Politics Obama - Actually doing a good job?

It's tough work criticizing Presidential policy one might be in agreement with. Much easier to create strawmen to take jabs at.
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There's a flaw in the system when the only way to get to the bad guys is to step on necks of law abiding citizens and allies. I hate to evoke the Constitution but we have protections from the sort of behavior Snowden blew the whistle on. Never mind the part about spying on our allies. How much nefarious behavior has to be committed before it's elevated to the status of wrongdoing?

Divulging secrets of capabilities? Everyone knows what those capabilities are. Torture, extraordinary rendition, illegal and indeterminate detention, to name a few. It's shameful behavior and deserves exposure.

 

Seeing how most of these 'revelations' came out in 1999 and 2006 and no one in the media did much, until you get a suspicious guy fleeing to China and then to Russia probably with direction from The Guardian or WikiLeaks on how to make the most of it... But maybe it was the Rand Paul libertarians that wanted this information to come out and damage the President's plans to get stuff done.

Yes, it is a small minority. I bet for most people it wouldn't even be in the top 20 things that impact their lives. I could think of 100 things that would impact my life more than knowing that the government is using phone calls to figure out who known terrorists are contacting who might be sleeper cells that are secretly planning something big while living normal lives.

 

For most people, none of what we discuss here is important.

And personally, it makes me very uncomfortable knowing that the US is monitoring the activities of private citizens in the UK.

I don't believe the level of the threat is comparable to the level of action being taken to address it. Call me cynical, but I've been around long enough to realize that governments are apt to escalate a threat as justification for suspending/eliminating rights and liberties. It's citizens like you who make it easy for them to do so.

 

The Supreme Court ruled that law enforcement can use metadata and that there were no laws preventing the ISPs and phone companies from sharing that data. So, it isn't unconstitutional and unless there is a change to the constitution in the future it isn't in there.

[QUOTE = http://www.volokh.com/2013/07/17/metadata-the-nsa-and-the-fourth-amendment-a-constitutional-analysis-of-collecting-and-querying-call-records-databases/]
In this post, I’ll start with current law, and I’ll explain why current law supports the conclusion that massive-scale collection of communications meta-data by the NSA does not violate the Fourth Amendment rights of its customers. I’ll then consider alternate views of the Fourth Amendment and explain the prospects and challenges of using the mosaic theory to get to a contrary result.
...
I. Metadata Surveillance and the Fourth Amendment Rights of Customers
First, the facts. From what we can tell, the FISC has signed an order requiring communications providers to disclose the telephony metadata they have collected to the federal government. We don’t know exactly what records are actually being turned over, but the order indicates that it includes all non-content information, which might include numbers dialed, duration of calls, and the location information of cell-phones. The NSA is then querying the database, although it seems that pursuant to a FISC order they can do so only when they have reasonable suspicion that the fruits of the query will reveal information relating to terrorist plots and the like.
The conventional account of the doctrine would indicate that this does not violate the Fourth Amendment. When I say “conventional account,” I mean the account found in conventional sources of legal authority like Supreme Court opinions and circuit court decisions. Here’s how the conventional account would go:
(a) First, obtaining telephone metadata is not a “search” under Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979). Smith held that the number dialed from a telephone call is not protected because it is information provided to the phone company to place the call. The caller sends the information to the phone company, and the phone company uses it; the information is the phone company’s record of what it did, not the user’s property. Smith built on United States v. Miller, 425 U.S. 435 (1976), which held that a person does not have Fourth Amendment rights in their bank records. The bank records are the bank’s business records of how the account was used, Miller reasoned, so the customer has no privacy rights in the information.
Under the reasoning of Smith and Miller, metadata that is account information about how an account was used — but not call contents — is not protected under the Fourth Amendment. See, e.g., United States v. Fregoso, 60 F.3d 1314, 1321 (8th Cir. 1995) (stored telephone records not protected). Lower courts have applied the same principles to Internet metadata, too. See United States v. Forrester, 512 F.3d 500, 510 (9th Cir. 2008) (IP addresses); United States v. Perrine, 518 F.3d 1196, 1204 (10th Cir. 2008) (“Every federal court to address this issue has held that subscriber information provided to an internet provider is not protected by the Fourth Amendment’s privacy expectation.”).
(b) Under existing doctrine, the closer call is with cell-site location — location information about where phones are located — that is part of the same Section 215 order. There is pending litigation on how the Fourth Amendment applies to cell-site information collection in several circuits, and it’s not inconceivable that the issue might get to the Supreme Court within a few years. However, the predominant view in the caselaw is that cell-site location is unprotected under Smith v. Maryland. See, e.g., United States v. Skinner, 690 F.3d 772 (6th Cir. 2012); United States v. Booker, 2013 WL 2903562, at *9 (N.D.Ga. 2013); United States v. Graham, 846 F.Supp.2d 384, 389 (D.Md.2012); United States v. Benford, 2010 WL 1266507, at *3 (N.D.Ind. 2010).
(c) One difference between the existing cases like Smith and the facts of the NSA program involves the scale of the records obtained. In the criminal cases Smith, Forrester, and Perrine, the government obtained and examined the records of a single customer — the criminal suspect. Under the current Section 215 order, however, the government is obtaining massive databases of tens of millions of customers. It is then only looking through that database when it has reasonable suspicion. So it’s a big difference in the facts. But do those facts make a constitutional difference?
I think that distinction can make a difference in the analysis on the Fourth Amendment rights of the phone companies — more on that in a minute. But I don’t see a doctrinal hook in existing caselaw for why it would make a difference in the Fourth Amendment rights of their users. If obtaining pen register information on one user is not a search, the obtaining that pen register information for 100 or 10,000 or 1,000,000 or more users is still not a search. Katz tells us that the Fourth Amendment protects “people, not places,” and it’s not clear how surveillance that is not a search when provides information about one person can become a search when it provides information about many. To be sure, it’s possible to devise theories of the Fourth Amendment that would make that relevant, but it’s hard to get there just based on the conventional sources of existing appellate cases.
(d) That brings us to the last part of the picture. If the information that is in the database is not protected by the Fourth Amendment, then querying the database does not raise any Fourth Amendment issues. See, e.g., State v. Sloane, 939 A.2d 796 (N.J. 2008).
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There should be a way to expose what is going on, and punish those who are doing the crimes. But not destroy the good work and trust because of a few bad events.

I would hate to see what today's 'investigative journalists' would have done during WW2. Yes, there was spying on allies, yes there were crimes worse than Abu Graib, and there was forced internment... But the enemy had uniforms and tanks and stayed on their side of the line, and the public was willing to do something to win the war.

 

Aha. So even though most of the revelations were common knowledge years ago, somehow Snowden leaking them has ruined everything. That doesn't make any sense.

Small minority, eh?

Few See Adequate Limits on NSA Surveillance Program | Pew Research Center for the People and the Press

Obviously, the harm in the government's overbearing surveillance isn't in average people knowing about it, it's the potential for the government, or its various private contractors, to abuse that information. This potential harm exists whether we know about these programs or not, but, we're in no position to decide whether we want to risk giving the government these powers if we don't know that the government has already assumed them.

 

You may be right, but frankly I'm surprised to that a first term transition website wasnt scrubbed after the first election and even more so after the reelection. Granted, the timing is suspect.

But I'm not one to put too much into matching any president's legislative or policy achievements against campaign promises. There are too many external influences over which a president has little or no control, not to mention that all candidates propose more than they realistically would even consider spending time and political capital on achieving once in office.

Results are what matter to me.

And in the area of whistleblower protection, I would suggest Obama's record is mixed. The Whistleblower Enhancement Protection Act is more than pleasantly named legislation, For the first time in years, it does codified more protections into law for federal employees that apply to the current and future administrations. Unfortunately, it excludes national security and I suspect Obama would not have signed a bill that covered national security whistle blowers.

 

So he is guilty of reminding people of stuff they should have been pissed off about in 1999 and 2006?

 

this makes no sense. it's obvious that there has been not only an expansion of surveillance (and the distinction meta-data/data is largely fictional given the way the interception technologies operate...at the same time, this data is being gathered and stored at such rates that it is, they say, unmanageable for the time being) but also a normalization of it using legal claims that simply did not exist prior to 2001....

 

Yes. It wasn't front page news back then but now this photogenic globetrotting leaker is providing an easy story for media to get hits from people who are afraid of what the government 'could' do with this type of data. What happens in the movies isn't what happens in real life. And just because something 'could' be done doesn't mean that it does happen.

Now, far fewer people had cell phones back in 1999 and people weren't nearly as tech savvy about what the possibilities were , and in 2006 I think they were saying that American to American phone call number pairs weren't being monitored. But, still it doesn't warrant the distraction from the real important things happening in this country and around the world. And I'm not talking about the Royal Baby.

If you put people on the spot and force them to say yes or no to a poll, it would produce a different result than trying to figure out what the biggest issues facing this country is and ranking their order. Yet if you rank how much attention certain news stories get, and how much coverage of people actually doing something to help solve problems, then you see the discrepancy.

*On a side note, I have never worked for the NSA just to be clear...

 

What does this have to do, then, with stopping 'bad guys.'?

 

If the 'bad guys' weren't aware of all the secret ways that I would hope exist (but I haven't seen any proof of regular crime going down), then they wouldn't know what behaviors to change and technology to not use or else they would get caught. Yes, some people might call it a police state, but I have more problems with red light cameras and speed traps run by the police than them using high tech ways to capture rapists, murderers, human traffickers, and terrorists that want to kill others.

You then have things like this that come out, with some right and some wrong things in it. Well, if you know what the wrong ones are, and what other things to add, it becomes a problem if they evolve and can carry out more crimes without getting caught.

Al Qaeda's handy 22-step guide on how to avoid drones found in rubble of abandoned terrorist safehouse in war-torn Mali | Mail Online

 

This is the problem. Obama has bought into the horseshit idea that we ought to sacrifice our ideals to ensure our continued existence, when it isn't at all clear that we actually need to sacrifice our ideals to ensure our continued existence.
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More generally, it's fucking pointless to pretend you care about accountability if you get upset at the idea that the people ostensibly in charge of implementing that accountability be allowed to know what is going on. It's fucking absurd for anyone to look at the US congress and say, "Yeah, these fucking shitbags are capable of holding the NSA accountable without any sort of public pressure." Congress can't even hold itself accountable for anything. It's fucking absurd to expect the executive branch to hold itself accountable, and anyone who has been paying attention for the last several decades (or, you know for the duration of this country's existence) already knows this.

And how accountable are the private firms who we've outsourced this type of work to? How many Edward Snowdens exist who remain unknown because they decided to give their info to people who aren't journalists in exchange for vast sums of money?

 

But it isn't just Congress who monitors these programs. They fund them, and they can set directives, and review them from time to time.

I'm assuming that Snowden was one of these types of IT people who was the monitor to have so much access. You also have the FBI, DOJ, and OPM monitoring stuff (I hope). You have internal auditors, and security that monitors activity.

Now there isn't a top secret, classified media (that I know of) that asks the tough questions, yet won't announce everything to the entire population. The regular media only exposes the big screw-ups and doesn't give much credit for when things go right anymore.

 

it's worse than that if the fisa court is essentially a rubber-stamp operation the appointments to which are controlled by the right (roberts) BUT the entire surveillance apparatus is (arguably) legal..even as that legality operates on the basis of opinions which are mostly themselves secret, but which are only now--after snowdon's actions--starting to be subject to legal challenge.

and bodkin is right about the "private security firms"---the result of the rumsfeldian application of "lean" management ideology to the defense department, following on that glorious tradition of applying management ideology to the administration of war that resulted in such excellent outcomes as vietnam.

so there are no mechanisms for checking. there are no balances.

personally, i have a kind of jaded relation to this stuff, and find myself watching it like some kabuki form of involution that seems characteristic of deteriorating empires, that curious moment at which they begin to turn on themselves, that point at which narcissism institutionalized flips over into paranoia institutionalized...

at the same time, this metastasis of the national-surveillance state really should be stopped. if it is not, it signals an even more profound problem with the american system, typically so veiled in requisite forms of self-congratulation, than did the consent for the entirely illegitimate iraq debacle, then did the inability to move off neo-liberal orthodoxy in the face of the global financial crisis, than has the persistent paralysis of conventional politics brought to you by the black hole that is the american right....but the hope in all this is that congress now finds itself under tremendous pressure from its constituents to address this metastasis...

 

My question is, if they want to nation-hop this Snowden guy around the globe, who is, ostensibly revealing nothing, then how much else is going on?

 

There are so many people with so many hidden agendas around, and I am not even in Washington DC... It is a big world and a lot of people want to hold onto power and money. And a lot of bad people want to get it by hurting others.

 

No need to get all pissy on me. If you look back at my posts, I agreed that transparency and national security are areas in which Obama is rightfully criticized.

But why should his national security policies come as a surprise to you. He was not among the handful of Congressional liberals on this issue in the past. In the Senate, he voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act in '06 and expand the Federal Intelligence Surveillence Act (FISA) in '08. The only difference between Bush and Obama is the fact that Bush expanded surveillance outside of FISA and Obama is doing within the limits of the expanded law.

And none of this takes away from the benefits of the recently enacted WEPA outside of the national security issues that you dismissed out of hand. If you think federal employees are not better off with this law, I would suggest you're letting your emotions get the best of you.

I also agree with Roachboy that the FISA court has never seen warrant that it wont approve and more accountability is needed.

Where I disagree with both of you and agree with ASU is that a majority of Americans support the program and it is not an issue that is among those that they take to the voting booth. The opposition is from the liberal left and the libertarian right with most voters falling much closer to the middle than to either of these ends.

Nate Silver had an interesting piece on this in the NY Times last month.

 

but that's all cool, yes ASU2003? because that's just how shit goes?

 

If you look at numerous recent polls on the issue, what you find is that a majority support the expanded surveillance program but at the same time, a plurality might feel that Obama has gone too far in encroaching on civil liberties (but I suspect this might be tainted by a significant number of voters on the right who oppose everything Obama does).

Terrorism