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Even the Mainstream Liberal Press Slams Obama On Spying
Presidential candidate Obama said in 2007:
[The Bush] administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand.
I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom.
That means no more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. That is not who we are. And it is not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists.
He frequently repeated his “no warrantless wiretapping” pledge thereafter.
In light of the revelation that the Obama administration has been spying on our phone calls Americans (the government has tapped every call in America, and is spying on everything we do online), media on both the left and the right are now admitting that Obama and Bush are indistinguishable. This includes, by way of example, Politico, National Journal, and Huffington Post:
Another widespread comparison is East Germany. For example, the Washington Post notes:
“Here we are, under the Obama administration, doing it sort of like the Bush administration on steroids,” [NSA expert James Bamford] said in an interview with the Associated Press. “This order here is about as broad as it can possibly get, when it comes to focusing on personal communications. There’s no warrant, there’s no suspicion, there’s no probable cause … it sounds like something from East Germany.”
The Daily Beast writes:
Fifteen years ago, all of us would have laughed at the notion that the government would assert the right to know about every phone call made by ordinary American citizens suspected of no crime—that’s something that East Germany would do, not the American government. How have we gotten so comfortable with the panopticon state in little more than a decade?
And the Atlantic notes:
TSA’s surveillance of our communications is most likely much, much bigger than [metadata]. Technology has made it possible for the American government to spy on citizens to an extent East Germany could only dream of.
(The Atlantic is correct.)
The New York Times Editorial Board says that Obama has lost all credibility (and slams defenders of the Big Brother spying program):
The Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.
Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability. The administration has now lost all credibility. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the 9/11 attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.
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A senior administration official quoted in The Times offered the lame observation that the information does not include the name of any caller, as though there would be the slightest difficulty in matching numbers to names.
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Essentially, the administration is saying that without any individual suspicion of wrongdoing, the government is allowed to know who Americans are calling every time they make a phone call, for how long they talk and from where.
This sort of tracking can reveal a lot of personal and intimate information about an individual. To casually permit this surveillance — with the American public having no idea that the executive branch is now exercising this power — fundamentally shifts power between the individual and the state, and repudiates constitutional principles governing search, seizure and privacy.
The defense of this practice offered by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to be preventing this sort of overreaching, was absurd. She said today that the authorities need this information in case someone might become a terrorist in the future. Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the vice chairman of the committee, said the surveillance has “proved meritorious, because we have gathered significant information on bad guys and only on bad guys over the years.”
But what assurance do we have of that, especially since Ms. Feinstein went on to say that she actually did not know how the data being collected was used?
The senior administration official quoted in The Times said the executive branch internally reviews surveillance programs to ensure that they “comply with the Constitution and laws of the United States and appropriately protect privacy and civil liberties.”
That’s no longer good enough. Mr. Obama clearly had no intention of revealing this eavesdropping, just as he would not have acknowledged the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, had it not been reported in the press. Even then, it took him more than a year and a half to acknowledge the killing, and he is still keeping secret the protocol by which he makes such decisions.
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Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, who introduced the Patriot Act in 2001, said that the National Security Agency overstepped its bounds by obtaining a secret order to collect phone log records from millions of Americans.
“As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely troubled by the F.B.I.’s interpretation of this legislation,” he said in a statement. “While I believe the Patriot Act appropriately balanced national security concerns and civil rights, I have always worried about potential abuses.” He added: “Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American.” [Sensenbrenner also asked: "How could the phone records of so many innocent Americans be relevant to an authorized investigation?"]
Stunning use of the act shows, once again, why it needs to be sharply curtailed if not repealed.
Howard Fineman slams Obama and invokes the Founding Fathers:
The Verizon story is yet more evidence that America is reaching a crisis point in the more than decade-long trend of expanding federal power to reach into the private lives of Americans. At the same time, the government inevitably is becoming more opaque, and more focused on leaks, in the name of protecting the investigations that it instigates in the name of national security.
The time has come for a deep, serious national debate on the balance between freedom and security.
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Osama bin Laden’s attack on Sept. 11, 2001, set off a new chapter in the age-old argument between liberty and security, a debate in which Ben Franklin warned that those who would sacrifice the former for the latter will end up with neither.
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There are similarities but mostly the Bush/Obama things is a convenient way for liberals who can't bring themselves to critiize Obama to make it a bipartisan blame game, thus relieving Obama of responsibility. And it's so intellectually dishonest. The reasoning is that if Bush did it then it's OK if Obama did it despite previously blasting Bush for doing it! As I said, it's simply muddying the waters by refusing to indict the parties concerned. I opposed the Patriot Act but fugured we were reasonably safe with Bush who seemed focused on foreign players. Obama seems to be concentrating on the domestic sice.
George Washington is repeating mainstream media socialist propaganda.
Bush was a Godsend to America compared to Obowel.
Bush Cheney in office when the US Government orchestrated and conducted attack of September 11, 2001,
and continued the coverup with the complicity of the Establishment news media.
You would do well to repeat things you hear and read. Because original, critical thought ... well, it makes you look foolish.
Yeah, I junked ya.
put down the crack pipe and step AWAY from your computer.
Ahh..same policies..Obama just pays better lip service...same type of fascist shit going down.
They are the same because Banksters tell them what to do
The article said exactly the same......do you think that's true?
Do you know what indistinguishable means?
neither do the feminists....
Liberal media has to disagree with Obama to hang onto their readers.
The reality is that liberal media is not to be trusted - they work for liberals - ergo the term "liberal media".
Liberal Media and Meatless Beef are pretty much interchangeable terms to me.
what are these terms "liberal" "conservative" "press?" They have no meaning anymore
Only because there are no real conservatives today, at least they are a very small minority. The vast majority of conservatives today are like the radical liberals of the 1960's. They are only conserving the Marxist/Fascist advances to date. They wail and threaten a lot, but essentially they are only obstructionists, ineffective against the Beast because they are feckless cowards. They have lost every battle for the last 100 years because they will not fight.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SQanONiQm8
bullshit - liberal media is the PR arm of team Obama.
conservative media is something quite different.
Lib press v. Conservative press?
How 'bout the "fascist press."
The only distinction is the color of the condom on the dick that's about to fuck you (you can pick red or blue).
So I suppose big and black without a condom isn't an option here?
Actually, the NYT went back and edited out that credibility quote, without saying anything.
Hmmmm.....
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/06/07/Stealth-Edit-New-York...
How do we know it wasn't the NSA making the Backdoor edit?
The NSA likes to use backdoors..... takes one to know one
Well, they (NYT) would know a thing or two about credibility and lack thereof.
Something really stinks in all this main-stream media suddenly sounding like they care about people
Has been said there is a big staged media attack on Obama to make him do what the military-industrial complex wants re starting World War III in the Middle East
Was the same problem will Bill Clinton ... the Monica Lewinsky business was to get him to start bombing Serbia and kill thousands of people, which he started doing as soon as the staged 'impeachment trial' went in his favour, Clinton took the deal ... Obama now is being told, like Clinton, he is dead if he doesn't co-operate
New York Times has been corrupt a long time
And the UK Guardian is actually a quite corrupt news outlet too, and in desperate financial shape ... the Guardian the 'left wing of MI6'
Both the NYT and the Guardian were the touters in the Wikileaks media hype ... first pumping up Julian Assange and then shooting him down together, like they were both following orders
Fake 'progressive news outlets' ... Now likely re-selling themselves to get people to 'trust' them
So they can sell the next big lie coming up ...
while I, for the most part, agree with you. i would mention that the real beneficiary of the Lewinsky story was clinton himself as it distracted the masses from taking notice of the fact that all the witnesses against him and hilary in the whitewater scandal (which was, if you remember the original cause for the investigation) were busy committing suicide and dying in plane crashes and single car accidents and just generally being found dead of natural causes (because if someone pops two bullets into the back of your head "naturally"...you're gonna die).
I always suspected that Clinton himself (or his handlers) engineered that PR stunt (lewinsky).
dont forget him selling secrets to the chinese... in fact one of the chinese's lawyer was none other ken starr making the whole starr investiagtion a fraud... starr could have been arrested at any time for being an unregistered lobbyist to a foreign country... don't forget starr's connection to aig
Time for another disenfranchised peace prize
Everybody in-the-know around theClintons seemed to end up dead...
Tyson taught them to treat people like chickens