Paying taxes is by far the greatest submission you could do to support the regime. Taking the govertment's money to help social services is far more noble than sending the govt a check that is used to buy spies and bombs.
No, they already knew the answer to the question which he fully understood, and he lied about the program because it was top secret, and they were using a public hearing to try and out the program. They already knew about the program and even so if they wanted to truly find out without breaking national security they could have held a closed door session.
> "They chose to make these statements in public that weren’t accurate," Wyden added. "They could have declined to answer the question in an open hearing. They have declined to answer questions in an open hearing before. At that hearing, he declined to answer other questions."
Declining to answer is the same as admitting it exists, which he wasn't permitted to do.
It is no matter anyway, the chairman knew the answer to the question before it was asked, and he just wanted to expose the program, which Clapper wasn't going to allow to happen. Just because you are able to chair a public committee doesn't mean you also have the right to expose top secret government programs you happen to not like.
In Citizenfour, Snowden specifically highlights Clapper's testimony as one of the factors that solidified his decision to go public. Clapper not only deceived the American public, he quite literally was one of the reasons the program was ultimately exposed.
And I'm glad it was exposed. Spying on every single one of your citizens' interactions and logging that information indefinitely in secret for later inspection has no place in a free society.
Re: declining to answer, other questions were presented in advance for that very hearing and declined in advance by Clapper – they were not asked, and they were not entered in to the record. See the parent Politifact article for sources. Did declining those questions expose secrets?
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals at the federal level ruled that the metadata collection program "exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized" and is therefore not supported by law, i.e. illegal. This happened on May 7th, 2015 and is public record.
It was illegal then and it's illegal now. The circuit court didn't say "as of May 7th, 2015 this is illegal"; they said that the NSA exceeded the scope of surveillance authorized by Congress in October of 2001.
You claimed the metadata collection program was "written about at length" and viewed as "OK". This is evidence from the judicial branch of the US government it is not, in fact, viewed as okay.
I'm wondering about the sources of laws and norms about "oversight". On the one hand, Congress and committees have a subpoena power and individual members have an immunity for what they reveal on the floor. On the other hand, the Executive manages to enforce security clearance requirements against individual Congressional staff (not against the members themselves, I believe -- though they get them to follow procedures for information security that are analogous to what a regular government employee would do).
And the committee members seem to have a pretty strong tradition of keeping classified information secret -- but isn't that just a tradition? Couldn't a member just decide that the public ought to know something in particular and hence reveal it? Is it a tactical decision about hoping to achieve better cooperation with witnesses and sources in the long term?
(I'm also wondering where the whole concept and structure of oversight comes from -- I think historically and constitutionally it has to do with the budget power but it seems like it's developed pretty far beyond that.)
So you admit he lied to Congress and the American public, but think it was justified? What do you think would have happened had Clapper told the truth?
http://www.hasjamesclapperbeenindictedyet.com