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U.S. Spy Panel Is Loaded With Insiders
schwit1 writes "After a public backlash to government spying, President Barack Obama called for an independent group to review the vast surveillance programs that allow the collections of phone and email records.
The members of the review group are:
Richard Clarke, the chief counterterrorism adviser on the National Security Council for Clinton who later worked for Republican President George W. Bush
Michael Morell, Obama's former deputy CIA director
Geoffrey Stone, law professor who has raised money for Obama and spearheads a committee hoping to build Obama's presidential library in Chicago
Cass Sunstein, law professor and administrator of information and regulatory affairs for Obama
Peter Swire, a former Office of Management and Budget privacy director for Clinton
'At the end of the day, a task force led by Gen. Clapper full of insiders – and not directed to look at the extensive abuse – will never get at the bottom of the unconstitutional spying,' said Mark Jaycox, a policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocacy group. The panel's meetings are closed after Clapper exempted it from the U.S. Federal Advisory Committee Act, which would have required it to keep the public informed and hold open meetings, for 'reasons of national security,' according to a statement from the group sent from Clapper's office. 'While we are exempt from the FACA, we are conducting this review as openly and transparently as possible.'"
Richard Clarke, the chief counterterrorism adviser on the National Security Council for Clinton who later worked for Republican President George W. Bush
Michael Morell, Obama's former deputy CIA director
Geoffrey Stone, law professor who has raised money for Obama and spearheads a committee hoping to build Obama's presidential library in Chicago
Cass Sunstein, law professor and administrator of information and regulatory affairs for Obama
Peter Swire, a former Office of Management and Budget privacy director for Clinton
'At the end of the day, a task force led by Gen. Clapper full of insiders – and not directed to look at the extensive abuse – will never get at the bottom of the unconstitutional spying,' said Mark Jaycox, a policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocacy group. The panel's meetings are closed after Clapper exempted it from the U.S. Federal Advisory Committee Act, which would have required it to keep the public informed and hold open meetings, for 'reasons of national security,' according to a statement from the group sent from Clapper's office. 'While we are exempt from the FACA, we are conducting this review as openly and transparently as possible.'"
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
BIG BROTHERS will never change it self.
Change does not come from within.
Real change must be made from the outside.
All the insiders - the careered politicians, the careered bureaucrats, the careered leeches who bled the public dry - will not change their ways.
If we are to have a REAL CHANGE we must make sure that NONE OF THEM remain inside the government.
Any less than that will be hot air, as usual.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
President Barack Obama called for an independent group to review the vast surveillance programs that allow the collections of phone and email records. The members of the review group are:
... Doesn't matter. You're asking the foxes to guard the hen house. If you work for the government, you can't really be expected to provide an impartial audit of government activities. The end. The only time Congress appoints actual outsiders is when the majority party is able to excert enough power to get them appointed. Of course, this is heavily politicalized as well -- they don't appoint people without knowing what their answer will be.
This is dinner theatre for one.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The watchers themselves, of course. And by the fifth amendment (they like the respect amendments when it serves to their pourposes), they won't incriminate themselves, so the outcome is predictable. Seems that the "ideological crusade" is in this side too.
There's no difference between the two parties that run America. The last election was between the rich white right-wing religious crazy guy and the rich black right-wing religious crazy guy, each of them representing their rich right-wing religious crazy organizations.
The problem being that 50+% of Americans actually believe Obummer's bullshit about "Hope and Change"
Except that wasn't the case at all. Most of the people I know who voted for Obummer the second time around were quite sick of his bullshit.
The Republicans simply had to run anyone electable, anyone fucking at all to win.
Instead, we had fifty shades of religious insanity, a man confusing the White House with a pizza joint, and the very icon of "that sort of evil capitalist the Democrats are always going on about - holy shit, they do exist!".
Even with the stupidity of the Republican party - Romney had a chance. But he couldn't stop running his fucking mouth, spewing shit that should not be spoken by any politician seeking election.
Magic fucking underpants aren't going to save you when you directly insult massive fucking swaths of the voting public.
Media picks the president and it picked Obama. It is as simple as that. People vote like they are told. MSNBC for example did not have a single positive story about Romney or a single negative story about Obama in the final weeks before the election (http://www.journalism.org/analysis_report/press_release_7). Something like that is expected of MSNBC but the likes of ABC, NBC, CNN, NYT, WaPo etc etc weren't far behind.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
This is by design. Nobody who cares about our rights would pass the background check.
Sound insider to me. Predisposed to lean on the side of surveillance, which is the point. Doesn't matter who he is loyal to. Career spook gives it two thumbs up.
Well, the Republicans did themselves no favors. The economy had just been destroyed by Wall Street fraud, and the culprits brazenly waved their fistfuls of bailout cash at the public.
Who do the Republicans put up for their Presidential candidate? Mr. Wall Street
Had they presented a down-to-earth, moderate candidate for the election, the Republicans would have won it by a landslide.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
There's no difference between the two parties that run America. The last election was between the rich white right-wing religious crazy guy and the rich black right-wing religious crazy guy, each of them representing their rich right-wing religious crazy organizations.
You've picked an ironic day to spout that sort of nonsense. Today, October 1, 2013, the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, started the major part of its implementation. That is a "gift" to the people of the United States from the Democratic party. There are plenty of difference between the two parties in terms of goals and policies. One thing they largely agree on is that allowing Americans to be killed in large numbers by terrorists is a bad thing. As a result President Obama has largely continued President Bush's counter-terrorism policies, but gone in very different directions with domestic policy. (Although it must be recognized that the differences in outlook have resulted in far fewer attempts to capture and interrogate terrorists due to the legal messiness that the Obama administration has helped create. As a result, they simply kill terrorists and lose the intelligence data.)
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
It just seems that no-one in the government is at odds with the NSA spying program. The idea was always to have checks and balances in the system so that if things spiraled out of control, there would always be counter-forces that would set it right.
However, the white house, senate, supreme courts etc doesn't seem to care. They're all acting like it is no big deal and we should forget about it (or maybe that is how the media is portraying it).
I think that you are overlooking the possibility that the checks and balances functioned as designed, and that the three branches of government signed off on the major aspects of the NSA's programs. That's not to say that there weren't compliance problems, or that the NSA's programs may have gone too far at various times and in various aspects. But the overall information seems to indicate that the NSA's programs were more or less supported by all three branches of government.
The very idea that such a thing is possible will of course result in uproar, cries of "traitors!", posts of the 4th Amendment, and quotes from Benjamin Franklin, and even cries to disband all the intelligence agencies. People will overlook that George Washington ran a spy ring that spied on other colonists and apparently existed well into the days of the Republic, and that Benjamin Franklin headed a committee that opened the mail of other colonists for intelligence purposes. There will be no recognition of Article II of the Constitution, the fact that applying the Constitution to real world situations for more than 200 years might have resulted in meaningful legal precedent and doctrines, that there are different implications in the Constitutional protections of criminal law versus the role of the state in time of war, and the much more modest impositions on the citizens today versus during WW2. There are a variety of other considerations including the shrinking size of the world with modern transportation and the transformational nature of modern communications. The US will be proclaimed to be a tyranny or a fascist state despite the fact that little fundamentally has changed. Elections continue, government changes by election, the Republic endures.
There has been push back against the NSA's programs in Congress, and that push back will continue. It is pretty likely that the NSA's programs will continue, although perhaps with some additional safeguards and oversight. That would be a good thing.
Intelligence agencies, like standing armies, are a regrettable necessity of the modern era. Neither the US nor Europe would be free today without them. But they always pose a potential danger to democracy if abused, and should be watched closely by the legislature.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
So you're advocating violent regime change then?
So you're saying violence is the only way to effect change from the outside? I don't know about that, certainly not clear to me that's what GP was getting at. Seems to me what you guys need is a third, fourth, fifth major political party with half a chance of, if not winning any election, at least offset the current status quo.
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
Or else, who the fuck are we supposed to vote for ?? Most of us already know that those appearing on our ballot tickets are scumbags.
Please explain why you consider either Gary Johnson or Jill Stein to be "scumbags". Both seem to me to be people of high integrity. Gary got my vote last year, and Jill got my respect. If neither of them got your vote, maybe you should consider that people like you are the root of the problem.
I'm waiting for the GP to respond with something along the lines of "blah blah you wasted your vote blah blah you acted as a spoiler" ... and when millions of people think that way, there's no chance of any third party candidate gaining any traction. The real problem here are apathy, excuses, and herd mentality. People don't vote on issues, hell they hardly understand what issues are at stake with any particular candidate. On the whole, people tend to vote for the political equivalent of their favorite sports team. So we get what we get, which is a horrible mess.
I have no idea how to to fix this, aside from watching things get so bad that people are rioting in the streets in every major city in the nation, and subsequently saying something like "well now, now that you all seem to care about what's happening since you can no longer ignore its direct effect on a massive number of peoples' lives, your own included, how about we figure this out."
Write failed: Broken pipe
You know the really scary part though? Put Mitt next to almost any of the other contenders for the republican nomination and he looked incredibly moderate. A huge chunk of the party thinks that swinging further and further right is how they'll win elections and it simply doesn't work at the national level or in moderate or left leaning states.
The United States of America.
Nothing they do actually protects us from attack because that is actually a ridiculously impossible goal. Its not even partially achievable in any meaningful way. Our only protection from attack is the lack of profit in actually attacking us that leaves all but an insignificant few even interested in trying, once in a great while.
No, the security apparatus and military is, AT BEST, security theater to make people feel safe, because the vast majority of terrorist attacks are the ones people imagine could happen.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
And look at the other candidates who actually led Mr Romney at some point in the race:
- Newt Gingrich, who among other things divorced his wife in the hospital because he wanted to marry someone prettier that he had been banging on the side, at exactly the same time he was leading the effort to impeach Bill Clinton for getting a little action on the side.
- Herman Cain, who, as far as I can tell, had no clue what the job of President of the United States actually entailed.
- Rick Santorum, who's a religious nutjob.
- Michelle Bachmann. Ditto.
- Rick Perry, who seemed surprised at the idea that naming your family's country estate "N*****head" was seen as racist. Also, given his last job, and given how much recent success the country had had with former Texas governors being in charge, Obama would have had an easy win.
- Ron Paul, who has some really great ideas, and some really lousy ones. We tried things like bank-issued currency, and stopped because those practices caused all kinds of problems.
And who didn't ever come close to winning? Jon Huntsman, the candidate that the Obama people were actually worried about, because he's a moderate good-governance-get-things-done politician who had previously been a successful and highly popular governor in his state, and was saying sensible things on the campaign trail.
I am officially gone from
It's great that you're willing to sign the WOLF-PAC petition, because money in politics does far more damage than you may think. Sure, democracy is a messy business even in the best of times, but it's always preferable to an authoritarian regime.
Corporate influence on our politicians should always be limited to prevent corruption, but right now very little limits that influence at all. This affects both parties, because 94-95% of the time the candidate with the most money wins the election, while most have found that getting their money from a small number of big donors is much more effective than getting it from many small ones. But that kind of money always comes with strings attached, which is exactly why Congress has such a low approval rating these days: they spend virtually all their time trying to keep their donors happy -- not their actual constituents.
Don't get me wrong here: we will always need corporations, because usually they are a force for good. For most things in our lives, we depend on the goods and services they produce. But certain rules need to apply to them lest things get out of hand. After all, they should serve us and not vice versa.
Of course, that's not how the corporations see it, for in the end the only thing that motivates them is profit. That's why to some extent all of them continue to bend and break the rules (pollution, money laundering, monopolistic practices, etc. etc.) whenever they think the benefits outweigh the costs. One of the tasks of government is to keep after them and make sure those costs (e.g. fines) always outweigh the benefits, but unfortunately it seems that Congress is no longer very effective at this. In fact, all they seem to be interested in is deregulation. Gee, I wonder why...
In April 2012, Clarke wrote an op-ed in the New York Times addressing cyberattacks. In stemming cyberattacks carried out by foreign governments and foreign hackers, particularly from China, Clarke opines that the U.S. government should be authorized to "create a major program to grab stolen data leaving the country" in a fashion similar to how the U.S. Department of Homeland Security currently searches for child pornography that crosses America's "virtual borders." Moreover, he suggests that the president of the United States could authorize agencies to scan Internet traffic outside the United States and seize sensitive files stolen from within the United States. Clarke then states that such a policy would not endanger privacy rights through the institution of a privacy advocate who could stop abuses or any activity that went beyond halting the theft of important files. The op-ed did not offer any evidence that finding and blocking sensitive files while they are being transmitted is technically feasible
I don't know if Clarke was being naive there or if it was just lip service, but I suspect he's working for interests that are more interested in controlling the internet and don't really care about our rights.
He also endorsed Obama, so he's definitely on the "friend" list, which is also suspicious.
So yeah, I think he's done good things in the past, he might be the best member of the panel, but he's still not someone I'd want on a panel charged with upholding our right to privacy.
They can't afford it but the rest of us can...and do. Ultimately their care comes out of our collective pockets in the form of massive insurance premiums and hospital bills.