The problem is that EVERYTHING is now classified.
I just finished reading 1984 for the first time last week. I believe the following is an apt exerpt:
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
If you want to paint someone as a villain, you’re in the right room, but facing the wrong direction. What that was primarily an example of was elected officials throwing military men to the wolves to protect their own asses. Assuming that the senators were all cleared to receive the answers they asked for, they were certainly aware that the public was not. Asking that sort of question in open session was guaranteed to produce that result, and it was a demonstration of holding to an oath, not breaking one.
“Wyden and his fellow Democrat Mark Udall used the public hearing to press the intelligence chiefs on aspects of the top-secret surveillance infrastructure.”
To those men, the words, “top secret” are not literary hyperbole. They refer to a specific class of information that these men are sworn not to reveal, regardless of situation, to ANYONE who isn’t cleared by the system to receive it. There is simply no way they would do so in a public hearing, and the senators well knew it.
So aim higher next time, eh? The “adult supervision” you write of is in this up to it’s lying, bloated neck, and not implicating them in the scandal means that they’ll do the same thing again, as soon as your back is turned.
Is he going to put the data in the same lockbox Al Gore put Social Security into? Isn’t it getting crowded in there?
see Wyden’s Intelligence Reform Act. it’s pretty good.
http://www.wyden.senate.gov/priorities/surveillance-reform
he needs to expose (we all need exposed), as much as possible, what the government is doing to infringe on our constitutional rights. this type of crap should not be classifiable, some of it is illegal, the rest, arguably unconstitutional. not to mention ineffective against the purported threat, and ripe for abuse.
i also agree we should not vilify, yet, intelligence chiefs for retaining classified details.
The NSA is doing exactly what it was created to do. 1984 is science fiction. Yes, some NSA employees spied on lovers. They are human after all.
The NSA was created to spy on US citizens? Huh. I did not know that.
i’ll bite:
from wikipedia:
NSA’s mission, as set forth in Executive Order 12333, is to collect information that constitutes “foreign intelligence or counterintelligence” while not “acquiring information concerning the domestic activities of United States persons”.
Don’t care. Fire him already. Get the bulldozers. Take down their offices at Langley and their data center in Utah. This is over and Alexander hasn’t read the message yet.
Then it should be disbanded, dissolved, shut down and used as a lesson.
[citation needed]
wikipedia did cite it. Executive Order 12333:
So why should we respect their criminal conspiracy, and their secrets, any more than any other equally criminal conspiracy?
Will that “lockbox” also include all the metadata about NSA employees’ phone calls and communications? How about Congressional communications? Or will their communications be considered “top secret”, “classified”, “privileged”, etc. or just “mysteriously” omitted from the records?
Who watches the watchers?
It is time to BURN DOWN THE NSA, in a legal and metaphorical sense if possible, and in a literal sense if that does not work.
String Keith Alexander up from a lamppost, like a good fascist deserves; use the courts and rule of law preferably.
All the people reading this in Ft. Meade, MD are laughing at you. That said, it couldn’t hurt to trim down Langley a bit either.
Of course, this means those folks in Ft. Meade just alerted the CIA to my comment, so there’s that.
The folks are Ft. Meade have the ability to laugh?
Touche. Well, the contractors maybe – all the way to the bank.
