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Church Committee Members Say New Group Needed To Watch NSA
Trailrunner7 writes "In a letter sent to President Obama and members of Congress, former members and staff of the Church Committee on Intelligence said that the revelations of the NSA activities have caused 'a crisis of public confidence' and encouraged the formation of a new committee to undertake 'significant and public reexamination of intelligence community practices.' In the letter sent Monday to Obama and Congress, several former advisers to and members of the Church committee, including the former chief counsel, said that the current situation involving the NSA bears striking resemblances to the one in 1975 and that the scope of what the NSA is doing today is orders of magnitude larger than what was happening nearly 40 years ago.
'The need for another thorough, independent, and public congressional investigation of intelligence activity practices that affect the rights of Americans is apparent. There is a crisis of public confidence. Misleading statements by agency officials to Congress, the courts, and the public have undermined public trust in the intelligence community and in the capacity for the branches of government to provide meaningful oversight,' the letter says."
'The need for another thorough, independent, and public congressional investigation of intelligence activity practices that affect the rights of Americans is apparent. There is a crisis of public confidence. Misleading statements by agency officials to Congress, the courts, and the public have undermined public trust in the intelligence community and in the capacity for the branches of government to provide meaningful oversight,' the letter says."
You mean "lies" - FTFY.
We have a group that monitors the NSA. The NSA lied to them.
Who watches the watchmen?
Yes, the NSA and the greater intelligence community clearly needs oversight, but will anyone trust someone with that much power any more than we currently trust the NSA?
And to preach to the choir, but shouldn't the conversation shift to asking:
people paying attention lost confidence in the federal government and intelligence community forty plus years ago. that trust has never been regained, Snowden just gave a wakeup call for younger people.
The intelligence and police of our federal government are out of the control of We the People
Less rubberstamping committees, more restritictions on the government.
Carter started extraconstitutional spying on suspected foreign agents (tapping phones) and had FISA courts oversee the implementation, and those courts I think went ahead with all but 4 out of 17,000+ requests in one of the past years.
Oversight is always than complete government restriction.
WTF has a Church Committee got to do with this anyway? There is supposed to be 'Separation of Church and State" as part of the constitution.
(And which Church are we talking about anyway? Catholic? Lutheran (ELCA) Southern Baptist? Methodist etc
But I can't help but feel that the very nature of our Government has morphed. Institutions like the NSA aren't bothered by public perception -- they have grown into their own. They are beholden only to their own agenda and will do whatever it takes (lying to congress, fabricating effectiveness) to maintain and expand their power. Obama will do some hand-wringing on TV but in the end nothing will change.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Ahem... from wikipedia: "The Church Committee was the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, a U.S. Senate committee chaired by Senator Frank Church (D-ID) in 1975." ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
A former US Senator who was highly distrustful of the NSA in the 70s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... He formed a committee: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
The committee was chaired by a Congress-critter named Church. Nothing whatever to do with religion.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
Seems like the NSA and CIA might be by nature beyond oversight. Their job includes assuming that the worst scenarios are possible, which then justifies any action to thwart them, including lying to their overseers in order to keep doing illegal things they think is necessary to prevent those worst possible scenarios. It's bureaucratic paranoia resulting in functional schizophrenia that makes sense within the hive mind but not within the greater public mind that employs them to keep us safe.
...is another committee, I'm sure of it.
Maybe a committe, and a staff...of course you have to have a competent staff. And they're going to be overworked, so a whole fleet of nubile, er, naive, er, talented interns.
And they'll need offices, maybe a new office building, somewhere downtown so they can exercise 'oversight' as closely as possible. A parking garage, certainly, plus probably a cafeteria. Probably a monorail from the airport is worth considering too...
-Styopa
The "Church" committee is the senate committee to make sure the NSA, CIA, and FBI don't do anything illegal (i.e. Watergate). It's called the "Church" committee because it was originally chaired by Senator Frank Church.
Oh, not that kind of Church?
Sure, an oversight committee would be a good idea. But are they going to be able to actually do their job? High-ranking officials in the NSA have already demonstrated they are willing to outright lie to congress, so why would they be any more honest here?
We'll just end up with a committee that isn't allowed to know about the things they should be monitoring, wouldn't be told if they were allowed to know, and can't actually do anything about any abuses they do find beyond politely reminding the NSA that their actions are probably illegal.
The committee members should Google recursion.
No amount of "reform" is going to fix this. Adding more lawyers and more bureaucracy will not fix this. It's all cop-outs and the NSA will keep doing what it's doing under whatever name it's given as part whatever cop-out reform you can imagine.
You might get there with constitutional amendments, but personally I'm arguing for a breakup; the problem is the millions highly paid bureaucrats ensconced in Washington doing the bidding of their hundred foot tall political Masters of the Universe in league with corporate statists trying to rectifiy the world to fit their business models. We don't actually need these people to live well and honorably, folks.
We really don't.
Until the US congress actually withholds funding from an agency that violates US law, all federal agencies are exempt from the law.
227-3517
I was thinking of those that would perverse a system for their own personal wet dreams. These same personalities would scream innocence when publically confronted with their actions; while rest of us try to keep from purging our prior meal. So ya, lies.
The NSA needs to be taken apart and gotten rid of. Its almost complete overlap with CIA / FBI. There should be no NSA. We don't need a separate signals intelligence agency without a clearly defined scope.
The stuff the NSA does around developing secure encryption standards etc (assuming it actually does any of that anymore and iust putting back doors in things ) should go the FBI as crime prevention. Everything else is foreign intelligence and should go to the CIA removing the duplication of course. It should be re-iterated the CIA is forbidden from operating withing the boarders.
That is how you restore public confidence.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Short of them being allowed to stick their manifesto in his breast pocket during a press conference, jack-shit is going to happen, all justified by permanent war and 'National Security' - the same garbage they've increasingly used to stop FOIA requests (which will probably be repealed in a few years anyway).
Your mom!
The first step is admitting that you have a problem. So far we have a 'letter', informing that there is a problem. The next step is admitting on the part of the one with the problem that there is a problem (without that you need an intervention). Followed by a series of steps to reform, and rehabilitate. Diligence and constant monitoring is required to ensure that there are no relapses. That this has happened before suggests a pattern, and previous efforts at oversight were either ineffective, or were (mistakenly) removed over the years.
Not just lies, perjury. Those lies were told under oath.
If we had a functioning justice system in this country, those perps would be in jail awaiting trial right now.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Well, we can't actually hide your mom (your mom is so fat, we can't hide her), but we do want to hide all the video of the things we do with your mom.
All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing ...
The problem, therefore, being one of branding rather than action?
Hint- the fact that they lied doesn't matter to me. The fact that they're reading this post, in building my dossier, does.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
And then we'll need another committee to watch those watchers. And a committee to watch those watchers ad infinitum.
Jeremy Bentham imagined a single overseer at the top to keep everyone else in line. Who could we possibly trust with that sort of authority?
Seems to me the only democratic way to handle surveillance is public transparency rather than more private committees. If our government didn't have such a sweeping surveillance authority in the first place we wouldn't need an infinite chain of watchers. That's the real solution. Not an endless regress of watchers.
“You don’t fight it without a price because they come after you and they don’t always tell the truth."
http://blogs.rollcall.com/218/...
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Ahem...
Well isn't that spehshull. Doing our little superiority dance, are we?
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
It's called The People. Stop withholding relevant information from the responsible watchdog organization, and everything will work itself out.
Well then Nancy Pelosi is a chicken shit - pure and simple!
The gaseous atmosphere of Uranus might be enough cloud cover to conceal her though.
... We could just dismantle the NSA.
We need spies to watch the spies..
In 10 years we will need spies to watch the spies who are supposed to be watching the spies.
And I was going to pretend to be a choir-fucking priest. You know, just so we can keep the introductions casual between kettle and pot here.
Oh, the irony of a religious group wanting more oversight. I almost fell off my chair laughing over that shit.
That's what you do with rogue agencies.
Back when I was in the Canadian Army, we disbanded entire units, burned their colors, demoted their officers, and punished the guilty for torturing civilians in Africa.
Do that with the NSA. Starting at the top, with long prison sentences in gulags.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The most widespread violations of citizen's rights in the history of this nation, practices that have badly damaged the international reputation of the nation in both public and private sectors, appointed officials who have sworn to protect and defend The Constitution patently guilty of criminal behaviro being allowed to tell Congress to, essentially, go fuck itself, and the advice is "form a committtee". Seriously?
There appear to be 2 paths forward.
Not just lies, perjury. Those lies were told under oath.
If we had a functioning justice system in this country, those perps would be in jail awaiting trial right now.
-jcr
If we had a functioning justice system, they would have been rounded up, tried for treason, and executed as traitors. They are levying war against the entire populace and are aiding our enemies with spy-back agreements. The banksters, the clowns at BP, the Enron dicks, etc. all knowingly, willingly, and intentionally fucked shit up on such a grand scale that I would consider them to be waging war on Americans as well, thus making them traitors and earning them the death penalty.
But the law doesn't apply to the rich and powerful in this nation.
Who else on /. (besides me) remembers the Church Committee hearings? Tricky Dicky? The Saturday Night Massacre?
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Not just lies, perjury. Those lies were told under oath.
If we had a functioning justice system in this country, those perps would be in jail awaiting trial right now.
-jcr
If we had a functioning justice system, they would have been rounded up, tried for treason, and executed as traitors. They are levying war against the entire populace and are aiding our enemies with spy-back agreements. The banksters, the clowns at BP, the Enron dicks, etc. all knowingly, willingly, and intentionally fucked shit up on such a grand scale that I would consider them to be waging war on Americans as well, thus making them traitors and earning them the death penalty.
But the law doesn't apply to the rich and powerful in this nation.
Laws don't apply to the intelligence community when psychos roam this planet.
It's not religion, they're talking about the lambda calculus.
Nowadays we find a few chumps like Lynndie England and Ivan Frederick and blame everything on them.
Janis Karpinski walks free. And we don't even know who commands the "black jail" in Bagram, which is one of several torture and rape facilities that President Obama has exempted from his shutdown of Bush-era "secret foreign prisons."
The constitution and judiciary who will enforce it is the only group you need. They won't so the new group is just as free to break the law as the NSA. The Supreme Court and your government is already corrupt and ignores the constitution, so you're pretty much screwed.
I don't get it, there are already Congressional committees monitoring the NSA/CIA/FBI and they aren't doing anything to solve the problem. In fact they are REFUSING to take action to solve the problem. What good is yet another committee pointlessly wringing their hands and complaining that the head of the intelligence agencies are lying to them (or hacking into the committee's computers to delete evidence of their criminal activity) and there is nothing that can be done. What we need is Sen. Feinstein to get off her rich ass, stop sucking up, and actually start filing criminal charges against these assholes.
The classic way to 'solve' a problem in Washington is to throw yet another (law, agency, reg, department, etc) at the problem.
Then call it fixed.
Then come back years later when it's even worse and repeat.
We don't need yet another group to watch the groups we have.
We need to hold the supposedly adult supervisors we have now accountable for not watching the store.
That would be the congressional intelligence oversight committees.
With the best of intentions,
They setup and supported what we have now.
Now that it's public, they are 'shocked' to see what is there.
(See the recent statement from the good lady from California about the CIA.)
Instead of adding another bandaid, a simpler approach might be to just let the 'Patriot' Act expire.
Laws apply to everybody regardless of who's roaming the planet.
Otherwise the psychos end up running things.
THIS!!!
There is never greater need for the rule of law than when society is at war or otherwise under attack.
In fact, artificial creation of "emergencies" is a classic ploy of governments to grab more power over the people.
Got my driver's license about that time, so didn't pay too much attention to that sort of thing, but I remember it from the news.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
And who is all this spying for? Could it be ... perhaps ... SATAN?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
all too well, (shaking my head), all too well
it's like deja-vu all over again...
But considering this is a religious group, they'll never do that. Religious groups in this country do not recognize rights. They hate the right to privacy so these church groups love the NSA.
I cannot read this, well, gotta run to the DMV and repent.
Hello Dave.
Cheers,
Hal
The psychos do run things, because laws are not applied to leadership. That is an accurate summary of the current state of governance for most countries of the world.
Do I get whooshed now?
And you can't spell SATAN without N, S, and A. Coincidence? I think not.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
Eventually it would fall on congress to not pay congress, and they've already pointed out during the shutdowns: Sorry. It is against the constitution for congress not to pay itself...
Hello Dave.
Cheers,
Hal
OK. As long as you don't say, "I can't do that, Dave," when I ask you to open the door.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
What evidence do you rely on that the codes and constitution apply to anyone?
the fact that they lied doesn't matter to me. The fact that they're reading this post, in building my dossier, does.
We are not reading this post, or building a dossier on you #638312.
-- Your completely honest and not lying at all friends at the national security agency.
The main problem is that the NSA has experienced scope creep and grown excessively large. Currently they handle SIGINT both foreign and domestic, while the head of the NSA also runs Cyber Command and the Central Security Service. The correct course of action would be to split them into multiple agencies with different chains of command. The most obvious looks something like this:
NSA - Foreign SIGINT, leaves the DOD, becomes independent agency but still reports to DNI like the CIA
New Agency - Domestic SIGINT, under the DOJ
Combined Cyber Command/CSS - Now separate organization but stays under DOD
or Santa.
What's your point?
the church is just upset the NSA gets access to all the naked kids web camming...and wants to have a look themsleves
Looks like we need a Section 31 to reign in the CIA and the NSA.
Urmom?!? Not likely. All the gas of Uranus, Urneptune, Ursaturn, and Urjupiter couldn't hide Urmom. She's that fat.
My predicate calculus trumps your lambda calculus.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Seriously, what do you have to hide?
Seriously, it's none of your fucking business.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
Strange how so many have been bamboozled and hoodwinked by what I think is partisan political theater in the vein of the long running bash the Federal government scam from RW political operatives like Rand Paul, and those RW politicians like Graham and others who have recently applauded Putin ass a vehicle to discredit President Obama and the concept of Federal governance (strong "central" government) .....when "comrade" Snowden made his Paul Revere ride it was not to expose violations of our liberties in this country to US media , heck it was not even to Great Britain ( The Guardian is a well know outlet for anti-Big Brother gripes) or the Neatherlands... ..and he finally landed on the front door of Russian "Spy-master" turned President Vladimir Putin.......sounds a little shaky to me on the matter of serious concerns over "liberties" and "freedoms" in the United States ............surprise , surprise no sooner had the lights of the Olympics cooled down and Spymaster Putin was back to his 15 commitment to reform the old Soviet Union it seems .......
Let's slow down...the NSA bash wagon got rolling thanks to one Edward Snowden a "con"tractor working in a programmer role at NSA ( too much reliance on contractors)
where did this fledgling patriot go..well he first went to that beacon of citizens rights called China...( Lord knows what US secrets he left there)
Hmmmmm, maybe someone intelligent enough to hack into secure data bases within the nations premier data intelligence gathering agency should have had enough reasoning ability to realize maybe Mr Putin was not the champion of personal freedoms he had been romanticized to be..........but guess not instead began the drip, drip, of an all out US SECRETS DOCUMENT DUMP from the hallowed halls of the Kremlin........................don't know im no James Bond Rhodes Scholar but on it's face the betrayal of his access at NSA was far from the act of someone who thought telling Putin US military secrets would result in greater respect of the liberties of citizens in this country.....just does not add up
We are really short-sighted to so relentlessly attack and expose US intelligence operations when "all" other developed nations even those overtly considered the enemies of this nation USE THE SAME TACTICS .....?
It would be one thing "if" this was a perfect world, no intelligence agencies , no espionage , no spies , spooks or the like at all.....guess what it is not......it's like the debate over guns, yes I think there are far too many in far too many of the wrong hands but guess what, since this is the world we live in, I will not be the sole person to say I'm going to disarm as some meaningless symbol of the perfect world I wish was a reality that is foolhardy indeed..!