Civil rights

by Jeremy Leaming

Are we over reacting when tossing around Orwellian to describe the federal government’s massive surveillance programs or denouncing President Obama as losing all credibility on this issue, as The New York Times Editorial Board has done?

We noted one of the massive spying programs yesterday regarding a FISA Court order granting the National Security Agency the power to collect telephone information from Verizon. The Guardian released the FISA Court order in its coverage. Later The Guardian and The Washington Post reported on a program called PRISM where the NSA and FBI are “tapping directly into central servers of nine leading Internet companies [like Google, Facebook and Apple], extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs ….” The order to collect telephone data has apparently been made much easier to obtain because of the administration’s sweeping interpretation of a provision in the Patriot Act.

President Obama today dismissed criticism of the surveillance programs as hype. At a press conference this morning intended to focus on implementation of the Affordable Care Act he was confronted with questions about the two programs.

Obama first acknowledged he has a duty to protect the constitutional right to privacy and civil liberties, but quickly shifted into defending the massive surveillance programs.

“The programs discussed over the last couple of days in the press are secret in the sense that they are classified but they are not secret in the sense that when it comes to phone calls every member of Congress has been briefed on this program,” Obama said. “With respect to all these programs the relevant intelligence committees are fully briefed on these programs. These are programs that have been authorized by broad bipartisan majorities repeatedly since 2006. So I think it’s important to understand that your duly elected representatives have been consistently informed about exactly what we’re doing.”

He claimed that the “intelligence community” is not looking at content of telephone calls, but instead sifting “so-called metadata” for leads of people plotting to engage in terrorism. He then knocked coverage of the two surveillance programs as “hype.” He added that the program of collecting telephone data is overseen by Congress and the FISA Court, which was created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA).

With respect to the Internet surveillance program, he said PRISM does not apply to U.S. citizens and that Congress is fully aware of the program and that the FISA Court “has to authorize it.” They are both programs, the president said, that have been approved by Congress and the FISA Court is overseeing them.

The Dish’s Andrew Sullivan writes, “I don’t find such data-mining for national security purposes to be that horrifying. If that’s the price we have to pay for deterring Jihadist attacks, then we should recognize there’s a trade-off. The problem is that we, the public, cannot judge the gravity of those threats and so cannot even weigh the necessity of giving up our privacy.”  

Geoffrey R. Stone, a constitutional expert and distinguished law professor at the University of Chicago, in a piece for The Huffington Post says that “based on the facts that have been made public,” the government actions “are neither unconstitutional nor otherwise unlawful under existing law.” Stone, however, adds that he would “personally like to see the interpretation of the Constitution and the state of federal legislation changed in particular ways that might alter this conclusion ….” 

Both Sullivan and Stone are touching upon the trade-offs that Obama also mentioned during his press conference today. In some instances national security will trump the interests of protecting privacy.

Others, like The New York Times Editorial Board believe the Obama administration has recklessly expanded the surveillance programs started under his predecessor and given more power to the nation’s unwieldy intelligence apparatus. “The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.”

by Jeremy Leaming

President Obama’s address to the National Defense University was quickly embraced by many high-profile pundits as evidence the 44th president would actually and finally offer change one could believe in. Specifically, change from the way his predecessor presided over a never-ending war on terror.

As noted here, during his May 23 speech the president provided some lofty rhetoric suggesting significant change was underway to counter intensifying criticism from civil libertarians and human rights advocates that the Obama administration is trampling fundamental constitutional principles and values while waging the so-called war on terror.

The New York Times editorial board lauded Obama’s speech as “the most important statement on counterterrorism policy since the 2001 attacks, a momentous turning point in post 9/11 America. For the first time a president stated clearly and equivocally the state of perpetual warfare that began nearly 12 years ago is unsustainable for a democracy and must come to an end in the not-too-distant future.”

Many other pundits also heralded the speech as a major shift in policy, while others, such as Alex Pareene warned that those concerned about human rights and civil liberties would likely be seriously disappointed.

Today, The Times reported that Pakistani officials said a CIA drone strike had supposedly “killed a top member of the Pakistani Taliban, an attack that illustrated the continued murkiness of the rules that govern the United States’ targeted killing operations.” Before his much-trumpeted counterterrorism speech, The Times reported that the administration would start shifting control of the drone strikes from the CIA to the military.

Obama’s speech received a lukewarm response from the ACLU, which has fought to obtain more information about the administration’s drone warfare. This blog also noted that a mere speech without action would not squelch criticism of counterterrorism efforts that violate U.S. and international law. The president declared early in his first term that we must protect fundamental values, such as due process under the law, as vigilantly as we wage war against terrorists. But such talk has too often proven hollow.

In a piece for The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald scored the president for a trend of advancing rhetoric that doesn’t reflect reality. Greenwald wrote, “what should be beyond dispute at this point is that Obama’s speeches have very little to do with Obama’s actions, except to the extent that they often signal what he intends not to do. How many times does Obama have to deliver a speech embracing a set of values and policies, only to watch as he then proceeds to do the opposite, before one ceases to view his public proclamations as predictive of his future choices?”