Bob Cesca is trying to sort out fact from fiction in the allegations about the NSA’s domestic surveillance. It’s pretty tricky because the way the law works, the internet companies that were implicated couldn’t tell the truth if they were actually providing direct access to their servers. However, their denials seem pretty emphatic and convincing. I don’t sense any kind of rote denials like you’d expect if they were forced to lie. I am not convinced that the Washington Post or Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian really got much of a scoop. The basic outlines of the program were already understood on Capitol Hill. Related capabilities have been reported on for years. On the main charge of direct access to the servers, the Washington Post now expresses some doubt, as it was based entirely on language in a Powerpoint presentation that may be more ambiguous than it at first seemed.
I think it’s healthy to have a debate, and I personally think that some of what is legal should be illegal, and that the process should be more transparent. The FISA Court should do more reporting to Congress. Their rulings should be declassified, at least to the Intelligence Committees, if not to the whole world. But the essential thing is that there is judicial oversight. And no one is alleging that the NSA is still avoiding the FISA Court.
Sure, judicial oversight is important, but what good does it do if it’s not only a rubber stamp, but is done in secret?
That’s my point. It does some good because most judges would balk at something that was completely egregious. But what we’re getting is nowhere near good enough.
Maybe most judges would, but would most FISA judges? FISA judges are appointed by the Chief Justice. All of the current members of the court were chosen by current Chief Justice John Roberts, which doesn’t inspire a whole lot of confidence.
Plus, each case is decided by one judge — who decides which judge gets a particular case? Is that process game-able? Or rather, how easily is that process game-able?
Plus again, each case is decided in a non-adversarial context, and I doubt it’s possible for the judge to know how reliable the information they’re being presented is.
Finally, something like 1% of applications are even sent back for modification before being approved, and only a small fraction of a percent are actually rejected. Those are not the numbers of a high-scrutiny process.
More or less my reading on the situation as well. There’s a picture floating around from USA Today reporting about the database from 2006.
I’m in basic agreement with you on both the situation and the remedies, which kind of surprises me tbh.
To expect a President to NOT use the most modern tools to protect the countries citizens, is, to me at least, absurd.
Can you imagine if another 9/11 happens, and the public finds out that the NSA might have been able to prevent it, if the President had just let them do something like this?
How many seconds would transpire before impeachment hearings were called?
I’m not happy about this whole thing, but, that privacy genii left the bottle a hell of a long time ago. Even before W – when Lincoln made his case for, not just reading people’s mail, but their telegrams, too. If not, before that.
If the Congress and the courts oversee this activity, and the courts don’t rubber-stamp every single request, I suppose that’s the best we can expect.
Sad, but true.
To be honest, I’ve assumed for decades that this was already being done, so I’m kind of surprised that people are surprised.
Maybe it’s because my parents came to America after WWII, from the USSR via Hitler’s camps, that I’m not surprised.
I told my late father, when I was in my teens in the early 70’s, while Nixon was still President, that we were moving closer and closer to being like the USSR, than they were to being us.
If it’s so absurd, then why did the President–and the rest of the government–hide it from us?
If the American people are okay with this, great. Fine. Ask us. We are the government’s owners, not its subjects. Obviously, some secrecy is necessary. But the fact that they’re doing shit which was–as you say–‘out of the bottle long ago’ while lying to us about it kind of undermines your argument.
If the American people don’t have a problem with our metadata (and probably a great deal more) being stored by the government, in an attempt to protect us, fine. Let one politician say, ‘Yes, I support this, to protect you. Give me all your data and I will keep you safe’ and let another say, ‘No, I oppose this. I won’t take all your data and you might DIE DIE DIE!’
Then vote. This is a democracy. WE are in charge. (Well, in theory.)
And this baffles me completely: “To be honest, I’ve assumed for decades that this was already being done, so I’m kind of surprised that people are surprised.”
I’ve long assumed that Big Oil will destroy the environment, so I don’t know why people kvetched about the BP spill. I’ve long assumed that gun rights would lead to massacres, so why are people still going on about Newtown?
This superior cynicism strikes me as leading to the worst kind of conservatism. “I already knew that people in power were fucking the little guy. Why are you so upset at people in power? Look! Game of Thrones!”
Outrage is the first step toward change, even if we must wait for many of silly little misinformed people to feel it.
Good points, one and all.
But, I’m 55, and for my whole adult life, I’ve been outraged at one thing after another.
I’ve even done some things about the things that outrage me – like organize anti-nuke rallies, and, more recently, anti-war and anti-torture/rendition protests in and around Fayetteville, NC (the home of Fort Bragg).
Don’t get me wrong, I’m outraged about this. But I was also outraged at the number of privacy rights we lost over the years in our idiotic “War on Drugs.”
Maybe I’m suffering from “Outrage Fatigue.”
I’ll be happy to help. Tell me how.
Wish I knew. I guess I think we’ve got a strange and perhaps unfortunately-shaped window here, if we bleat loudly enough, because there’s a (remote) possibility that the non-craven left, who acknowledge that this is just as outrageous when done by a Democrat as a Republican, can join the loony right, who are sufficiently hateful and racist to oppose anything Obama does, to actually make change.
It’s a rare confluence. Someone (Tarheel Dem?) mentioned the Church Commission. An extreme long shot, but if minimally principled senators like Franken and Wyden, who are opposed to this, are joined by ranting reactionaries who are opposed to the Swarthy Stalin, change might be possible.
I’m not gonna do shit, myself, except Be Outraged On The Internet and fire off a few emails to my reactionary-in-this-case senators. But at least there’s that.
If it’s so absurd, then why did the President–and the rest of the government–hide it from us?
The efficacy of a program like this depends upon the people being targeted not knowing about it.
Do you similarly wonder why there wasn’t a live feed from the helicopters on the way to the bin Laden raid? Does that demonstrate that the government considers it scandalous?
Let’s go back to square one: there actually are legitimate uses of secrecy.
Straw man.
You said: ‘Let’s go back to square one: there actually are legitimate uses of secrecy.’
I said: ‘Obviously, some secrecy is necessary.’
I’m not sure who you’re responding to, but it’s not me.
You said that, but then made an argument to the contrary.
Your incoherence does not make my response a straw man.
This is not about using the most modern tools, it is about the way in which the President and the NSA are using the most modern tools. There are and were alternatives, which Thomas Drake disclosed in his whistleblowing about NSA. What this is is an over-expensive project that violates the Fourth Amendment and has enriched several federal contractors needlessly and got ex post facto immunity and support from the Congress. But because it is classified, no one can report the corruption and invasiveness of this project except folks who are willing to violate their security clearances. That NSA has impunity with respect to Congressional oversight is part of the issue.
I have honestly never understood how this is supposed to make it better. Maybe it’s because I’ve never live in a time where Congress wasn’t full of police-state wannabees in the form of fascist Rs and terrified Ds.
It arguably makes it worse. But it does diminish the scandalous impact because the opposition can’t plead ignorance.
Well as the guy himself said:
The point was to reveal the sheer scope of the spying and to the people. It might make it less scandalous but I think it makes it more difficult to subject to political gamesmanship.
I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest
OK, everybody see this statement?
This is a what a whistle-blower does.
If you don’t do this before leaking information, you aren’t a whistle-blower. You’re just a leaker.
so hilarious watching the libertarian left follow wherever their masters lead them.
These powers will be available to future Presidents.
And then they’ll be bad. Right now they’re just less than meets the eye.
Sure, it always is.
That doesn’t mean there’s nothing important in this story, though.
I don’t sense any kind of rote denials like you’d expect if they were forced to lie.
I had the opposite impression. All the denials seemed to include the words “…did not provide direct access to the government”. IOW, indirect access – say through a government contractor is fully plausible.
As Chertoff hinted here (though he spoke of non-profits, not necessarily commercial contractors):
DHS chief floats idea of collecting private citizens’ information
Not that I’m particularly surprised by the recent revelations, we’ve known that this occurs for years. But it should be pleasing to see the confirmations to anyone that values transparency and accountability in government.
No, they used the words “direct access” because they were responding to the (false) accusation that the government can lift data from their servers without anyone’s knowledge.
The NSA has assuredly tapped the underwater cables and steals data from foreign countries and providers (they’ve been doing that since the Soviet days), but there’s been no evidence that anything gets done in America without a pretense towards judicial verification and oversight through the FISA courts.
denials. This article explains the discrepancy between the WaPo and Guardian stories, Obama’s admission that the stories are correct (which Booman ignores), and the companies’ denials:
Tech Companies Concede to Surveillance Program
Of course, the above explanation appears to be inconsistent with this remark: “”They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” an unnamed intelligence officer told Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras of the Washington Post.” The internet company executives could simply be lying.
I’ve also heard that there may be a distinction between directly accessing the servers and mirroring them. These details will be fleshed out in due time. But attacking the credibility of the story based on the technical detail is dishonest. Glenn Greenwald’s article accurately reported what was in the NSA’s slides, sought to corroborate that information with the corporations involved, and published their denials accurately, and leaves the question open to a follow-up. That’s what we expect from journalism. The article that BooMan’s post is based on is an embarrassing example of biased tripe, (crediting a writer from Little Green Footballs, no less). I’m surprised that Boo would use it.
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These links were also part of my diary in 2012 – Wired’s Expose on Massive New Spy Center in Utah.
There are two different programs that we know about and Cesca is conflating them in his rebuttals.
We know from the FISA court order that Verizon provides specified metadata to the NSA on all of its Verizon Business Services traffic. We know that DiFi said that this was a routine renewal, which means that all telecom carriers likely provide the same information. That means that every telecom operating in the US is providing that specified metadata on every call. How it happens for ATT is known because of the reporting in 2005 that raised this issue initially. The traffic at a switch is split and duplicate signal is sent into a room with NARUS devices that screen the duplicate data and send something to NSA. Is this “direct access”? It depends on what you mean technically by “direct access”?
The PRISM presentation claimed real-time access to the listed providers. Like Verizon, those providers are enjoined from discussing their relationship. In all likelihood, NSA placed equipment at their sites that can obtain access to some or all of the content on their site in real-time. This process is likely shielded from the knowledge of the providers’ employees through some secure room and narrowly tailored extract-transform-load interfaces. NSA personnel deal with the extracted and loaded data and not the data on the providers’ servers. It is open to debate whether you want to call that “direct access” or not. There is no information in what was leaked about whether NSA minimizes the scope of the data that it gets, whereas in the Verizon case we know that a given provider is ordered to provide all international and domestic data.
There is some analysis that the Powerpoint presentation of the PRISM program is in part a sales job to management and overstates some things.
All of the technical details aside, the Congress has gone way beyond its Constitutional limits on this. And the statistics make it appear that the FISA Court is a rubber-stamp, although that might just reflect the tailoring of FBI requests to ensure approval.
We need something like the Church Commission to clear the air on how our intelligence agencies have been operating since 1979. The White House would be wise to get ahead of the curve on this instead of trying to diminish the issue.
I don’t think will work. I don’t think there is anyone in the government or even the retired elite structure that is NOT already on their side. And if stonewalled? There’s no recourse.
Another shoe drops:
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: ‘I do not expect to see home again’
Brave!
I think Greenwald was hinting this would come a couple of days ago.
Well, open-eyed and duly diligent about consequences.
Yes, which is why I think “brave” applies. Some may think “stupid”, though. As with Manning.
It’s not the same as with Manning. What this man leaked was specific and targeted. The problem is, at least so far, he hasn’t proved anything.
LOL! An intelligence expert who’s worked in the field for years has risked his entire life and gotten the President to acknowledge a program that was until now secret, but all without actually proving anything yet?
You seem determined to minimize the importance of this story any way you can. You’re tying your credibility to Obama’s, and the NYTimes has already had something to say about the latter’s.
He didn’t even prove what the Guardian and Greenwald alleged, which is why the WP backtracked.
He released a FISA court order. That means he divulged legal activity.
Maybe he indicted Clapper’s congressional testimony, but that’s not definitive and isn’t much.
He started a conversation and I have no problem with what he did, but he didn’t do much more than tell the American people about activities that they didn’t know about.
I think it’s probably a good thing for us to know this stuff so we can get more transparency and safeguards, but this doesn’t seem like any kind of bombshell.
He released a status Powerpoint about the PRISM system, of which only two or three of the 47 slides were published by the Guardian.
The PRISM slides are the ones that raised the direct access issue.
yes, but it doesn’t seem like he proved that at all.
what “direct access” means.
Right.
He provided evidence about Verizon’s metadata which is concerning but basically a nothing-burger since it’s being known about and legal for years and the proof is a judge’s authorization.
And he provided a slide that wording about accessing servers that doesn’t make clear what that means. And what the Guardian and WP initially took it to mean is being hotly disputed by everyone involved.
And then we have the guy’s interview, in which he makes a bunch of vague allegations but doesn’t really further our understanding of anything.
As I said, the map of coverage implies Clapper may have lied to Congress, and that’s significant. But even there, it’s not really clear that he proved the case.
All in all, it’s not much when you consider how much trouble this guy is in.
Maybe he doesn’t want to end up like Bradley Manning. He’s a libertarian, after all LOL.
FYI, what you just did is taught in freshman year logic class as the ‘Appeal to Authority Fallacy.’
If he proved something, you could have demonstrated that (or maybe you couldn’t). That you decided to cite his resume instead is not encouraging.
Hehe – trying to share the article to FB. No way I can make it happen. Then closed the tab with FB, now I can’t reopen. That’s enough to make a CT; being thwarted in real time more or less, just like the leaks imply.
My Facebook share of the article worked. Don’t get prematurely tinfoil hat. Just say hi to Gen. Keith Alexander.
I am sure you noticed it was tongue-in-cheek.
I got back in and shared.
Hmm, reading my own comment again, I guess it was not really clear that I was beeing snarky.
Oh, I had hoped he would be an older guy, having lived a full and happy life.
NSA whistleblower reveals his identity
The guy sounds like a Bradley Manning type.
I disagree.
I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest
That is most certainly not a Bradley Manning type.
This guy seems intelligent, careful, competent, serious, and responsible to a fault.
Bradley Manning? I still can’t figure out what idiot decided to give him a clearance.
there’s a frustrating lack of specificity in that interview.
He’s begging for oversight to provide that specificity. He’s limiting his exposures of the system and its operation as much as he can. He has also identified the types of information available to him that he will not disclose.
The Guardian and the Washington Post are also splitting the information that they’re reporting, and the Guardian has the video interview, a printed Q & A, and a separate article, all with unique information.
If there was any more specificity, you’d throw a fit about our national security being gravely and irreparably damaged. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t, as far as you’re concerned.
serious question? Why China? If you leave the USA for civil liberty malfeasance, exactly how is China better?
Next question is “What is the status of extradition treaties with the Chinese Autonomous Region of Hong Kong?”
Do you remember why Iceland didn’t work for Assange?
He couldn’t/can’t get there. He is stuck in the London embassy of Ecuador and UK authorities deny him safe conduct out of the country. Ecuador has granted him asylum.
Thanks, I meant why he didn’t seek asylum from Iceland instead of Ecaudor when he was in England, or why he left Iceland in the first place. He had relationships with people there, but I seem to remember something being an issue.
His troubles started in Sweden. Too much to get into now.
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I kind of wonder why he didn’t go to Iceland to begin with if that’s where he hopes to get asylum. He might have better chances in Hong Kong, since China is not in the US orbit.
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Excellent diary and article in May 2006 …
Cross-posted from my diary – TIA Never Dead Under Jeb/George Bush-Cheney.
Edward Snowden Interview
Maybe the part about NSA capability to snoop on members of Congress and even the President of the US will perk some ears up.
Looks like Gen. Keith Alexander has what J. Edgar Hoover tried to build all of his life. The perfect budget-extortion machine.
I’m sorry, but what exactly is courageous about this guy.
Courageous is MLK fighting for what he believed in right smack dab in the middle of the South not from Central America or somewhere in Europe.
Courageous is MLK continuing to work for Civil Rights, even after being stabbed in the chest, but some crazed woman. Or continuing to fight even after KKK literally burned crosses on his lawn as his family ate dinner.
Courageous is MLK stint in Birhmingham jail and continuing to rally and fight even knowing he was under surveillance.
Courageous is MLK returning to Selma, AL even after receiving death threats and with prices he knows were on his head.
Courageous is John Lewis standing on that bridge being beat upside the head, or the freedom fighter sitting at lunch counters as people pour milkshakes and soda over their heads.
Whatever the merits of what the guy did, “courageous” or “brave” or “hero” aint’ the word I’d used for this guy.
Stand and fight, that’s courageous, not fleeing before the fight even began.
Brave would be for the guy to come right back and face his actions, not looking for means by which to escape prosecution.
Right on. Either you’re MLK or you’re a coward!
You know who else is a coward? All these pussies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_dissident#To_be_arrested_on_entry_to_China.
Look, the fight is here, dude fleed before he even started the fight.
There are people here currently who’ve been fighting this civil liberties fight right here on our shores.
The idea that this guys is brave is just a slap in the face of people here who have no means by which to flee, so instead they stay and fight…
That is brave, IMHO.
If you don’t agree, then fine, that why it’s MHO, and NOT yours.
He started the fight. If he comes back, he’ll be arrested and very possibly–as Boo said re. Manning, abu Ghraib-ed. He’s taken a bigger risk for his principles than I ever have. Perhaps you’ve done more?
Giving up your career and the the life you’ve been living and going into exile is a very serious consequence to have to face.
so in your mind, this guy who fled to China are like the Chinese dissendents who can no longer even enter China.
How exactly does that work?
Like I said, I’m not commenting on the merits of the “leaks” the guy did.
All I’m saying is the idea that he’s sooo courageous and brave is BS and just hyperbole.
They can enter China. Look at the heading of the section I pointed to.
In fact, I imagine that the shitheels who run China would love for them to come home and ‘face their actions.’
Let your reflexive defense of the President cool a bit and think about it. This is a seven- or eight-year-old program that has existed under two administrations with bipartisan support of Congress and the courts. And which nonetheless violates the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution.
Moreover if the computer architecture that Snowden’s leaks are correct, it could place into the hands of the head of the NSA the ability to blackmail the President and Congress. There are no good checks and balances in the architecture of the computer system, if Snowden is correct about the scope of his ability to see information.
MLK and John Lewis depended on a media willing to report what was happening to them. Recent whistleblowers regarding the NSA’s overreach cannot count on a friendly media.
Snowden has seen how the media has treated Thomas Drake and Bradley Manning and how the administration has sought inflated charges to plea bargain them into convictions. Snowden claims he has knowledge of how some things operate in the intelligence community with regard to people who compromise their information.
People make their strategic decisions about the best way to handle their civil disobedience. Sometimes facing the charges ensures that you disappear from sight fast and sometimes it means you can make your case in court.
The courts and media these days are not courts and media of the 1960s; they are too easy to be silent about key issues.
I would not apply labels except to say that I think that Snowden is acting from a deep sense of public service at great risk to his future prospects.
The proper response for the President is to take the issues of abuses at NSA seriously and handle the accountability in public. And firing Gen. Alexander peremptorily like the President has handled several previous crises will not make this go away. And likely will cause blowback from the intelligence community, which is a great risk anyway just to adopt any stance that doesn’t treat them with impunity and legal immunity.
I suggest a Church commission-style investigation of intelligence abuses since 1979. At a minimum, if honestly conducted, that will established whether there are bases for concern.
This is one of those issues that is not partisan because there are Republicans who have their fingerprints on it as well. And a long-term review will cross many partisan divides.
So hold your fire and hope for sanity in the White House staff.
Let me start by saying that I read your whole comment and I hear your points, but IMHO, I still don’t find what the guy did courageous. I guess “courageousness” as a metric is as subjective as anything else. We’ll have to agree to disagree about the level of “courageness” this guy is showing.
Now having said that, this beginning to your comment I don’t appreciate: “Let your reflexive defense of the President cool a bit and think about it.” Was very dismissive, IMHO, first of all, because my comment made no mention or defense of the White House, or President Obama, or the administration. Yet you felt the need to preface your comment with the above intro.
What “reflexive defense” of the President did you hear/read? None.
Let me say that I stopped reading your comment entirely after the first line.
You – not BooMan, but you, who can’t seem to even put together a comment without making the Obot Verification Routine the most important thing you have to say – are the one who needs to stop judging everything in terms of what you want to believe about Obama.
I stopped reading his comments because they are always the same.
That’s just depressing.
Tarheel Dem used to be the most interesting commenter on this site by far. Some of us, myself included, asked BooMan to promote him to front-page status, because what he had to say was so consistently interesting, informed, and original.
I agree that it is depressing because I used to enjoy reading his perspective.
Being treated as a terrorist by your government has an effect on people. You should try to put yourself in his shoes for a moment before you dismiss everything he has to say.
Yeah I’ve been on the receiving end–from tea party members threatening harm against my kindergartner to being shot at and recently being hacked and having my credit cards atm cards stolen by gun nuts.
You provide a troll rating for a comment you admit to reading only one line of!
Classy!
I don’t have to be classy. I just skip over Tarheel most of the time because I grew tired of the same old schtick.
You didn’t troll rate. That was my observation with joe.
Just how much trolling do you feel the need to expose yourself to before you object to it?
And why am I supposed to care how classy you feel I am?
I have no illusions that you have an inch of care. That is already obvious. Simply observing your normal behavior when faced with substance you seem incapable of dealing with.
I deal with substance all the time.
That is the least credible possible accusation you could make towards me: that I’m incapable of dealing with arguments. In fact, I’ve dealt with those arguments on this very thread.
How is he trolling?
“Let your reflexive defense of the President cool a bit and think about it.”
Ok, I decided to read this post and here is my take.
First you start by dismissing lamh right off the bat because lamh is a supporter of the President. If lamh is a supporter of the President and MLK jr one could presume that he is on the liberal side of the spectrum and therefore a potential ally. Besides being smug, this really isn’t a good way to persuade people. IF you want to change the status quo, you will need a committed movement to do so. Second part of this is the statement that it violates the Fourth Amendment–well this is a serious matter and not as cut and dry as you might think. Parts of it may violate the Fourth Amendment and parts may not.
“If Snowden is correct” is a big if in this case as I believe that lamh is correct in that there are some very hinky aspects to this character. I think we are in the preliminary stages of assessing both the source and the leaks themselves.
Do you really think the media reported fairly and accurately what was happening to Lewis and MLK at the time? I don’t think so at all. I think we have the benefit of many years in which we have learned so much more about what took place than contemporaneous reporting told us.
Ok then we go on to Drake and Manning and your claim of inflated charges. First Drake had what 10 or 12 charges filed against him and he pled guilty to a misdemeanor. If I remember correctly, all of the original charges were dropped. This doesn’t seem inflated to me–more like the way the legal system works all the time in civil and criminal cases all over the country. Then there is Manning. He screwed up big time. The important information that was legitimate whistleblowing was completely overwhelmed by all the other things. He did the cause harm and he did in fact do harm to our diplomatic efforts. Had he been more discerning and/or worked with competent people it would be a very different story.
I will say that for me there are some very hinky aspects to Snowden so I am waiting for more information before I make determinations.
People do make strategic decisions about the best way to handle civil disobedience. They always know that there may be consequences.
I would agree that the courts and media are not like they were in the 1960s. In some ways they are better now. In some ways worse.
One more time, I think that people of good will and conscience can disagree about Snowden but I am sure that no one other than Snowden can know what motivates him to act. At some point we can reconcile his statements about why he did this with the facts as they become available.
I do think the President takes NSA issues seriously. When the press asked him about this last week he said that when he took office he was skeptical about the programs and uncomfortable both with the programs and with the oversight so he asked his team to do a review and they then added oversight to the program. Both the FISC and the Congress review these programs. When you say NSA abuses, are you saying that they are acting in violation of the laws governing them? Or are you saying that the laws are inadequate? Those are two different charges.
A commission to investigate intelligence “abuses” since 1979 is highly unlikely and would be so broad that it would take forever to conduct–not offering guidance or recourse soon enough to help the current situation.
No the issue is not partisan and it is not just limited to Government. The problem is also with we the people. I am not at all convinced that the American people want increased privacy at the expense of security. This is the far more difficult issue to address because it requires a tremendous amount of on the ground organizing to determine where people are, educate them about the issues and then to take any kind of coordinated action that might one day cause Congress to act.
The White House staff is insane if they don’t do as you suggest even though reasonable people might look at your suggestion of a long term review as incredibly impractical and unlikely and not even the most effective way to go about dealing with this.
I am not convinced that the Washington Post or Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian really got much of a scoop.
I am convinced that this is a HUGE scoop. I was worried about the new NSA center being built in Bluffdale, Utah but the present is already bad enough.
Once the alarm and non alarm is voiced over the programs, it will be useful to delve into evaluating just how this program and its bretheren can be tweeked so that when there is a problem, it can be heard.
Now, we have a system where only a limited number of Congresspeople are read directly in. Using Ron Wyden’s reaction as an example, he may know specific problems but he has at least one hand tied behind his back to do anything about it.
Questions by Congress about number of FISA court app’s and rulings have gone unanswered.
ACLU attempts to get court docs on individuals have been successfully stonewalled.
So, to me, the question becomes not just justification of what’s being called invasion of privacy, but let’s see a much better process of evaluation put into place where the govt doesn’t have all the weight to slam doors closed.