QOTD: Dave Eggars
by digby
In the Guardian:
“What if the government, in its defence, said: “First of all, we’re searching everyone’s home, so you’re not being singled out. Second, we don’t connect your address to your name, so don’t worry about it. All we’re doing is searching every home in the United States, every day, without exception, and if we find something noteworthy, we’ll let you know.”
That’s pretty much it.
The president reiterated his call to tweak the NSA programs so that people can have more “confidence” in them and “trust” them more. I’ll just paraphrase some famous old guy and say that if spies and governments were angels we wouldn’t need a constitution or a judicial system. But we do. We simply do not rely on “confidence and trust” because humans are, by their very nature, untrustworthy and if there’s one thing in which we can have confidence, it’s that there are people who will abuse power, we just don’t know which ones.
This whole line makes you wonder:
If lack of public confidence is the main problem with NSA surveillance, doesn’t that mean the reforms should be largely cosmetic?
— Ned Resnikoff (@resnikoff) December 20, 2013
It could. And probably will.
The president is either naive or blowing smoke with this comment:
The — the fact of the matter is that the United States, for all our warts, is a country that abides by rule of law, that cares deeply about privacy, that cares about civil liberties, that cares about our Constitution. And as a consequence of these disclosures, we’ve got countries who actually do the things that Mr. Snowden says he’s worried about, very explicitly — engaging in surveillance of their own citizens, targeting political dissidents, targeting and suppressing the press, who somehow are able to sit on the sidelines and act as if it’s the United States that has problems when it comes to surveillance and intelligence operations. And that’s a pretty distorted view of what’s going on out there.
I’m going to assume that he’s comparing the US to China (or some other repressive regime) but that’s a pretty embarrassingly low bar for the leader of the free world. We have a very long history of doing all those things to one degree or another and some of it is recent history. Very recent. It’s hard to believe that he would say this in light of the report from his own independent panel’s findings, but he did.
What will give people more confidence is ending surveillance and data collection without probable cause and strict adherence to the constitution and the rule of law, period. It’s not complicated.
It’s annual holiday fundraiser time…
