The NSA Would Be Eliminated Under President Gary Johnson (thehill.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson says he'd sign an executive order eliminating America's National Security Agency if he wins the 2016 election. And he's also forcefully arguing that domestic surveillance of internet activity and phone calls in the United States is worse than in China. Johnson took issue with an interviewer at The Daily Beast who pointed out that China monitors political dissidents, saying "What do you call the NSA and the satellites that are trained on us and the fact that 110 million Verizon users are having everything we do on our cell phones being data-collected?"

Johnson also wants to abolish the Internal Revenue Service, replacing both income taxes and corporate taxes with a single federal consumption tax, and says he'd be willing to sign legislation eliminating the Department of Education, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Department of Commerce, which he says fuels "crony capitalism". "I'll sign legislation to eliminate any federal agency that they present me with."
Johnson has also said that if he were elected President, he'd pardon Edward Snowden.

Comments

Re:headline is misleading

[shilly]

On the consumption tax, as I understand it, he's proposing eliminating state and federal income tax, instituting a flat-rate consumption tax instead. Taxes for purchases of "basic necessities" would be prebated (which actually appears to amount to a universal basic income in the form of a check to anyone holding a social security number).

Re:If shove came to push...

[the_povinator]

I'll probably get modded down for saying this, but I know people who have worked with the NSA, and these people have always been very impressed with how seriously NSA employees take the legislative limits on what they can do.

NSA people work in big office buildings, in a corporate-like environment; they're tightly controlled. It's not like the CIA used to be where you were in a field office somewhere and your superiors weren't always 100% sure what you were doing.

Re:And he means it .. literally ..

[Agripa]

Which part of the NSA is it which sabotages encryption standards?