Related to the previous post about Raul’s OpEd and whether anyone the government appoints could be trusted to be a genuine privacy advocate, consider this news story by Stephen Braun of the Associated Press last week:
Stung by public unease about new details of spying by the National Security Agency, President Barack Obama selected a panel of advisers he described as independent experts to scrutinize the NSA’s surveillance programs to be sure they weren’t violating civil liberties and to restore Americans’ trust.
But with just weeks remaining before its first deadline to report back to the White House, the review panel has effectively been operating as an arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA and all other U.S. spy efforts.
Read more on AP’s The Big Story.
Some days, it feels kind of hopeless, doesn’t it? But never give up and never retreat when it comes to protecting privacy and civil liberties. That’s my position, anyway.
This is all just security theater, nothing will happen, it’s a smokescreen!
Of course nothing will happen from this “independent” review. There’s no genuine independence and for the most part, the people they’ve picked are not the people we’d want on a review panel.
“There’s no genuine independence and for the most part, the people they’ve picked are not the people we’d want on a review panel.”
I’m not sure how we’d go about forcing a full all-out independent review with the right people, I mean even the president cannot be trusted, and I cannot see the republicans being any better either.
Bad times ahead I think.
This is why a number of us think we need another Church Committee, although I grant you there are not as many people in the Congress I’d particularly trust to really do a good job. If Wyden and Udall were on it, that would be a decent start. And if we could get Russ Feingold back in Congress…