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NSA Cheerleaders Discover Value of Privacy Only When Their Own Is Violated (theintercept.com)
Advocatus Diaboli sends this report from Glen Greenwald:
The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the NSA under President Obama targeted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his top aides for surveillance. In the process, the agency ended up eavesdropping on "the contents of some of their private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups" about how to sabotage the Iran Deal. All sorts of people who spent many years cheering for and defending the NSA and its programs of mass surveillance are suddenly indignant now that they know the eavesdropping included them and their American and Israeli friends rather than just ordinary people. The long-time GOP chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and unyielding NSA defender Pete Hoekstra last night was truly indignant to learn of this surveillance.
In January 2014, I [Greenwald] debated Rep. Hoekstra about NSA spying and he could not have been more mocking and dismissive of the privacy concerns I was invoking. "Spying is a matter of fact," he scoffed. As Andrew Krietz, the journalist who covered that debate, reported, Hoekstra "laughs at foreign governments who are shocked they've been spied on because they, too, gather information" — referring to anger from German and Brazilian leaders. As TechDirt noted, "Hoekstra attacked a bill called the RESTORE Act, that would have granted a tiny bit more oversight over situations where (you guessed it) the NSA was collecting information on Americans." But all that, of course, was before Hoekstra knew that he and his Israeli friends were swept up in the spying of which he was so fond.
In January 2014, I [Greenwald] debated Rep. Hoekstra about NSA spying and he could not have been more mocking and dismissive of the privacy concerns I was invoking. "Spying is a matter of fact," he scoffed. As Andrew Krietz, the journalist who covered that debate, reported, Hoekstra "laughs at foreign governments who are shocked they've been spied on because they, too, gather information" — referring to anger from German and Brazilian leaders. As TechDirt noted, "Hoekstra attacked a bill called the RESTORE Act, that would have granted a tiny bit more oversight over situations where (you guessed it) the NSA was collecting information on Americans." But all that, of course, was before Hoekstra knew that he and his Israeli friends were swept up in the spying of which he was so fond.
Dear Rep. Hoekstra,
Here's your Word of the Day:
Hypocrisy (noun) - The practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform.
Sincerely,
The rest of us.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
These congresscritters only have themselves to blame since they laid the very foundation for this to happen with things like the Patriot Act. I'll shed crocodile tears for the lot of them.
Except that, technically, those congresscritters may have been violating the law themselves by engaging in direct diplomacy with foreign powers, which is a felony (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ).
Of course, members of both parties have violated it in the past, and it largely goes unenforced as no one has actually been prosecuted for it since 1803.
Am I the only one concerned that Israel and the Jewish community have such high reaching influence on our country?
Maybe, just maybe, the influence they have and the power they weild is being used to convince us to fight wars that they benefit from but that cost us ruinously.