QOTD: Ezra Klein
by digby
On the latest NSA revelations:
[T]he report is a reminder that we don’t know what we don’t know. And a companion story today makes clear that we can’t trust that the courts providing oversight — weak as they are — know it either.
Even though this was a friendly audit produced with the cooperation of the NSA — and so, by the way, might not have uncovered systemic abuse if indeed it existed — Gellman reports that these kinds of details are “not routinely shared with Congress or the special court that oversees surveillance.”
I haven’t seen this point made enough. Yes, it’s true that one could assume that the internal NSA audit has revealed all there is to reveal and that’s terrific proof that they are on the up and up. But we also now know that they commonly go to some length to obscure the truth when reporting to their overseers which kind of puts a kink in that argument, don’t you think? And the fact that the rubber stamp FISA court has all the power of Judge Judy when it comes to enforcing laws governing the NSA doesn’t give one a great sense of trust in the system they’ve been touting for months now as airtight and fully compliant.
The history of the United States government in this regard should have been enough for anyone to be concerned when they found out that these secret NSA programs existed. Nobody in a free society should ever be sanguine that such activity is benign. The government has enormous power over individuals and secrecy makes the temptation for abuse overwhelming.
That’s just how these things work. It is, therefore, up to the government to prove that it is not doing these things by using the elaborate legal processes that have been developed over centuries to ensure it. Skirting them with Orwellian language and Catch-22s — with the excuse they must do this in order to “protect us” from whatever the boogeyman of the day happens to be — is not acceptable. They always say they need these powers to protect us.
So no. It’s not believable that this internal NSA audit (which only covered the DC area and Ft Meade, remember) is adequate. They have no credibility. In fact, they never have credibility when it comes to this stuff. I don’t care if Jesus Christ himself were president, I still wouldn’t trust the government with such enormous secret, unaccountable power. It’s not personal. It’s just common sense.
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