Government Secrecy Allows the President to Lie to Americans whenever He Wants — for Example, regarding the NSA’s Telephone and Email Snooping — He said, “Lives Have Been Saved” — without Making any Attempt at All to Prove It

19 June 2013

The only thing more disheartening than the garbage spewing from the President’s mouth is the American public’s willingness to believe it

Consider this:

Germans have been particularly concerned about the PRISM program — which involves surveillance of non-U.S. citizens outside the United States — and the infringement of their privacy rights.

But Obama offered assurance that his government’s uses of surveillance have been limited, and always approved by a court.

Ultimately, he said, “lives have been saved” because of the cautious execution of the surveillance systems.

“We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted” not just in the United States, but in countries around the world, including Germany.

That number, which the administration has been using in recent days to defend its actions, includes plots thwarted by PRISM and by the National Security Agency’s scrutiny of phone metadata.

No proof will be forthcoming — because this Administration’s top secret classification of even used government toilet paper prevents even the most minimal transparency

“Trust me because I said so.”

Not that anyone influential cares.

After half the Senate ducked an intelligence briefing about PRISM, the House Intelligence Committee decided show up for theirs and cheerlead the Fourth Amendment-flouting hacks who guide the surveillance:

The Founders created a system of checks and balances. Those overseeing the nation’s spying have switched to a system of cheers and bouquets.

This was the impression given by members of the House intelligence committee as they held an open-to-the-public hearing Tuesday on the National Security Agency’s snooping into Americans’ phone and Internet records.

“That’s a patriot!” Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) said of Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA director.

“Your leadership in NSA has been outstanding,” added Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (Md.), the committee’s ranking Democrat.

Only his spymaster’s cool kept Alexander from blushing.

“Thank you for the kind words,” he replied. “As you noted, we have extraordinary people doing great work.”

The hearing was really a pep rally, as lawmakers praised the officials involved in the surveillance programs and then yielded the floor for an hour so the officials could make statements about how responsible and restrained they’ve been.

The congressional overseers of the intelligence agencies quite clearly are captivated by — if not captives of — the people they are supposed to be supervising.

Lest you think that there are at least some grownups involved (somewhere) in this blatantly intentional erosion of the Fourth Amendment — get this . . .

When people don’t want to face a difficult truth, they make up reasons why they should not.

In PRISM’s case, the demise of the Fourth Amendment is camouflaged behind the blatant lie that an independent “court” oversees the unwarranted trespasses into other people’s privacies.

As any highly experienced administrative lawyers can tell you, systems erected to oversee secret insiders makes easily manipulated pawns of the supposedly rights-protecting overseers.

This stripes-changing process applies just as much to Congress, as to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) “Court” that it created to assist King Bush the Second in legalizing the warrantless snooping his administration had been doing:

As Yale Law professor Jack Balkin explained back in 2009:

"The Fisa Amendments Act of 2008, effectively gives the President - now President Obama - the authority to run surveillance programs similar in effect to the warrantless surveillance program [secretly implemented by George Bush in late 2001].

That is because New Fisa no longer requires individualized targets in all surveillance programs.

Some programs may be 'vacuum cleaner' programs that listen to a great many different calls (and read a great many e-mails) with any requirement of a warrant directed at a particular person as long as no US person is directly targeted as the object of the program. . . .

"New Fisa authorizes the creation of surveillance programs directed against foreign persons (or rather, against persons believed to be outside the United States) – which require no individualized suspicion of anyone being a terrorist, or engaging in any criminal activity.

These programs may inevitably include many phone calls involving Americans, who may have absolutely no connection to terrorism or to Al Qaeda."

The ACLU's Deputy Legal Director, Jameel Jaffer, told me this week by email:

“In the course of conducting that surveillance, though, the government inevitably sweeps up the communications of many Americans.

The government often says that this surveillance of Americans' communications is 'incidental', which makes it sound like the NSA's surveillance of Americans' phone calls and emails is inadvertent and, even from the government's perspective, regrettable.

"But when Bush administration officials asked Congress for this new surveillance power, they said quite explicitly that Americans' communications were the communications of most interest to them.

The principal purpose of the 2008 law was to make it possible for the government to collect Americans' international communications - and to collect those communications without reference to whether any party to those communications was doing anything illegal.

And a lot of the government's advocacy is meant to obscure this fact, but it's a crucial one: The government doesn't need to 'target' Americans in order to collect huge volumes of their communications."

The moral? — Germans care more about Fourth Amendment privacies than Americans do

Somewhere along the way, totalitarian-experienced Germany picked up the American Founders’ flag, where General Washington’s not so great descendants had trampled it into the mud of cowardly ordinariness.

Complacent America’s light is dying. With eager help from our President, Congress, and us.

Perhaps freedom and courage require frequent clashes with deadly oppressions to stay brightly lighted.

PeteFree.com

Government Secrecy Allows the President to Lie to Americans whenever He Wants — for Example, regarding the NSA’s Telephone and Email Snooping — He said, “Lives Have Been Saved” — without Making any Attempt at All to Prove It