Obama, the privacy board, and the NSA

According to yesterday’s edition of The Guardian, “The US government’s privacy board has sharply rebuked President Barack Obama over the National Security Agency’s mass collection of American phone data, saying the program defended by Obama last week was illegal and ought to be shut down.”

What is interesting about this is that the White House handpicked the members of the privacy board from the Washington establishment. They couldn’t even stack the deck in their favor on this issue. Of course, the administration immediately issued a response saying that it totally disagreed with the report.

As I’ve noted before, Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. Unlike the NSA’s supporters in congress, who all have their own agendas, there is no way he doesn’t understand the illegality of warrantless searches. And he also has to be aware that this type of indiscriminate surveillance has been very ineffective. Can he possibly be intellectually convinced that this mass collection of phone data is legal? I find that hard to believe. However, alternative explanations are unsettling. He knows it’s wrong but he’s being pressured to give it his okay. Or he’s being blackmailed.

Could it be possible that the White House chose the members of privacy board knowing what the outcome would be, in order to send a message not to Obama, but to further undermine the NSA? It’s Washington. Anything is possible.

How the NSA and CIA keep politicians in line

As new revelations about NSA spying break almost daily, I can’t help but ask myself how we can stop this monster with tentacles stretching around the globe and deep into our private lives? Articles published today claim that Obama didn’t know the NSA was spying on world leaders. I doubt that’s true, but if it is, what else doesn’t the President know about our surveillance operations?

Putting an end to these technically legal but clearly unconstitutional practices is going to be very difficult for many reasons, but here is one thought I had about why I think Congress has been so “cooperative” in giving the spooks what they want and allowing them to lie with impunity. I call it the silent conspiracy.

Let’s say I’m a congressman who is not comfortable with what’s going on with our super secret surveillance policies. Now I’ve been in many closed-door meetings over the years with our top cyber spies and I’ve learned a lot about how they operate and the amazing ways that they can gain access to information about individuals. I’ve also learned how they routinely eliminate enemies in ways that make it look like an accident or suicide. And when they say “enemies,” they’re not talking only about terrorists.

As I think about my objections to the current surveillance programs, and then weigh that against what I know the NSA or CIA could do to me if they saw me as an enemy, I decide to shelve my doubts and welcome the new world realities. No one has to make any overt threats. Words are not necessary. I give them what they want or I will face consequences. Some embarrassing event from my past might suddenly go public. I could wake up one morning to headlines about my drug problems or a tax issue. And, if I really insist on pushing the issue, I might one day find my car’s computer has been hacked and I’m heading for a light pole at 90 miles per hour.

Those few politicians and journalists who are willing to stand up to the NSA are truly brave souls. It will take many more people with courage, and our encouragement and votes, to put the brakes on the Orwellian state of affairs in which we find ourselves today.

What’s happened to Al Franken?

To hear Minnesota Senator Al Franken defending the NSA domestic spying program is very dispiriting. The one time progressive Democrat has stepped over to the dark side, just like Obama. I sent a letter to Franken expressing my disappointment in the representative’s response to the NSA revelation. If I know anything, it is that if the former SNL member were a private citizen right now, he would be front and center criticizing the government’s surveillance overreach.

It’s interesting to me how much the insular Washington scene has changed Franken and Obama. It’s as if they were recruited into a cult that separates members from family and friends and in this case, average Americans. The big picture is shrunk to a narrow perspective. They’ve been hypnotized by charts and graphs and serious people who convinced them that what they’re doing is for the good of the country. The fact that they are let in on “secrets” makes them believe that they know better what’s good for the country, and they adopt a patronizing, “If you only knew what I know” attitude towards citizens who challenge them.

I had great hopes when Franken was first elected to the Senate that he would carry forward the lonely but necessary efforts of Paul Wellstone to challenge the status quo and work toward peace and a progressive agenda. Unfortunately, Franken has disappointed by asking us to blindly trust the government as they shred the Constitution in the name of security.

Check out my new novel Fall Lake. The link is below my photo.

Joe Klein to America: Go back to sleep

Here they come. The Serious People, like Time’s Joe Klein, are stepping into the NSA fray to tell us all to calm down, cool our jets and go back to sleep. You should trust the government, especially this administration, to do the right thing, he argues. This little kerfuffle is not as bad as the wackos on the left and right make it out to be so stop your grousing and let our leaders keep on spying and prying to prevent a problem that is less common than getting stabbed by a unicorn.

One thing that our Founding Father’s knew from first-hand experience that we seem to have forgotten is that too much power concentrated in the hands of too few can lead even well-intentioned leaders into dark waters. Our three branches of government, each intended as a check and balance to the other, was a brilliant solution that worked pretty well for a couple hundred years. But then came 9/11 and the scales tipped drastically toward the executive. Scared, foolish authoritarians like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld took advantage of the situation to secure vast new powers for the executive branch that could be shrouded in secrecy. Unfortunately for all of us, Obama was sucked into the Fantasyland rationales for keeping the surveillance state going and even expanded it.

The key word here is “trust.” Klein and others who see themselves as the voices of reason insist that we trust the government to do the right thing. I would argue that this is directly opposed to the beliefs of the Founding Fathers and the pillars on which this democracy was formed. We have the system of government that we have precisely because the founders knew that concentrating power in the hands of a few inevitably leads to problems. For a time in the twentieth century we had an active news media that tried to keep the government honest, but that hasn’t been the case for at least thirty years. What we have now are the few whistleblowers courageous enough to risk their lives to step forward with the truth about what our leaders are doing in our names.

Democracy only works if citizens have a healthy skepticism of the motives of those in power and, like a safety valve, have some mechanism for challenging our elected leaders on their decisions and policies. Those who argue that Americans should calm down and put their trust in the government harbor a serious misunderstanding about the relationship between citizens of a democracy and their elected officials. We don’t just have a right to question our leaders, we have a duty to keep them honest. The horrific reality today is that those people who are fulfilling their roles as citizens of a democracy, the whistleblowers, are labeled enemies of the state and thrown into prisons.

But don’t worry your pretty little heads advises Klein. Everything’s under control. Night, night.