It’s remarkable that this hasn’t received more attention:
At 1:30pm on Christmas Eve, the NSA dumped a huge cache of documents on its website in response to a long-fought ACLU Freedom of Information Act request, including documents that reveal criminal wrongdoing.
The dump consists of its quarterly and annual reports to the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board from Q4/2001 to Q1/2013. They were heavily redacted prior to release, but even so, they reveal that the NSA illegally spied on Americans, including a parade of user-errors in which NSA operatives accidentally spied on themselves, raided their spouses’ data, and made self-serving errors in their interpretation of the rules under which they were allowed to gather and search data.
The NSA admits that its analysts “deliberately ignored restrictions on their authority to spy on Americans multiple times in the past decade.”
My guess is that, consistent with the public’s acceptance of torture in the name of security, this will be tolerated as well.
Acceptance might be the proper term wrt torture, but resignation would be more proper wrt the government spying on citizens. Seriously, who thinks they’ve got any power to effect change?
“Seriously, who thinks they’ve got any power to effect change?”
Psssst. Dude. I heard there is this PE guy who can “get to the right people.” Some guy on the internet told me. Pass it on.
The public focuses on what is dumped in its lap. Racist cops are “in.” Government spying on its citizens is “out.” Ask the media outlets. Plus, Pres Obama informed us he was angry as a hornet and after all, it’s the Republican Congress duty. After Brian Williams and Gloria Borger noted how awesome Obama is it was time to move on to the non- lame duck lame duck narrative. A small voice cried out that the media concern was quite pronounced 9 years ago, but was not head from again. Something about a tax audit.
“It’s remarkable that this hasn’t received more attention”
I’m sure the Christmas Eve release was entirely coincidental….
A lot of attention has been paid to the cops, but nothing will change. Some attention was paid to torture, but nothing will happen. Same with this NSA stuff. We just don’t question authority when claims are made that action is being taken to protect us.
Steve
Drew, people with money buy influence. People with $20 in the bank do not. It’s really amazing to see someone who can beat my personal wealth by about six orders of magnitude maintain that we’ve got exactly the same amount of influence & access.