Comment by cynix
12 years ago
> If the President wanted to eliminate these programs, they'd get eliminated.
Just like Guantanamo Bay, right?
12 years ago
> If the President wanted to eliminate these programs, they'd get eliminated.
Just like Guantanamo Bay, right?
Exactly like that.
If Obama believed these programs (and Guantanamo Bay) were "wrong" with the same conviction Snowden believes – he'd do what it takes to shut them down, with the same career/livelihood risks that Snowden accepted.
It's precisely the sort of moral compromises that Obama has made to allow Guantanamo Bay to stay operating, that have allowed the NSA to grab so much extraordinary power amd avoid any sort of reasonable oversight.
I understand that "just closing Guantanamo" isn't as simple as it sounds - but letting things like that slide because they're complicated, and doing so for 40 odd years, has allowed a situation where people like Clipper think lying to congress is his job. Where intelligent people somehow perform the sort of mental gymnastics that allow them to claim collecting and storing personal communication isn't "collection" unless a person listens to the collected information.
If the president wanted it to stop - he'd stop it. If he's not stopping it, it's because there's something he considers more important.
He _might_ even be right. There might be a real and provable public interest reason why Guantanamo and the NSA have to be the way they are. There's no obvious or easy explanation along those lines – and it's super easy to cynically attribute it all to personal(and corporate) wealth and power motives which _are_ pretty obvious.
Exactly. He can always promise to pardon every individuals that steps forward and provides the evidence necessary to shutdown Guantanamo.
Right now, it's continued operation relies entirely on state secrecy laws. If Obama or some future president realizes that it is that one provision that is protecting illegal actions, he can promise to pardon anyone of the laws they have to break to expose those illegal actions.
One of the biggest problems with our whistleblowing laws is that if you have to break laws to make things right, you may be seen as righteous, but you'll still be prosecuted for the laws you had to break to accomplish that. We're still a nation of laws and the only laws that can overturn that is the constitutional power to pardon. The only crime the president cannot pardon is impeachment. Any individual that isn't in an impeachable position could expose wrongdoing if the president had their back.
Honestly, dedicating himself to fixing this problem may be the only way he can save his presidency in the eyes of history at this point. Literally everything he's overseen has been a disaster.
The problem, of course, is that the president probably knows about the reason these programs came to be. What if there's a good reason ?
I mean you can be cynical or you can be realist. The cynical explanation would probably be that the president/congress don't really control a few organisations like the NSA.
The realist reason would be that the NSA can point to a couple dozen cases where their surveillance saved thousands of lives, American or otherwise. That they have very, very convincing arguments that these policies are worth it.
Also I am a bit fatalist about privacy expectations. Have you seen how "working class" people live in Hong Kong and how much privacy they effectively have ?
That's the future for the vast majority of humans on this planet, unless growth stops. If growth does stop, death and famine is the future for the majority of humans.
Enjoy it while it lasts, or collect enough money that you can realistically enjoy privacy and space until you die. For the next generation, it's a lost cause.
Government intrusion of privacy is (should be) the least of anyone's worries.