By Peggy Noonan
Fivve blunt thoughts on the growing surveillance state:
1. The thing political figures fear most is a terror event that will ruin their careers. The biggest thing they fear is that a bomb goes off and it can be traced to something they did or didn’t do, an action they did or didn’t support. They all fear being accused of not doing enough to keep the citizenry safe.
This is true of Republicans and Democrats. Their anxiety has no ideology. They all fear being the incumbent in the election in which the challenger says, in a debate: “That’s all well and fine, Senator, we’re sure you’re upset at what happened. But at the moment it counted, when you could have supported all efforts to keep the people safe and bust the terror network, you weren’t there. You were off giving lectures on what you call civil liberties, and explaining why you were voting ‘no.’ Well, life is a civil liberty—and now a thousand people are dead.” Nobody wants to be that incumbent.
Because of that primal political fear, there is a built-in bias within the U.S. government toward doing too much and not too little. There is a built-in bias toward using too much muscle, too much snooping, too much gathering of data. The bias is toward overreach. The era of metadata encourages all this: There’s always more information to be got.
Presidents are very much part of this, as are congressmen, and judges too. Nobody wants to be the judge who didn’t sign off on the request that could arguably have impeded the network that put the dirty bomb on 42nd and Eighth. No one wants to be the judge whose name the U.S. intelligence agencies leak to the press as the real culprit, the real reason they couldn’t stop the bad guys. “Judge Murphy was generally seen as a loner on the bench, a man more drawn to horticultural pursuits and abstruse comment-thread debate on the history of the Fourth Amendment than evenings out with colleagues on the court and in the local bar association. ‘He’s about to discover why people have friends,’ said a court worker who spoke anonymously in order not to appear to be taking sides in the growing controversy. ‘I hope he survives this, even in a diminished capacity, because in a way the law benefits from his kind of detachment and ethereal approach.’” Nobody wants to be Judge Murphy.
Because of the built-in bias in the system—the bias to do too much, to go too far—the creation of an invasive American surveillance state is probably inevitable. Politicians are people who can do math. The number of people who want to be safe, they are certain, is far greater than the number worried about abstract issues of privacy. Moreover, they figure voters are more or less like this: They’ll have their little blog debates about privacy right up until a bomb goes off, and then they’ll all go into a swivet and join a new chorus: “Why didn’t you protect me? Throw the bums out!”
2. There is no way a government in the age of metadata, with the growing capacity to listen, trace, tap, track and read, will not eventually, and even in time systematically, use that power wrongly, maliciously, illegally and in areas for which the intelligence gathering was never intended. People are right to fear that the government’s surveillance power will be abused. It will be. There are many reasons for this, but the primary one is that humans are and will be in charge of it, and humans have shown throughout history a bit of a tendency to play every trick and bend and break laws. “If men were angels,” as James Madison wrote, limits, checks, balances and specifically protected rights would not be necessary. But they aren’t angels. Add to all this simple human mistakes, innocent and not, and misjudgments. And add to that sheer human craziness, partisan lust, political mischief of all sorts. In the Clinton White House there was a guy named Craig Livingstone who amused himself reading aloud the confidential FBI files of prominent Republicans. The files—hundreds of them—were improperly secured and disseminated. Imagine Craig Livingstone at the National Security Agency. Imagine Lois Lerner.
So if we have and develop a massive surveillance state, it will be abused. And that abuse will, down the road, do damage not only to individuals but, quite probably, to the nation’s morale, to its very vision of itself.
But it will make us – or allow us to feel — physically safer. And it may help break real terror networks bent on real mayhem.
Discuss. Really: Discuss.
3. The president said Friday, in his remarks on the NSA surveillance story: “I think it’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100% security and also then have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience.”
But is that really the trade-off? Will a surveillance state make us 100% safer? It let the Tsarnaevs through. We had the surveillance state when they set off their bombs at the Boston Marathon. We’d even been tipped by the Russians to watch them. The surveillance state didn’t thwart the Fort Hood massacre. Maybe in the end we’ll find the surveillance state is massive, cumbersome, costly, potentially helpful, certainly powerful, menacing and yet not always so effective.
4. The president said the recently revealed programs are subject to congressional oversight, which will help keep them from getting out of hand. But that sounded more like a Washington inside joke than a comfort. Congressional oversight of executive agencies has been chronically lacking and lackluster for years. If you are a congressman oversight is, generally, an unrewarded time-suck. It’s housekeeping that demands deep bureaucratic, accounting and now technological expertise. (“Thank you for providing the email records, but is there any chance you have secret email accounts that aren’t included here?”) And usually nobody knows about your good work—it yields little in the way of credit.
Oversight is time taken away from fundraising calls, from the four-minute hit on “Hardball” or Fox, from the urgent call with the important constituent, from time in the gym where you hide from your staff. And Congress isn’t even in Washington often enough to establish ready and present oversight—members work from Monday through Thursday, and then go home to meet with people and show they’re normal. That’s part of the reason the Internal Revenue Service thought it could function as a political entity—they didn’t fear oversight. The General Services Administration on its champagne-soaked boondoggles—they didn’t fear oversight. Do the technicians, data miners, lawyers and technology officers in the NSA warehouses fear oversight?
Props here to Darrell Issa: He does oversight. But his work is exceptional because it is the exception. And congressional oversight still leads us back to where we began: the built-in bias toward doing too much.
5. The security age began on Sept. 12, 2001. The enormity of the surveillance state since has grown. Americans, in the shock after 9/11, didn’t mind enhanced security, and in fact were mostly grateful for it and supportive of it. But built into that support, and the acceptance of the surveillance mentality’s intrusions, was I suspect a broadly held assumption that we’ll just do it now, and down the road we can stop it. It’s just an emergency thing. We can make it go away when we no longer want it. But can we? Do government programs tend to remain static, or wither? Or do they tend to grow?
http://blogs.wsj.com/peggynoonan/2013/06/08/the-era-of-metadata/?mod=WSJBlog
Fed study shows tax increases, not spending cuts, are slowing the economy
This should cause a few heads to explode on the left.Washington Examiner:
In fact, the San Francisco Fed reports that "federal fiscal policy was unusually expansionary during the Great Recession" thanks largely to the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the economic stimulus program passed by Congress in 2009. As a consequence, federal government saving in the recession fell faster--that is, the deficit grew faster--than our historical norm would predict."
The San Francisco Fed does note that after the recovery began "fiscal policy sharply reversed course" and has since been "much more contractionary than normal." But in total "federal fiscal policy has been a modest headwind to economic growth so far in the recovery, but no more so than usual given the weak pace of growth."
Looking ahead, however, the Fed does see fiscal policy slowing growth, but not, as liberals would have you believe, due to spending cuts:
Surprisingly, despite all the attention federal spending cuts and sequestration have received, our calculations suggest they are not the main contributors to this projected drag. The excess fiscal drag on the horizon comes almost entirely from rising taxes. Specifically, we calculate that nine-tenths of that projected 1 percentage point excess fiscal drag comes from tax revenue rising faster than normal as a share of the economy.
So the next time a liberal complains about austerity, be sure to ask them which of President Obama's many tax hikes they want to repeal first.Can't wait for Obamacare taxes to fully kick in. Then we can really expect a slowdown.
This report should be filed under "Why Liberals Believe Stupid Things."
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/06/fed_study_shows_tax_increases_not_spending_cuts_are_slowing_the_economy.html#ixzz2VkIxsSTU
Barack Obama's Long-Term Goals
In an attempt to deflect concerns about the government's vast National Security Agency spying operation on Friday, President Barack Obama tried to empathize with critics of the program, suggesting that he, too, could be targeted once he left office. Given that he will enjoy Secret Service protection for the rest of his life, that is highly unlikely. Yet the question of his future plans is relevant--even now, early in his second term.The same day Obama commented about the NSA scandal, Obama's former campaign-turned-501(c)4 tax-exempt group, Organizing for Action (OfA), released a new video, detailing what activists were doing around the country. "What we want is to make sure that the voices of the people who put me here continue to be heard," Obama says in the video, his comments interspersed among interviews with enthusiastic volunteers.
Indeed, from an organizing point of view, it is the confrontation that counts more than the policy outcome. Robert Creamer, the Alinsky disciple and convicted felon who trained many of Chicago's current political cohort, and who helped craft the Democrats' political strategy on Obamacare, argues in his primer Stand Up Straight!--a "blueprint for future victories," according to David Axelrod--that "the fight's the thing."
As I noted in revisiting Creamer's ideas in February: "Notably, Creamer rebukes Democrats who might be tempted to work together with Republicans...Voters do not reward moderation or compromise, he says. What they admire, even if they disagree with you, is strength. Likewise, he says, it is better to seek confrontation than to find solutions, because voters want leaders who fight for them."
That philosophy seems to be the key behind many of President Obama's second-term initiatives, which have often stressed confrontation over problem-solving: gun control; the sequester; comprehensive immigration reform; cap-and-trade; and even the nomination of judges. Each of these initiatives depends on a bipartisan effort, yet in each case Obama has openly sought a dramatic confrontation with his political opponents.
Obama has applied that strategy in foreign policy, too--from the selection of Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense, to the nomination of the disgraced Susan Rice as National Security Adviser, and the radical Samantha Power as UN Ambassador. Alexis Simendinger of RealClearPolitics noted the trend in her recent article, "Obama Seeks Conflict With GOP in Appointing Rice, Power," observing that the president seems to be "fishing for new openings to paint Republicans as hazardously obstructionist and partisan."
Seeking such battles may not be in the nation's best interest, or even in the president's own short-term political self-interest, but it is useful in building the enthusiasm and coherence of the president's activist organization, which he intends to use over the long term to play a continuing role in American politics.
Obama and those closest to him, such as Chicago power broker Valerie Jarrett, have often said that he remains a "community organizer" at heart even while inhabiting the White House. As the Benghazi episode illustrates most harshly, he certainly seems less interested in governing than in campaigning. As far as he is concerned, he secured his legacy merely by winning office. His real goals are bigger and more revolutionary.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/06/09/Barack-Obama-s-Long-Term-Goals
Obama: "We're going to have some problems here"
You don’t trust President Barack Obama?
No faith in the massive federal bureaucracy? Don’t hold a huge reservoir of confidence in Congress representing your interests? How much do you trust the federal courts that handle secret requests from the Department of Justice . . .and then issue secret decisions based on the judge’s secret interpretation of the law?
Be advised: President Obama finds “your lack of faith disturbing.”
“If people can’t trust not only the executive branch, but also don’t trust Congress and don’t trust federal judges to make sure we’re abiding by the Constitution, due process, and rule of law,” Mr. Obama told reporters, “then we’re going to have some problems here.”
Let’s put partisanship aside and agree with his conclusion. Indeed, there are problems galore; the morning paper reads like a dystopian novel.
Uncle Sam — or Big Brother (it is increasingly difficult to tell them apart) — is snatching a record of every phone call you make, including to whom you are calling, from where you call, and how long you talk. And, but for a leak of classified information, we wouldn’t be worrying our pretty little heads about it.
Still, “no one is listening to your telephone calls” the POTUS reassures, as if the Feds knowing every phone call you make, when, where and to whom, isn’t a serious enough violation of your privacy. Of course, if the FBI or NSA or CIA are listening to the content of calls, it’s surely classified and you won’t be told.
But trust him.
Or trust that good ol’ Congress! “I think at the outset,” explained the president, “it’s important to understand that your duly elected representatives have been consistently informed on exactly what we’re doing.”
Considering congressional approval ratings, that point strikes me as less than assuring.
It’s nonsensical, too. The few members of the House and Senate intelligence committees who receive classified briefings (the entire Congress is not informed) are sworn to secrecy. Even if they disagree with what’s happening, their hands are tied. They can’t do very much about it.
Moreover, the few congressmen informed only know what they are told. That’s hardly oversight.
It’s not just all of your phone records, either, the National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping into the servers at Apple, AOL, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Skype, Yahoo, YouTube, etc., and capturing your personal information — emails, pictures of kids and grandkids, financial information. The administration argues the companies have agreed to this surreptitious government snooping, but the companies publicly deny it.
Again, the Great O assures you that they are not reading your emails. But doesn’t he mean “not at the moment”?
They are also reportedly grabbing all your credit card information. Who is “they”? I think that information is classified.
It’s all legal, though. Or so we’re told. But no law passed by Congress — not the Patriot Act or any other — can overrule our constitutional rights.
The FISA courts, created by the Foreign Surveillance and Intelligence Act, are not “lawful” in approving secret government requests to violate the Fourth Amendment rights of virtually every American in a secret proceeding without any countervailing party to raise objections and without any ability to appeal a decision.
Even supporters of the FISA court easily admit that it’s essentially a rubber stamp. According to several reports, Big Sam — er, Uncle Brother — I mean, the government has never had a request denied.
Setting up a secret court and whispering the secrets to a few members of Congress who promise not to tell isn’t a meaningful check on power. The only group I have any confidence in, the public, is kept in the dark.
President Obama tells us there are compelling national security interests, upon which our rights must be balanced. “You know, when I came into this office,” he offered, “I made two commitments that are more important than any commitment I make: number one, to keep the American people safe and, number two, to uphold the Constitution, and that includes what I consider to be a constitutional right to privacy and an observance of civil liberties.”
His priorities are flipped. Mr. Obama is required to take an oath, which he swore twice, to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” There is no addendum about keeping people safe.
The president should, of course, do all he can to “keep the American people safe.” But he does not have a choice to do so at the expense of abiding by the Constitution, including the Fourth Amendment . . . the Second . . . the First . . . and all the others.
Otherwise, there are going to be problems.
http://townhall.com/columnists/pauljacob/2013/06/09/obama-were-going-to-have-some-problems-here-n1616002/page/full
The Two-Front Forever War
So which should we be more afraid of? The US Government and its scandalous--even tyrannous--intrusions on our finances and privacy? Or foreign enemies with their explosives, cyber-weapons, and nukes?Is your answer “both,” I agree. But we will all have to get used to these threats, because neither are going anywhere. In 1961, John F. Kennedy described the Cold War as a “long twilight struggle,” and he was right. The Cold War was finally won, 30 years later, but at enormous cost. And as we all know, new enemies, domestic and foreign, have developed since.
Yes, the US government is scary. We now realize that seemingly every electronic communication service in the country has been tapped by Uncle Sam. When we learn that the National Security Agency (NSA) has a program called “Boundless Informant”--well, we’d better believe it.
But come on, admit: You already kind of knew this was happening, didn’t you? I mean, since the PATRIOT Act in 2001, since the revelation in 2005 that the Bush administration had been tapping our phones for the previous three years, it’s been understood--or it should have been understood--that everything we did, on the phone or online, was being monitored.
Still, those who had the most faith in Obama--a blind faith--are feeling a bit betrayed right now. On June 6, The Huffington Post headlined “George W. Obama,” atop a morphed-together photograph of the 43rd and 44th presidents. Huff Po will continue to support Obama, of course, but Arianna won’t be quite as much of a groupie. Meanwhile, other video-editing wiseguys have put together video compilations of Obama and Bush, showing them saying the exact same thing about the value of their surveillance programs.
The takeaway here is the enormous continuity between presidents, even of different parties. The imperatives of the job--and the realities of the world--have a way of forcing presidents to behave in similar, if not identical, ways.
Shrewd Beltway observers have always been hip to this continuity. Back on January 20, 2009, the day that Obama was first inaugurated, Washington Post reporter Bart Gellman--author of a biography of the secrecy-minded Dick Cheney--hinted that the new president would show Cheneyesque tendencies:
Information technology, and the executive’s control of its fruits, are widely cited in explaining presidential dominance over Congress. Every recent president has regarded himself as the primary judge of what information to share and what to withhold on grounds of executive privilege or national security.
Gellman’s 2009 reportorial analysis, we might conclude, has proven more reliable than Obama’s 2013 claim that his administration is “the most transparent in history.”
Oh, and by the way, speaking of Obama pledges gone awry, our war-ending, Nobel Peace Prize-winning president also seems to have declared cyber-war on other countries. Indeed, we might ask: Per Article One, Section Eight of the Constitution, did anyone in Congress vote on this new offensive? The answer, of course, is “no.”
However, it seems likely that top Members of Congress quietly approved of these cyber-attacks abroad, as well as the cyber-snoops here at home. Congress hasn’t formally declared war on anybody since 1941, and yet in the seven decades since, the US has fought overseas dozens of times. For the most part, Congress seems to have been perfectly happy not being asked to vote; it’s better, Capitol Hill denizens seem to think, to let the White House take the burden of responsibility for foreign military ventures. And so maybe now, too, for foreign cyber-ventures.
Similarly, top Members of Congress seem to have been apprised of domestic surveillance programs, and none of them seem to have objected. Speaking of lawmakers on Friday, Obama asserted that there’s been plenty of covert Congressional oversight on surveillance, adding, “These are the folks you all vote for as your representatives in Congress, and they are being fully briefed on these programs.”
Yes, a few lawmakers, such as Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), have protested, but it’s not immediately obvious, shall we say, that he has any sort of Capitol Hill groundswell behind him. Moreover, it’s also not immediately obvious that the country as a whole is riled up. Yes, big segments of the population--to say nothing of the media--are outraged, but as for the nation as a whole, not so much.
The public might yet erupt if it turns out that, say, the IRS was making use of the NSA data somehow, but that hasn’t happened--at least not yet.
Why this seeming lack of national outrage?
One reason, as we have seen, is that people have long thought that the government has been spying on them.
A second reason is that the private sector has been spying on the public even more meticulously than Uncle Sam.
And Silicon Valley has been the spearhead of that spying. Back in 1999, Scott McNealy, then CEO of Sun Microsystems, famously dismissed privacy concerns: “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”
McNealy’s words caused an uproar, but he had a point: The Internet is a two-way street. If it’s easy for us to use the Net, it’s easy for the Net to use us.
How do you think Google gained a market capitalization of nearly $300 billion, when it gives away just about everything it creates? Google enjoys about two-thirds of the search market in the US; the value-proposition for Google is we, the people--and all our data.
Moreover, around the globe, its search engine boasts a billion unique visitors every month. So Google isn’t just “we the people”--it’s “we are the world.”
Meanwhile, 91 percent of Americans today have cell phones. We know, of course, that the government is tracking our phone calls; the only remaining question is whether or not they are also listening to those calls. A presidential denial, no matter how emphatic, ought not get in the way of our “paranoia.”
In addition, if you have a smartphone--and more than half of Americans do--then you probably also have a bunch of downloaded apps that are monitoring every move you make, maybe even every breath you take.
In the wake of all the latest revelations, we might ask: Has there been any mass renunciation of the digital world? How many people have actually given up their computers and smart phones and tablets?
We might note that Scott “Zero Privacy” McNealy sold Sun Microsystems to Oracle in 2009--and since then, he has become increasingly active in Republican politics, and of late has been advising the Republican National Committee on its digital strategy.
Meanwhile, speaking of Republicans, there’s a strain of libertarian thought maintaining that any and all snooping is okay, so long as it’s the free-market-based private sector doing it. That is, it’s okay for Google to know everything about you, because you, the consumer, operating in the market, freely consented to use Google. By contrast, libertarian thinking goes, governments operate by coercion, and so governmental snooping is therefore illegitimate. That’s not a bad theoretical distinction--free market vs. coercion--although in the real world, the distinction starts to collapse.
For instance, if the private sector knows all about you, the public sector can just come along and grab the private-sector data, making that private data all its own. This is more than a theoretical possibility; in fact, it’s exactly what has happened, as the government has tapped into Google and all the rest.
Okay, so that’s the dire situation on the homefront. Yes, our freedoms have been eroded in myriad ways--Rush Limbaugh has spoken of an Obama “coup” against American freedoms--but we don’t seem to object that much, especially if objecting would cost us our access to convenient and free stuff.
Meanwhile, of course, looking beyond the threat from within, we can’t forget the even greater threat from abroad. We have enemies. Al Qaeda has never given up trying to attack us, the North Koreans say they can nuke us, the Iranians are trying hard to gain that nuking capacity, and the Chinese really could do it.
Indeed, as Hamilton noted in the previous installment, if the Chinese have “pervasive access” to the 80 percent of the world’s communications--look on your computer or phone or PDA and see where it was made--then we all have a problem. It’s bad enough that the American government knows all about what we’re doing; it would be even worse if the Chinese government knew everything.
To sum up, yes, we have things to be afraid of here at home. Yet still, the even more fearful things are overseas.
So we might think of ourselves as being in a two-front war--a scary one at home, and a scarier one abroad. It’s a two-front forever war, we might say, because the US government isn’t going anywhere, and neither are the overseas threats.
What to do? How to react? We have four choices: We can give in, we can hide, we can fight, or we can leave.
That’s a grim quartet, one might say, putting added darkness into this new “long twilight struggle.”
On the other hand, it’s best to view the situation clearly, however grim it might be. In seeing the future with clarity, we can yet find liberation.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/06/09/The-Two-Front-Forever-War
The Scandal Dump is a Smokescreen
For several months, the Benghazi scandal lay dormant, apparently forgiven and forgotten. Then, inexplicably, it reared its ugly head when Congressmen Ron Johnson and Jason Chaffetz smelled Obama's blood in the water.After feigning affliction with the flu, and then ostensibly tumbling down a carpeted stairwell resulting in an unconfirmed concussion, then-Secretary of State Clinton was finally forced to testify before Congress. Clinton's desperate attempt to put the Benghazi scandal to rest with her now-infamous impassioned declaration -- "What difference, at this point, does it make?" -- only fanned the flames of American outrage at the needless deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens, his aide Sean Smith, and two valiant Navy SEALS, Tyrone Woods and Glen Dougherty.
At this point, the focus of the investigation was confined to the failure of the Obama regime to adequately protect the American consulate in a hostile country and its subsequent attempt to cover up that ignominy. Nobody, except us conspiracy theorists, was asking about the real reason for the coordinated terrorist attack. Hint: it was not a video mocking Islam. Here are the questions that should have been asked, but were not:
Why was American security systematically withdrawn and transferred to incompetent Libyan operatives several month before the attack?
What were the missions of Ambassador Chris Stevens, Tyrone Woods, and Glen Dougherty?
Why was the order to "stand down" given to ready and able military rescue forces?
The Obama regime frantically feared that these questions were forthcoming. Desperate to change the subject, the nefarious regime serially released a spate of "gates" intended to inundate the news media outlets in order to provide a smokescreen obscuring the lethal Benghazi questions.
The first feint was AP-gate: revealing the illegal DOJ inquisition of the world's largest newsgathering agency. This titillated the media and put Benghazi in the rearview mirror. When that furor waned, along came Reporter-gate, proclaiming that Fox News journalist James Rosen had been the subject of a similar inquest. Again the media feigned horror at the atrocity committed against one of their own. Benghazi what?
On the heels of AP-gate comes IRS-gate, alleging egregious acts of power abuse by the most powerful government agency in America. Never mind that the shocking, illegal targeting of politically incorrect enemies of incumbent administrations has been rampant within the IRS for decades. The media cooperated as if those corruptions were breaking news. Benghazi who?
Alas, as revulsion with IRS-gate began to decline, another "gate" was needed to anesthetize the populace against Benghazi-gate. Conveniently, the IRS debacle was extended by revealing their half-a-billion-dollar "seminar" parties, which have been going on for years but suddenly are splashed as breaking news.
Now the latest news flash is telephone-gate, swiftly followed by internet-gate. Never mind that these practices have been going on since at least 2006 during the Bush administration. Benghazi when?
Put on your tinfoil hats, folks. I submit that this chain of coordinated releases of scandal after scandal is a ploy by the most corrupt regime in American history to divert national attention from the most damning political catastrophe Obama has ever faced: Benghazi-gate.
Was the stratagem a botched attempt to have Stevens kidnapped by al-Qaeda and then to offer the Blind Sheik in exchange for the ambassador? Was the subterfuge a failed attempt to divert the massive Gaddafi weapons cache into the hands of al-Qaeda? Don't get me started.Whatever was going on in Benghazi, Libya before the nefarious 9-11-2012 attack is a dark secret, the revelation of which the Obama regime mortally fears. That is why this coordinated serial release of humiliating scandals, reproachful as they may be, is far, far better than the truth about Benghazi -- at least for the Obama regime.
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