FLOTUS, the Internet, and Hypocrisy

by Gerard Emershaw

In a recent speech given while visiting China with President Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama stated that access to the Internet is a “universal right”: “When it comes to expressing yourself freely, and worshipping as you choose, and having open access to information—we believe those are universal rights that are the birthright of every person on this planet.” This was obviously aimed at the Chinese government, which does not protect freedom of speech on the Internet or anywhere else as well as at Turkey, whose government recently banned Twitter. The problem is that this smacks of hypocrisy given President Obama’s assault on the First and Fourth Amendments through the NSA.

It would be unfair to blame the First Lady for the actions of the President; however, the position of First Lady has grown into an unofficial job within the administration. Gone are the days when the First Lady just smiled for the cameras. Michelle Obama represents a new breed of First Lady—which began with Nancy Reagan and peaked with Hillary Clinton—who functions as a good will ambassador, Nanny State busybody, and propagandist for the White House.

While the Obama administration has not banned Twitter and does not censor the Internet in the dramatic way that China does, it chills free speech nevertheless. Knowing that the NSA is liking monitoring one’s Internet usage and communications, an American is less likely to express speech critical of the government than he or she would be otherwise.

Even if speech is not chilled by the well publicized and unconstitutional NSA presence on the Internet, how can this speech be truly free if there is no freedom to speech anonymously? Without the possibility of such anonymity, the First Amendment is null and void online. Furthermore, the NSA’s ability to spy on Internet communications without a warrant effectively makes the Fifth Amendment prohibition on self-incrimination null and void. While the FISA Court mandates that potentially incriminating evidence against Americans found during national security searches by the NSA are not to be used in criminal cases, American spy agencies distribute such information to other agencies via the Special Operations Division. Therefore, the NSA could easily provide potentially incriminating evidence that it unconstitutionally discovered online and provide it to other law enforcement agencies who can “launder” it, hiding its true unconstitutional source.

Thus, what First Lady Michelle Obama said in China is hypocritical. If the Obama administration continues allowing the NSA to do what it has been doing, then the United States does not truly respect the “human right” of Internet access. The Internet becomes a dangerous venue for potential criminal entrapment instead of the freedom conduit that it ought to be.

Highlights and Analysis of President Obama’s Appalling NSA Speech

by Gerard Emershaw

President Obama’s January 17, 2014 speech on NSA surveillance may cause some devoted progressives to claim that the Commander-in-Chief has seen the light on civil liberties. However, anyone who listened to the speech with his or her ears rather than a deaf progressive heart understands how the President said nothing encouraging in terms of willingness to fulfill his duty to defend the Constitution. 

1. Isn’t spying on our enemies different from spying on our citizens?

President Obama pointed out that the United States government has a long history of employing various types of surveillance in an effort to keep the nation and its citizens safe:

At the dawn of our Republic, a small, secret surveillance committee borne out of the “The Sons of Liberty” was established in Boston. And the group’s members included Paul Revere. At night, they would patrol the streets, reporting back any signs that the British were preparing raids against America’s early Patriots. Throughout American history, intelligence has helped secure our country and our freedoms. In the Civil War, Union balloon reconnaissance tracked the size of Confederate armies by counting the number of campfires. In World War II, code-breakers gave us insights into Japanese war plans, and when Patton marched across Europe, intercepted communications helped save the lives of his troops. After the war, the rise of the Iron Curtain and nuclear weapons only increased the need for sustained intelligence gathering. And so, in the early days of the Cold War, President Truman created the National Security Agency, or NSA, to give us insights into the Soviet bloc, and provide our leaders with information they needed to confront aggression and avert catastrophe.

However, what the President failed to note is that spying on the Confederacy, the Axis Powers, and the Soviets were different than spying on American citizens with the NSA through the bulk collection of metadata. No rational American would criticize spying on dangerous enemy governments. The NSA and other American intelligence agencies can spy on China, Russia, and even allies such as Germany. These agencies can also spy on terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. But why do they need to spy willy nilly on American citizens?

2. Don’t bring up a cautionary tales if they don’t make you proceed with caution.

President Obama discussed the Constitution, the checks and balances built into the American form of government, totalitarianism, and past abuses by American intelligence agencies:

Throughout this evolution, we benefited from both our Constitution and our traditions of limited government. U.S. intelligence agencies were anchored in a system of checks and balances—with oversight from elected leaders, and protections for ordinary citizens. Meanwhile, totalitarian states like East Germany offered a cautionary tale of what could happen when vast, unchecked surveillance turned citizens into informers, and persecuted people for what they said in the privacy of their own homes.

In fact, even the United States proved not to be immune to the abuse of surveillance. And in the 1960s, government spied on civil rights leaders and critics of the Vietnam War. And partly in response to these revelations, additional laws were established in the 1970s to ensure that our intelligence capabilities could not be misused against our citizens. In the long, twilight struggle against Communism, we had been reminded that the very liberties that we sought to preserve could not be sacrificed at the altar of national security.

But what is the point of bringing up cautionary tales if these tales do not make you cautious? One of the most important checks against tyranny from the federal government has been the Fourth Amendment, yet President Obama did not refer specifically to it even once during his speech. He brought up Stasi East Germany, but he failed to recognized that the NSA, FBI, and CIA are beginning to resemble East Germany’s Stasi and that the Department of Homeland Security’s “see something, say something” campaigns have attempted to turn Americans into informers. The fact that the United States government has used its vast spying apparatus against its own people on so many occasions—COINTELPRO, Operation CHAOS, Nixon’s “Plumbers,” Project Shamrock, Project MKUltra, Operation Northwoods, etc.—should lead President Obama to realize how close the nation can come to becoming a totalitarian surveillance state.  It is one thing to say that “the very liberties that we sought to preserve could not be sacrificed at the altar of national security” and another thing entirely to mean it. Meaning it requires being ever-vigilant in preserving natural rights regardless of what threats—even if existential—the nation faces. Being truly aware of “cautionary tales” such as Stasi East Germany and the various violations of rights by American intelligence agencies which the Church Committee revealed in the 1970s means making it a priority to oversee these executive agencies. President Obama has at most given lip service to this responsibility. At worst he has cynically pretended to do it while in fact helping these security agencies violate Constitutional rights.

3. Neoconservative in Progressive’s clothing?

President Obama sounded like Vice President Dick Cheney or some member of a 1990s neocon think tank when he said:

If the fall of the Soviet Union left America without a competing superpower, emerging threats from terrorist groups, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction placed new and in some ways more complicated demands on our intelligence agencies. Globalization and the Internet made these threats more acute, as technology erased borders and empowered individuals to project great violence, as well as great good.  
     

Terrorist threats are overblown. Threats of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction are also overblown. Unlike something from Fox’s “24” or a novel by the late Tom Clancy, “suitcase nukes” do not grow on trees. Nuclear weapons are difficult to create and difficult to maintain. Hostile or potentially hostile nuclear nations have every reason to avoid allowing any proliferation. While the United States has shown caution in getting involved with military confrontations with nuclear powers, does anyone doubt that if terrorists obtained and used a nuclear weapon and this weapon could be traced to North Korea, Pakistan, etc, that the United States would not respond with a “shock and awe” military strike against such a nation? Terrorism does not pose an existential threat to the nation as did the Axis during World War II or the nuclear armed Soviet Union during the Cold War. If anything, the United States should be doing less spying and not more. If anything, the American people are finally owed the peace dividend from the ending of the Cold War.

Like the ruthless yet clueless neocons in the administration that preceded his, President Obama shamelessly invoked 9/11:

The horror of September 11th brought all these issues to the fore. Across the political spectrum, Americans recognized that we had to adapt to a world in which a bomb could be built in a basement, and our electric grid could be shut down by operators an ocean away. We were shaken by the signs we had missed leading up to the attacks—how the hijackers had made phone calls to known extremists and traveled to suspicious places.

Adapt? How about not escalating the Afghanistan War? How about not unconstitutionally attacking Libya? How about not trying to gin up a war against Syria? How about watching China and Russia—who actually probably can shut down the electric grid—instead of watching ordinary Americans? How about paying attention to obvious signs like memos stating that Al Qaeda is poised to strike?

President Obama even shamelessly evoked the debunked lie about how 9/11 could have been prevented if the NSA had been bulk collecting metadata at the time:

Why is this [NSA bulk collection of metadata] necessary? The program grew out of a desire to address a gap identified after 9/11. One of the 9/11 hijackers—Khalid al-Mihdhar -- made a phone call from San Diego to a known al Qaeda safe-house in Yemen. NSA saw that call, but it could not see that the call was coming from an individual already in the United States. The telephone metadata program under Section 215 was designed to map the communications of terrorists so we can see who they may be in contact with as quickly as possible.

Without the bulk collection of metadata, the United States knew the identity of Khalid-al-Mihdhar well before 9/11 and knew exactly where to find him. They just failed to do so. The NSA, FBI, CIA, and their sister intelligence agencies in the federal government were all negligent prior to 9/11. Should negligent actors be awarded more power? If too much was slipping through the cracks then, why give these agencies even more hay—in the form of metadata—to obscure the needles for which they are searching?  

4. Pot, meet kettle.

President Obama pulled out one of his favorites from his bag of tricks—blaming President Bush:

And yet, in our rush to respond to a very real and novel set of threats, the risk of government overreach—the possibility that we lose some of our core liberties in pursuit of security—also became more pronounced. We saw, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, our government engaged in enhanced interrogation techniques that contradicted our values. As a Senator, I was critical of several practices, such as warrantless wiretaps. And all too often new authorities were instituted without adequate public debate. 

As usual, the President did not let the facts get in the way of a good story. Enhanced interrogation? What is the difference between doing it and having some ally do it in a secret prison overseas after you have allowed terror suspects and others to be whisked away using extraordinary rendition? How was Bush’s warrantless wiretapping any worse than what the NSA has done on President Obama’s watch?

5. President Obama’s War on Whistleblowers will continue.

President Obama has been notoriously hard on whistleblowers. He assured us that he will continue to fight this war in earnest: 

And given the fact of an open investigation, I’m not going to dwell on Mr. Snowden’s actions or his motivations; I will say that our nation’s defense depends in part on the fidelity of those entrusted with our nation’s secrets. If any individual who objects to government policy can take it into their own hands to publicly disclose classified information, then we will not be able to keep our people safe, or conduct foreign policy. Moreover, the sensational way in which these disclosures have come out has often shed more heat than light, while revealing methods to our adversaries that could impact our operations in ways that we may not fully understand for years to come.

Without whistleblowers, how would the people ever learn of abuses done by clandestine government organizations? One wonders if President Obama believes that Woodward, Bernstein, and Deep Throat should all have been prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage Act.

6. Friend of false dilemma.

President Obama implied time and time again that one can either accept that the NSA must violate Constitutional rights or one believes that the nation should disarm its intelligence agencies. This is the kind of black and white thinking that made President George W. Bush infamous. It turns out that President Obama is also skilled in such fallacious thinking:

First, everyone who has looked at these problems, including skeptics of existing programs, recognizes that we have real enemies and threats, and that intelligence serves a vital role in confronting them. We cannot prevent terrorist attacks or cyber threats without some capability to penetrate digital communications—whether it’s to unravel a terrorist plot; to intercept malware that targets a stock exchange; to make sure air traffic control systems are not compromised; or to ensure that hackers do not empty your bank accounts. We are expected to protect the American people; that requires us to have capabilities in this field. Moreover, we cannot unilaterally disarm our intelligence agencies.

Who was suggesting that the United States disarm its intelligence agencies? This is like saying that anyone who opposes unnecessary and unconstitutional uses of military force believes that the United States should disarm its military and throw up the white flag to its enemies around the globe. President Obama again and again misses the point. Surveilling foreign governments and terrorists is necessary. Nobody is denying that. But why does that mean that the NSA should be collecting information on citizens domestically without probable cause or even suspicion? Why is the federal government targeting American citizens at all when all the 9/11 plotters were foreign?

7. No such thing as double standards.

President Obama claimed that employees of the NSA and other intelligence agencies can be trusted because they are just like us:

Second, just as ardent civil libertarians recognize the need for robust intelligence capabilities, those with responsibilities for our national security readily acknowledge the potential for abuse as intelligence capabilities advance and more and more private information is digitized. After all, the folks at NSA and other intelligence agencies are our neighbors. They're our friends and family. They’ve got electronic bank and medical records like everybody else. They have kids on Facebook and Instagram, and they know, more than most of us, the vulnerabilities to privacy that exist in a world where transactions are recorded, and emails and text and messages are stored, and even our movements can increasingly be tracked through the GPS on our phones.

Uh, members of the Gestapo, the KGB, and the Stasi were just like ordinary Germans, Soviets, and East Germans. So why did members of those organizations not “readily acknowledge the potential for abuse?” Could it be that members of spy agencies have the ability to exempt themselves and their family members? What is to prevent members of the NSA from formulating a policy of not surveilling employees, friends, and family of the agency? If Obamacare has taught us anything, it is that the President has no trouble with making unjustified exceptions to rules. So why not here as well?

8. Okay, I’m a crook, but look at that bigger crook over there!

President Obama essentially acknowledged that the federal government is violating the privacy of its citizens, but he distracted his audience by pointing to another culprit:

Third, there was a recognition by all who participated in these reviews that the challenges to our privacy do not come from government alone. Corporations of all shapes and sizes track what you buy, store and analyze our data, and use it for commercial purposes; that’s how those targeted ads pop up on your computer and your smartphone periodically. But all of us understand that the standards for government surveillance must be higher. Given the unique power of the state, it is not enough for leaders to say: Trust us, we won’t abuse the data we collect. For history has too many examples when that trust has been breached. Our system of government is built on the premise that our liberty cannot depend on the good intentions of those in power; it depends on the law to constrain those in power.

It is no secret that President Obama the corporatist does not like business—unless it is a business that gives campaign contributions to his party. He basically said: “Hey, the corporations are violating your privacy, too!” So what? He claims that the government should have a higher standard. But the thing is that the government is becoming unaccountable. One has a choice whether or not to do business with a corporation that violates privacy. If you do not like the policies of Facebook, then you can delete your account. If you think that Google is probing too much, then you can use other websites and online services. If you think that Amazon is spying too much on your internet activity, then you can shop elsewhere. The bottom line is that there is at least a small check against private businesses in that angry customers and others can boycott them. The two major political parties are two sides of the same rotten penny, so “throwing the bums out” will not do a thing.

9. Playing the King card.

President Obama, as he often does, referenced Martin Luther King:

In fact, during the course of our review, I have often reminded myself I would not be where I am today were it not for the courage of dissidents like Dr. King, who were spied upon by their own government.

How are those like Snowden and Manning not dissidents? At this point it seems likely that if Martin Luther King were still alive, President Obama would be spying on him. It is also plausible that Reverend King might be facing a charge under the 1917 Espionage Act or living in forced exile.

10. Fox guarding the hen house.

President Obama promised greater executive oversight:

First, I have approved a new presidential directive for our signals intelligence activities both at home and abroad. This guidance will strengthen executive branch oversight of our intelligence activities. 

President Obama has hardly proven himself to be a friend of the Constitution. The centerpieces of his presidency—Obamacare and the Libyan “kinetic military action”—both involved egregious violations of the Constitution, so how can he be trusted to provide adequate oversight?

11. Most transparent administration.

President Obama also claimed that there will now be more transparency:

Second, we will reform programs and procedures in place to provide greater transparency to our surveillance activities, and fortify the safeguards that protect the privacy of U.S. persons.

The President has claimed time and time again that his is “the most transparent” administration ever. Repeating this claim over and over does not make it any more true—or any less ridiculous. The Obama administration has been anything but transparent with its army of lawyers fighting Freedom of Information Act requests, its War on Whistleblowers, its secretive drone campaign, etc. However, even if he does turn over a new leaf, transparency is not enough. Being transparent about the violation of rights does not make those actions any less unconstitutional.

12. Whatever happened to probable cause?

The Fourth Amendment states that warrants shall not issue without probable cause. President Obama defended the NSA bulk metadata collection program by stating:

This brings me to the program that has generated the most controversy these past few months—the bulk collection of telephone records under Section 215. Let me repeat what I said when this story first broke: This program does not involve the content of phone calls, or the names of people making calls. Instead, it provides a record of phone numbers and the times and lengths of calls—metadata that can be queried if and when we have a reasonable suspicion that a particular number is linked to a terrorist organization.

In sum, the program does not involve the NSA examining the phone records of ordinary Americans. Rather, it consolidates these records into a database that the government can query if it has a specific lead—a consolidation of phone records that the companies already retained for business purposes. The review group turned up no indication that this database has been intentionally abused. And I believe it is important that the capability that this program is designed to meet is preserved.

Reasonable suspicion? Whatever happened to probable cause? It is the reasonable suspicion standard which causes the greatest problem. If the government has all this data in a big database and can dig deep into it with merely a claim of reasonable suspicion, then there is simply no way to protect the rights of American citizens. Unless and until the Fourth Amendment is fully restored and probable cause is again treated as the exceptionless standard it was intended by the Founders to be, then no safeguards will help.

13. Fascism or corporatism? Take your pick.

President Obama suggested two possible reforms to NSA bulk collection of metadata:

The review group recommended that our current approach be replaced by one in which the providers or a third party retain the bulk records, with government accessing information as needed. Both of these options pose difficult problems. Relying solely on the records of multiple providers, for example, could require companies to alter their procedures in ways that raise new privacy concerns. On the other hand, any third party maintaining a single, consolidated database would be carrying out what is essentially a government function but with more expense, more legal ambiguity, potentially less accountability—all of which would have a doubtful impact on increasing public confidence that their privacy is being protected.

Six of one, a half dozen of the other. What difference does it make if the NSA itself has this data or some third party does? Furthermore, such collaboration between government and private entities in such nefarious matters just stinks of fascism or corporatism. When government and corporations collaborate in such a manner, the only question is which one is steering the unconstitutional bus that is about to run over the people. This all begins to feel like a shell game. The NSA will unconstitutionally get this data and will be able to access it on demand. What does it matter where it is stored or who is storing it?

14. Didn’t you hear my lies the first time?

President Obama began to wind up his speech by again repeating a dubious claim:

The bottom line is that people around the world, regardless of their nationality, should know that the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security, and that we take their privacy concerns into account in our policies and procedures.

The NSA is collecting metadata on essentially everyone. That is the definition of spying. And since everybody is not threatening American national security, the President’s statement is simply not true.

15. Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.

President Obama concludes with some language which in another context would be inspirational:

As the nation that developed the Internet, the world expects us to ensure that the digital revolution works as a tool for individual empowerment, not government control. Having faced down the dangers of totalitarianism and fascism and communism, the world expects us to stand up for the principle that every person has the right to think and write and form relationships freely—because individual freedom is the wellspring of human progress.

However, President Obama and all future presidents must take heed. The United States did in fact help defeat the evils of fascism and communism, but there is the danger that fighting such monsters could turn the nation into such a monster. Perhaps it has already happened.

Scalia Is No Friend of the Right to Privacy

by Gerard Emershaw

The flood of shocking revelations about the NSA resulting from the whistleblowing of Edward Snowden will inevitably land issues concerning the surveillance state, national security, the Fourth Amendment, and the right to privacy before the Supreme Court. With the current makeup of the court, this does not bode well for civil liberties. Earlier this year, in Clapper v. Amnesty International, the Supreme Court held that the plaintiffs in the case could not challenge the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping because they lacked standing. They lacked standing because they could not show that they were harmed by the program. However, the proof that a plaintiff would need to show that he or she is affected and harmed by the NSA program is classified. Therefore, as long as the NSA keeps this information secret, it is impossible for anyone to sue. This alone is enough to signal to civil libertarians that any NSA case decided in the near future is not going to end well. But, it appears that the prospects for the right to privacy may be even worse.

Justice Antonin Scalia recently spoke before the Northern Virginia Technology Council and told them that he believed the Court would soon be hearing cases connected with the NSA. Justice Scalia appears to be less than thrilled about having to hear such cases. He believes that elected branches of government are better equipped to deal with such issues. However, the Supreme Court opted, beginning in the 1960s, to expand its power in hearing cases concerning the right to privacy. According to Justice Scalia, this was not wise:

The consequence of that is that whether the NSA can do the stuff it's been doing ... which used to be a question for the people ... will now be resolved by the branch of government that knows the least about the issues in question, the branch that knows the least about the extent of the threat against which the wiretapping is directed.

Justice Scalia told his audience that prior to cases like Katz v. United States (1967), the Court held that there were no constitutional constraints on wiretaps because the Court believed that the Fourth Amendment did not apply in such cases and gave no protection at all to conversations. Justice Scalia then lamented the fact that the Warren Court stepped in on the issue and explained that the Warren Court found that “there's a generalized right of privacy that comes from penumbras and emanations, blah blah blah, garbage.” This does not sound like a jurist who believes in the right to privacy.

The landmark case that established the constitutional right to privacy is Griswold v. Connecticut (1965). In this case, the Supreme Court ruled that a Connecticut law outlawing contraceptives was unconstitutional. In William O. Douglas’s majority opinion, he speaks of why the constitutional right to privacy was recognized:

The foregoing cases suggest that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance. Various guarantees create zones of privacy. The right of association contained in the penumbra of the First Amendment is one, as we have seen. The Third Amendment in its prohibition against the quartering of soldiers “in any house” in time of peace without the consent of the owner is another facet of that privacy. The Fourth Amendment explicitly affirms the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” The Fifth Amendment in its Self-Incrimination Clause enables the citizen to create a zone of privacy which government may not force him to surrender to his detriment. The Ninth Amendment provides: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

Justice Scalia, obviously, is unimpressed by this. However, despite his ingenuity, Justice Douglas could have stopped after a quick discussion of the Ninth Amendment. The Ninth Amendment states: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” In other words, just because a natural right is not specifically enumerated in the Constitution, it does not mean that the people do not possess that right in virtue of their humanity.

One source of evidence concerning the existence of a natural right to privacy is tort law. In 1960, legal scholar William L. Prosser documented the right to receive damages under the common law for invasions of privacy. Four distinct privacy torts have developed: 

1. Intrusion upon seclusion or solitude, or into private affairs;

2. Public disclosure of embarrassing private facts;

3. Publicity which places a person in a false light in the public eye; and

4. Appropriation of name or likeness.

This provides strong support for the existence of a right to privacy. If an individual can exert this right against his or her fellow civilians, then he or she should also be able to exert these rights against the government.

Furthermore, the aspects of the right to privacy which concern wiretaps and other advanced technological forms of electronic intrusion used by the NSA, FBI, etc., are fully encompassed by the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

While the Founders did not contemplate things such as wiretaps and other surveillance telephone lines, cellphones, the internet, etc., they did institute the requirement that a search cannot take place without a specific judicial warrant issued upon probable cause. While the Supreme Court has disputed this in recent decades, this is simply an indication that they are either not careful readers or they simply wish to create constitutional law that does not exist.

When a person is in a place of privacy and has a conversation with a companion—whether this is a face-to-face conversation or an electronic conversation via a phone or the internet—the content of that conversation is akin to his or her person. The words—whether spoken into the air, spoken into a telephone, or typed—are inseparable from the person in that searching the words is akin to searching the speaker of the words. Therefore, since persons are protected by the Fourth Amendment, so are conversations. Furthermore, modern forms of communication such as phone calls, text messages, e-mail, and instant messages are secondarily covered by the Fourth Amendment because they can only be achieved through the use of telephones, cellphones, or computers. These items are clearly “effects”—movable belongings. Given that the Fourth Amendment guarantees the protection of persons and effects, private conversations of all types are clearly protected. Unfortunately, this is not the way that Justice Scalia and a likely majority of his colleagues will see it.

President Obama on Not Overreacting to Terrorism

by Gerard Emershaw

While yucking it up with NBC's Jay Leno on "The Tonight Show," President Obama said:

One thing I've tried to do as President is not overreact, but make sure that as much as possible the American people understand that there are genuine risks out there. What's great about what we've seen with America over the last several years is how resilient we are. So after the Boston bombing, for example, the next day folks were out there, they're going to ball games. They are making sure that we're not reacting in a way that somehow shuts us down. And that's the right reaction. Terrorists depend on the idea that we're going to be terrorized. And we're going to live our lives. And the odds of people dying in a terrorist attack obviously are still a lot lower than in a car accident, unfortunately.

By "unfortunately," President Obama meant, of course, that it is unfortunate that so many Americans are killed in automobile accidents, but it is not difficult to imagine that it was a Freudian slip and that he was expressing that he is upset that more Americans aren't killed by terrorists. 

President Obama claims that he has not overreacted to the threat of terrorism. He hasn't overreacted? He has continued with and enlarged President Bush's neocon plan to turn the United States into a police state. President Obama has continued the Stasi provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act, continued and enlarged Bush's NSA warrantless spying program, signed the NDAA which makes the United States into a battleground and gives the government the power to declare any American an unlawful combatant and detain him or her indefinitely, and declared that he has the power to kill Americans without due process. In addition, President Obama has broadened the Orwellian War on Terror by widening the war into Libya, Yemen, and—perhaps soon—Syria. 

President Obama has the NSA monitoring the communications of Americans, yet he does not consider this to be “overreacting.” He won't even admit that it is a “domestic spying program”:

We don't have a domestic spying program. What we do have are some mechanisms where we can track a phone number or an email address that we know is connected to some sort of terrorist threat. And that information is useful. But what I've said before I want to make sure I repeat, and that is we should be skeptical about the potential encroachments on privacy. None of the revelations show that government has actually abused these powers, but they're pretty significant powers.

President Obama plays a “Newspeak” word game by claiming that the NSA spying programs are simply “mechanisms” and not “a domestic spying program.” He also attempts to portray himself as a civil libertarian by claiming to be “skeptical about the potential encroachments on privacy.” He is also quick to point out that there is no proof that the government has abused the powers of the NSA spying leviathan. Of course, the reason for this is that these programs are top secret and those who dare even reveal that they exist must live in exile in order to avoid being railroaded into federal prison on bogus espionage charges. 

While President Obama fully believes that Edward Snowden should be dragged in chains before a criminal court and forced to answer these bogus espionage charges, he toots his own horn as a defender of whistleblowers:

I can tell you that there are ways, if you think that the government is abusing a program, of coming forward. In fact, I, through executive order, signed whistleblower protection for intelligence officers or people who are involved in the intelligence industry. So you don’t have to break the law. You don’t have to divulge information that could compromise American security. You can come forward, come to the appropriate individuals and say, look, I’ve got a problem with what’s going on here, I’m not sure whether it’s being done properly. If, in fact, the allegations are true, then he didn’t do that. And that is a huge problem because a lot of what we do depends on terrorists networks not knowing that, in fact, we may be able to access their information.

The fact that President Obama was able to claim to be a friend to whistleblowers and say it with a straight face indicates that he may have missed his calling as a Hollywood actor—or as a spy. The truth is that President Obama has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other presidents combined. How can anyone believe that whistleblowers can properly inform Americans of the abuses of the surveillance state through the official channels of which the President speaks? Does anyone believe that if Mark Felt—a.k.a. “Deep Throat”—had simply expressed his concerns to J. Edgar Hoover instead of leaking information to Woodward and Bernstein that the machinations of the Nixon administration would ever have been revealed? Does anyone believe that if Edward Snowden had simply expressed his concerns about the unconstitutional NSA spying programs to his boss that we would be talking about the issue now? President Obama provides bogus protections to lip service whistleblowers who are only pretending to blow the whistle on government corruption. Real whistleblowers like Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden will be thrown in prison by the Obama administration.

While one might be tempted to give President Obama credit for admitting that more Americans die in automobile crashes than die in terrorist attacks, his admission was true but misleading. According to the National Security Council, approximately 36,200 Americans died in car accidents in 2012. Thus, up to 36,199 Americans could have died in terrorist attacks last year, and President Obama's statement to Jay Leno would still be true. The truth is that far fewer than 36,199 Americans have died in terrorist attacks per year. In 2011, 17 Americans were killed worldwide by terrorists. However, a comparable number of Americans were crushed to death by their televisions or their furniture that year.

Since 9/11, terrorist attacks have killed a grand total of three Americans within the United States. This number increases to sixteen if one includes the Fort Hood shootings—which still seems more a matter of an unstable federal employee who happened to be a fundamentalist Muslim going “postal” than a premeditated terror attack. Why didn't President Obama point this out? Why didn't the President tell the American public that one is 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist? Why didn't he tell the American public that one is 9 times more likely to choke to death on one's own vomit than to die at the hands of a terrorist? So far this year, more Americans have been killed in the United States by toddlers (5) than by terrorists (3). Why didn't President Obama say “the odds of people dying in a terrorist attack obviously are still a lot lower than being fatally shot by a toddler, unfortunately”?

If the actions of the Obama administration both at home and abroad concerning the War on Terror are not overreacting, then it would be frightening to see what overreaction would look like. If the NSA spying is not a “spying program,” then it would be frightening to see what an actual “spying program” would look like.

The Disconcerting Disconnect: 63% of Americans Believe that NSA is Lying About Data Collection Yet 50% Still Approve of the Program

by Gerard Emershaw  

  
According to a Pew Research Center poll released on July 26, 2013, 56% of Americans believe that the courts have not provided adequate limits on what is collected by the NSA. In addition, 70% of those surveyed believe that the government is using the data collected by the NSA for purposes other than anti-terror. Even more interesting is that 63% of those surveyed believe that the government has been lying about the NSA collecting only metadata and believe that the NSA is in fact collecting what is being said in phone calls and e-mails. However, the most interesting result from the Pew poll on the NSA is that 27% of those surveyed believe that the government has specifically listened to their phone calls or read their e-mails.

Overall, 47% of Americans believe that government anti-terror policies have gone too far in restricting civil liberties while 35% believe that government anti-terror policies have not gone far enough to protect the country. This marks a major change from recent American attitudes on this issue. In 2010, 58% of Americans surveyed in a similar Pew Research poll said that government anti-terror policies had not gone far enough to protect the country while only 27% said that these policies went too far in restricting civil liberties. 

Statists and die hard Obama apologists are likely to say that all this simply means that Tea Party blowhards and tin foil hat wearing paranoids are scaring many Americans with disinformation. Civil libertarians are likely to say that this poll data indicates that many Americans are waking up and realizing the prescience of Senator Frank Church's 1975 warning about the NSA:

"Th[e National Security Agency's] capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. [If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A.] could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back."

Despite all this, half of those surveyed still voiced support for the NSA surveillance program while only 44% indicated disapproval. Why the disconnect? If so many believe that the NSA is lying and so many believe that the courts are not doing enough to protect Americans from the NSA, then how can half support the NSA data collection program?

This apparent disconnect begins to make more sense when we examine approval/disapproval of the NSA data collection program among members of the two political parties. Among Republicans, 44% approve and 50% disapprove. Among Independents, 47% approve and 48% disapprove. Among Democrats, 57% approve and 36% disapprove.

Do you see what is going on here? If you are a staunch supporter of the GOP, don't bash Democrats just yet. In a 2006 Pew Research Poll conducted on American attitudes toward the Bush warrantless wiretap program, 75% of Republicans approved while only 37% of Democrats approved.

Now it all begins to make sense. It also all begins to be even more sickening. What Democrats and Republicans both seem to agree on concerning unconstitutional violations of the Fourth Amendment by the NSA is that such dastardly actions are perfectly fine as long as their party's candidate is sitting in the Oval Office. In essence, for far too many Americans, fidelity to the Constitution does not matter as much as whether the commander-in-chief is a donkey or an elephant. For these citizens, politics is akin to sports. For the Yankees fan, when a Red Sox player steals signs from the Yankees catcher, he is a dirty cheater. However, for that same fan, when a Yankees player steals signs from the Red Sox catcher, he is playing heads up baseball. But the machinations of politicians and security agencies are not the same as the antics of professional athletes. Far more is at stake. For most of us, the outcome of a sporting event has little effect on our lives. We cheer or groan when the game is over and then move on. However, the malfeasance of security agencies like the NSA has profound effects on our privacy, our rights, and our freedom. 

When rabid partisanship becomes more important than Constitutional principles and natural rights, then the nation has devolved into a system of tyranny of the majority. When this happens, the nation has transformed into a democratic banana republic. When a party is in power, it can oppress its opponents to its heart's content. While members of the minority party may not like this, they just have to grin and bear it until the next election. When their party regains control of the White House, then it's pay back time!

But is this the kind of country we want? Is this variety of political moral relativism a good thing? Isn't the moral rightness or wrongness of an action independent of whether the actor is a donkey or an elephant? Isn't the Constitution and the natural rights that it upholds more important than which party's candidate is living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? The danger created by the widespread worship of political parties is one which threatens every American.