See no evil, hear no evil oversight
by digby
So it turns out that members of congress did have access to information about the scope of the NSA’s collection of data. They just didn’t care or didn’t bother to read the details before they voted to re-authorize them. I guess they figured it was better not to know.
Of the three documents disclosed by the government on Wednesday, a 2009 report states in the section devoted to Section 215 of the Patriot Act that “orders generally require production of the business records (as described above) relating to substantially all of the telephone calls handled by the companies, including both calls made between the United States and a foreign country and calls made entirely within the United States.” The section also notes that both Section 215 and the “pen register/trap and trace” provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was being used to collect the same kind of information about online communications rather than phone calls, “operate on a very large scale.” The 2011 report provides a similar summary of how the authorities are being used in almost identical language. Also released Thursday was the original secret court order requesting the all the communications records from the customers of a Verizon subsidiary that was published by The Guardian and the Washington Post. There are presumably similar orders in place for other telecommunications companies.
A spokesperson for California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Senate intelligence committee, told MSNBC that the declassified reports posted online Wednesday were the same ones referred to in the letters.
The reports affirm that the current backlash in Congress is a product of public knowledge of the programs. Some legislators, like Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, had been making public statements for years that hinted at information members of Congress were being told in private. Legislators who say they were ignorant about how the authorities were being used prior to the revelations effectively made a choice not to be informed. They then voted to reauthorize these laws without knowing what they actually did. Those legislators who were exercising their oversight responsibilities and were concerned about surveillance couldn’t inform the public in detail about what was happening. Far from affirming the Obama administration’s insistence that congressional oversight serves as a key check on executive branch authority, it mostly raises the question of whether effective oversight can be conducted in secret.
Yeah.
Which leads to this report from Josh Feldman at Mediaite about an ongoing piece of illogic spouted by every Villager and administration apologist in the country:
[L]ogical fallacy number one: Toobin believes that Edward Snowden is a criminal who “should not have done what he did,” but thought that the public discussion is good, and said, “My hat’s off to Glenn for investigative reporting.”
Risen pointed out the blatantly obvious problem with Toobin’s logic.
“We wouldn’t be having this discussion if it wasn’t for him. Why do you think–I mean, that’s the thing I don’t understand about the climate in Washington these days, is that people want to have debates on television elsewhere, but then you want to throw the people who start the debates in jail.”
This is not the first time Toobin has made this assertion, as I noted in a column here last month. Here’s what Toobin said on Morgan’s program mere days after the first NSA revelations came out:
“There are many good reasons to protest this law. I’m troubled by this law. But I think there are right ways to do it and wrong ways to do it. And by a 29-year-old kid just throwing open the safe and giving away documents that people have devoted years of their lives to creating and protecting, that’s the wrong way to protest this.”
It really bears repeating that the national security apparatus wasn’t suddenly going to have a come to Jesus moment and decide to become more transparent all of a sudden. We have a secret court with its own secret interpretation of the law, so the government’s pretty firmly in the “secrecy” camp. Snowden releasing the documents was pretty much the only way the public was ever going to find out about these programs.
Whenever I hear these fatuous gasbags say they sincerely want a debate but also see whistleblowing as a criminal act (even treason!) which should be punished I want to scream. There is no mechanism by which this debate can happen without whistleblowers — not even through congressional oversight in which elected officials are given Top Secret clearances! Udall and Wyden were practically immolating themselves on the floor of the Senate trying to warn people about what was going on and it did nothing to spark debate because they couldn’t reveal the details. The only way this could have happened without a whistleblower would have been for the administration to spontaneously decide they needed to come clean and let the American people in on their secret surveillance programs. Needless to say, that did not happen. So here we are.