So which is it? Is he "welcoming a debate over spying on Americans" or is he prosecuting the whistleblowers (again) and requesting state privileges to protect themselves against further scrutiny? I don't think the two can really co-exist. And if all of this was "already known" what's there to prosecute then? The amount of double-speak from the Obama administration astonishes me.
I have trouble deciding whether people intentional misunderstand him, simple can't, or just prefer to be outraged.
The program is classified. Its more effective if it remains so. Since it is now public, though he wishes it wasn't, he's happy and willing to publicly debate the issue of privacy vs security. He's made it quite clear that he struggles with the issue himself.
Leaking classified information is illegal, thus it generally should be prosecuted. Though we also have whistleblower laws that protect people who are leaking evidence of criminal conduct.
The parent poster should have been more specific. The reason lawsuits have largely be stymied has been the claim of state secrets (whether or not everyone in the room knew the program existed, the executive branch argued that details would reveal things that would be detrimental to the state) and because no one who sued could prove they had standing to sue because no one knew who was actually being monitored.
So, yes, we knew section 215, FISA, etc existed, but no one has been able to (yet) successfully challenge them fully because any legal basis for challenging has been (in many cases actively) kept secret.
Curiously, the UK government made an argument to the contrary just recently when talking about when an alleged sex offender should have their name disclosed, which has been a big issue here of late after a wave of allegations about inappropriate behaviour by high profile media personalities going back many years. The argument was essentially that if you disclose the identity of a suspect before they have their day in court, you might encourage other victims to come forward with evidence that will build the case, which is presumably favourable if the suspect actually is guilty but obviously has severe potential consequences if in fact they are innocent but publicly associated with sex crimes anyway.
I'm not sure what the parallel with whistleblowing should be in a case of allegation but not yet a conclusive decision in court, but I'm pretty sure governments shouldn't be entitled to more protection against potential damage to their reputation than an alleged but not convicted sex offender.
(Just to be clear, I'm not commenting on the appropriateness of the policy toward disclosure of suspected sex offenders, just the double standard that would arise if the UK government objected to this kind of whistleblowing using your "innocent until proven guilty" argument.)
Well the US definitely "has their cake and eats it too" on your example. We will oftentimes (incl. for alleged sex offenders) publicly mention the name of a suspect, mug shot, general details, etc. even while the case is ongoing. In fact I'm convinced that's the only reason Americans know about "innocent until proven guilty", to remind them that the suspect hasn't been convicted yet.
But here we go, perhaps the whistleblower technically broke the letter of the law. It doesn't sound like he was leaked illegal activities so he doesn't have the benefit of that particular shield. And just the other day a few on HN were arguing that a prosecutor should not be able to use prosecutorial discretion.
I think we can all definitely agree his heart is in the right place though (and all the previous elements of my ode to him still apply), so I wonder what we would think of prosecutorial discretion after this?
What's the point of classified information if you don't punish those that leak it?
Don't get me wrong, the treatment of Bradley Manning is absurd, and there shouldn't be any sort of prosecution of the journalists involved (which has been happening recently), so it's fair to complain that they are coming down too hard on whistle-blowers. However, you have to expect some sort of investigation into who did the original leaks.
We can also have the debate about whether they overly classify things and should be more open in the first place, but that's not the same thing.
So the whistleblower law is just a "pretend-law"? Whistleblowers are needed for a healthy democracy, unless we have a pretend-democracy at this point, too. How do you uncover dirt on the government if every single act of whistleblowing and investigative journalism on the government is being prosecuted? Not only does that create a very chilling effect, but it also takes out everyone who did it, "before they cause too much damage". And doesn't this begin to resemble a little too much with some of those oppressive regimes?
The government classifies everything it doesn't want the public to know these days, and then tries to arrest everyone who leaks those documents. I think we need to stop thinking about what's legal and what's illegal, and start thinking about what moral and immoral. Many of these laws are immoral.
> So the whistleblower law is just a "pretend-law"?
Not sure why you used the phrase 'pretend-law' in scare quotes, since the post you responded to said no such thing.
Either way, there isn't really such a thing as the whistleblower law (IANAL). Aside from the first amendment, the closest thing I could find was the Whistleblower Protection Act [1]. It's a young law by any standard (1989), so you'd be hard pressed to argue that we didn't have a functioning democracy in its absence.
Your central point is well received, but you rebutted a partial straw man.
Also, I have to add, I'm a little ashamed of my country today. But I feel vindicated as a programmer that we were right! We knew it all along. Things like this have been reported for years. But no one cared. Finally this is plastered on every major publication and people no longer think it's some conspiracy theory or exaggeration of normal security measures. So now's the real test. What do we do? How do we fix this? Our innate liberties have been trampled and threatened. Have some self-respect and speak your mind at work, people.
> We can also have the debate ... but that's not the same thing
Yes, it is. The whole thing is cohesive. Penetration at the source is the only thing that will halt government secrecy, and condemning those who leak classified information is egregious and a grave disservice to those people.
Classified information should only pertain to anything with national security at stake. The in-country data mining obviously did not.
I believe that "national security" reasoning has been expanded to cover the country's reputation. The security being protected is that of a portrayed image.
We barely even need to have that debate, we know our Government are using classified information to cover their own asses and for political reasons. Transparency is pretty much the only weapon we have against Government corruption, thus we really should to be doing more to help protect legitimate whistle blowers and to stop documents being classified or redacted without some overseeing from a party without skin in the game.
It's one thing to oppose a system such as PRISM in the legal abstract, quite another thing to hear about the wanton details of a real one, and see the CEO's of Microsoft, Facebook and Google publicly fib under FISA gag orders.
The process of classifying material is uncontroversial because in general parlance, we assume that material is specific intelligence of people, place, and times.
The extension of that definition to include classified courts with classified rulings used as the legal basis for programs like this... is not the generally accepted one.
I don't know why you'd assume it's specific intel of that. Classified info is literally anything that would be a risk to national security if released in an uncontrolled fashion. The 3 different tiers of U.S. classification are literally just the 3 different levels of damage that would accrue to U.S. national security, nothing more.
So in the case of programs like this, if the hypothetical terr'ists know about it, that lets them know services to avoid, or communications methods to avoid, etc., which might enable them to form networks that the NSA would otherwise have been able to unravel before their next terrorist attack.
So it's not completely inconceivable that there's a valid reason to apply classification standards.
I happen to think that the importance of transparency is such that we need to at least have that public discussion about what types of records NSA would be storing, searching, and examining.
But at the same time the NSA has literally been doing this for decades, Congress has had classified hearings for longer, and the Republic has refused to fall. I don't know for sure about classified courts, but neither would that surprise me too much.
There is no Salafi army capable of achieving military victory against the United States. The existential threat is zero.
Therefore, I see no reason why our sacred liberties should be secretly sacrificed as "tactics" in an eternal, global war.
Better to declare global perpetual war against pools, bathtubs, or uncooked food. It would be cheaper and save more lives. Oh, and, preserve the sacrifice of those who died fighting for our freedom.
Or, is a life lost to a one who has claimed jihad worth more than one from uncooked food?
It may be that Bush was right, that terrorists wish us to abandon our liberties. So, too do the disciples of Leo Strauss who want to elevate to warriors the ideology of people who are merely sad, pathetic men no different from the killers of random school shootings, and deserve no more.
I can't speak for you (I'm immersed in a bunch of "privilege" already), but the actual concrete effect on my civil liberties, even since 9/11, has been exactly zero.
Remember we oppose tools such as these based on what the government might be able to do with them to abuse their citizens, just like we field militaries based on what other nations might be able to do.
So far your Salafi army example applies in reverse as well: The U.S. government hasn't been running around actually repressing the citizenry. Certainly we should take measures to ensure they can't, but as long as we're worrying about what people might do then I don't see why it's shameful to worry about what Islamists might do as well.
That this doublespeak surprises anyone shows the tragedy of the small size of Glenn Greenwald's readership. He has been writing on Obama's abuses and misdirection since Obama admin has been in power; and before that, he's written about Bush's (published three books about Bush, in fact)
I've pretty much come to the conclusion that he does the direct opposite of whatever he promises. He promised to end all this when he was elected, yet expanded on what Bush had started.
