Demon!

(Editorial cartoon by Joel Pett / Lexington Herald-Leader (June 11, 2013) and featured at McClatchy DC.  Click on image to enlarge and then please return.)

Right on schedule, the demonization of Edward Snowden, the leaker/whistleblower (take your pick) has commenced.  I expected it from our government.  I did not expect it from some lefty bloggers, of which there are several who have bought into what is clearly designed as a distraction from the real issue, domestic spying by our own government.  Maybe Snowden is an attention seeker or a drama queen.  Maybe his girl friend is a pole dancer.  That doesn't detract from the issue we need to be most concerned about.

If people insist on having a demon to lash out at, there is at least one around:  the National Security Advisor who is supposed to keep Congress briefed, but couldn't quite bring himself to tell the truth about the program.

One of the staunchest critics of government surveillance programs said Tuesday that the national intelligence director did not give him a straight answer last March when he asked whether the National Security Agency collects any data on millions of Americans.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., called for hearings to discuss two recently revealed NSA programs that collect billions of telephone numbers and Internet usage daily. He was also among a group of senators who introduced legislation Tuesday to force the government to declassify opinions of a secret court that authorizes the surveillance. ...

Wyden said he wanted to know the scope of the top secret surveillance programs, and privately asked NSA Director Keith Alexander for clarity. When he did not get a satisfactory answer, Wyden said he alerted Clapper's office a day early that he would ask the same question at the public hearing.

"Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" Wyden asked Clapper at the March 12 hearing.

"No, sir," Clapper answered.

"It does not?" Wyden pressed.

Clapper quickly and haltingly softened his answer. "Not wittingly," he said. "There are cases where they could, inadvertently perhaps, collect — but not wittingly."

Wyden said he also gave Clapper a chance to amend his answer.

A spokesman for Clapper did not have an immediate response on Tuesday, but the intelligence director told NBC that he believed Wyden's question was "not answerable necessarily, by a simple yes or no." Officials generally do not discuss classified information in public hearings, reserving discussion on top-secret programs for closed sessions where they will not be revealed to adversaries.

"So I responded in what I thought was the most truthful or least most untruthful manner, by saying, 'No,'" Clapper said.   [Emphasis added]

 Now that's an answer which would make Lewis Carroll proud!

Liberals and conservatives alike are finding this whole issue of domestic spying deeply troubling, and that's the kind of bipartisanship I can welcome.  Yesterday, I suggested all sorts of ways to play with the program, among them signing the petition up at the White House.  In just three days it's garnered well over 55,000 signatures.  I suspect that not all those signing are incorrigible lefties.  And a couple of senators from different sides of the aisle are looking for a way to reign in this madness wrought under the Patriot Acts. 

A bipartisan group of senators is introducing new legislation that they say will provide greater transparency of National Security Agency surveillance programs, the first significant legislative response to the revelation of the highly classified telephone and Internet data-collection programs.

The bill, written by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Sen. Mike Lee ( R-Utah), would end the "secret law" governing the programs, the sponsors say, requiring the attorney general to declassify opinions from the secret federal court overseeing surveillance to show how broadly the government views its legal authority under the Patriot Act and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Co-sponsors include Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee who has raised concerns about tactics that could infringe on Americans’ privacy rights.

"Americans deserve to know how much information about their private communications the government believes it’s allowed to take under the law,” Merkley said in a statement. “There is plenty of room to have this debate without compromising our surveillance sources or methods or tipping our hand to our enemies. We can’t have a serious debate about how much surveillance of Americans’ communications should be permitted without ending secret law.”   [Emphasis added]

The FISA court, which has a statue of a kangaroo in front of its door rather than Lady Justice, is notorious for rubber stamping whatever the government wants.  The court has maybe denied 3% of the requests for warrants brought to it.  Imposing some actual oversight over that part of the process is a good beginning.

I suggest you email and call your senators and ask them to co-sponsor the bill and then vote for it.  Do both. 

It'll keep that data cloud growing.

But It's Patriotic

(Political cartoon by Ruben Bolling and published at Daily Kos.  CLick on image to enlarge.  If that isn't sufficient, click on link for a readable copy and then return.)

When AP discovered that the feds were collecting the phone and email data from their reporters, it went ballistic.  It turns out that the feds have been collecting data from a whole lot more people than AP employees.  The NSA has gotten records from all Verizon telephone customers.

From the Los Angeles Times:

The massive National Security Agency collection of telephone records disclosed Wednesday was part of a continuing program that has been in effect nonstop since 2006, according to the two top leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“As far as I know, this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been in place for the past seven years," Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) told reporters Thursday. The surveillance “is lawful” and Congress has been fully briefed on the practice, she added.

Her Republican counterpart, Saxby Chambliss, concurred: "This is nothing new. This has been going on for seven years,” he said. “Every member of the United States Senate has been advised of this. To my knowledge there has not been any citizen who has registered a complaint. It has proved meritorious because we have collected significant information on bad guys, but only on bad guys, over the years."

The statements by the two senators, whose committee positions give them wide access to classified data, appeared to rule out the possibility that the court order directing Verizon to turn over telephone records was related to the Boston Marathon bombings. The order was effective as of April 19, shortly after the bombings, which had sparked speculation about a link.   [Emphasis added]

 Of course there haven't been any citizen complaints.  No citizens outside of the US Senate were aware of what their government was doing.  That's how the FISA court and the Patriot Act works ... in complete secrecy, and a breach of that secrecy is punishable, as Bradley Manning and Julian Assange will attest.

It's secret, but not so secret that our senators weren't aware of the practice for seven years, and none of them complained.  Were they AT&T subscribers or were they too intimidated to complain or didn't they care about the egregious breach of our rights to be free from government intrusion into our private lives?

We live in interesting times: interesting and scary.  Very scary.

Unintended Consequences

(Editorial cartoon by Joel Pett / Lexington Herald-Leader (February 6, 2013) and featured at McClatchy DC.  Click on image to enlarge and then hustle back.)

Doyle McManus took a look at the Senate confirmation hearings for the nominee to head the CIA and noted something I thought was quite interesting.  The first part of his op-ed piece dealt primarily with the issue of whether more oversight was needed when using drones to take out American citizens accused of being terrorists.  It's the latter part of the column that struck me.

Still, protecting the rights of U.S. citizens in Al Qaeda is only part of what is at stake; those cases are unusual. In the long run, a more important question may be whether the drone strikes, which have killed more than 3,000 people, are creating more enemies for the United States than they are eliminating.

Scholars who have studied the political effects of drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen have argued that even well-targeted raids often claim innocent victims, and the result is a backlash against the U.S. Likewise, Hayden and retired Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the former U.S. commander in Afghanistan, have warned that too many drone attacks — in Pakistan, for example, where the CIA uses "signature strikes" against suspected militants without identifying them individually — can be a bad thing.

"What scares me about drone strikes is how they are perceived around the world," McChrystal told the Reuters news agency last month. "The resentment created by American use of unmanned strikes ... is much greater than the average American appreciates. They are hated on a visceral level, even by people who've never seen one or seen the effects of one."

During a hearing that lasted more than three hours, only one senator asked about that critical issue — a senior Republican, Susan Collins of Maine.

"If you looked at a map back in 2001, you would see that Al Qaeda was mainly in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and if you look at a map today, you would see Al Qaeda in all sorts of countries," Collins said. "If the cancer of Al Qaeda is metastasizing, do we need a new treatment?" ...

...Collins shined a light on a question that can be debated in public: Are drone strikes effective in the long run, or are they creating more enemies than they kill? That's a worthy target for Senate and House committees to go after.   [Emphasis added]

Apparently all but Sen. Collins believe the use of drones, even against US citizens, is acceptable.  The only quibble has to do with Congress having more oversight when it comes to US citizens.  The implication is that the US public is OK with drone warfare, an implication borne out by some polls which finds a strong majority in favor of their use, presumably because it means fewer American troops on the ground.

But if, as Sen. Collins suggested, the use of drones against any suspected terrorist is creating far more terrorists in many more countries, then the policy just might be flawed, something no one seems willing to discuss.  A FISA court or congressional oversight committee isn't going to do much in any case.

When one adds to the mix the fact that more and more countries now have their own drones and are presumably willing to use them, we may just have opened a whole new kind of hell hole.