Obama ran on the promise to end domestic spying by the NSA, and as president he would have had the authority to do it at any time, but once he got into office he expanded the domestic spying program. The most simple explanation is that he lied through his teeth and that he had no intention of stopping it.
It's also possible that once he got elected he was convinced that it was so worthwhile that it was worth violating his campaign promises, but what worries me most is the possibility that Obama honestly believed, and still believes, that it was a unacceptable violation of our constitutional rights and that he only had to be shown a sample of the data collected on him and his family to get him to fall in line and approve whatever the NSA wanted.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." The NSA has so much data on us that they could blackmail anyone, and could likely plant incriminating data as well. That power exists for them to use at any time. If they're willing to use it in order to keep that power over anyone they see as an enemy then it's possible that no president or politician will ever be able to do anything to stop America's domestic spying program.
For a lot of these cases, I suspect the politicians just get rolled by a series of Very Serious People who spend all their time working on briefings which justify their jobs and the attendant concentrations of power. "If not for this program, we would have had [large number] of 9/11s!"
> The most simple explanation is that he lied through his teeth and that he had no intention of stopping it.
This doesn't really fit anything I understand about Obama or about the world. Much more likely is that upon taking the responsibility of president he learned a lot of new things and received a lot of new advice/opinions and changed his mind.
> This doesn't really fit anything I understand about Obama or about the world.
The world should have taught you a thousand times over that politicians tell lies to get elected. If Obama was being honest, he would be the exception. Obama was a typical politician in a lot of ways. For example, he was bought and paid for by the RIAA and after he was elected he stacked the justice department with their lawyers and as a result his administration was extremely favorable to them. (see
https://www.wired.com/2009/03/obama-sides-wit-2). That said, listening to him talk about ending domestic spying, I believed him.
It's worth mentioning that he also campaigned on promises of transparency and said that he supported whistleblowers, but he branded Snowden as a criminal and his ended up being the least transparent administration in history.
It's possible he was shown a lot of things that convinced him, but I can't think of anything that would justify the ongoing violation of our basic constitutional rights. He gave some lip service about improving transparency at the NSA but ultimately did nothing to increase accountability for the misuse of the data being collected. Misuse that we now know was commonplace (thanks to Snowden).
I'd like to think that if he did see some legitimate use that made him believe it was a necessary evil that he would have done something to minimize the number of people with access to that data, but instead he made it easier for that data to be abused and shared with other agencies. In the end Obama gave the NSA more power than they had when he entered office.
As Charlie Stross explained, he was "their man" from the outset.
You could see he was "their man" because they somehow arranged to get him a Nobel Peace Prize for, apparently, nothing. Recall Henry Kissinger, Woodrow Wilson, and Teddy Roosevelt got them too. (And Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Peres. And Yasser Arafat.)
> You could see he was "their man" because they somehow arranged to get him a Nobel Peace Prize for, apparently, nothing.
I have to admit that was weird, but I think a lot of people really thought Obama was going to turn things around for the nation and the rest of planet. Bush Jr. had a whole lot of people all across the globe very concerned about America. Some saw him as an idiot, and/or a literal war criminal, and he had pushed the US in some very dark directions. Suddenly America was doing some very very un-American™ things aggressively and right out in the open. Torture, preemptive war, voter suppression, direct interference with the media, the stripping away of civil liberties, increasingly oppressive/nationalistic rhetoric, he was basically the warm-up act to Trump's administration.
All the worry over the fast decline of America is why Obama's hope/change message went over so well. If Biden had been almost anyone else he probably would have been given awards one for saving the world from more Trump, but I don't think anyone had high expectations for Biden whereas the world was basically begging Obama to bring integrity and stability back to the US.
It was way beyond weird. You give somebody a legitimate Nobel prize after they actually do a thing, not just because you HOPE they will do some unspecified thing.
So, no, the fix was definitely in. "I'll be your President, but I expect a Nobel, and quick."
Have you ever worked in or alongside the U.S. Federal Government? I have. It's pretty easy to pin all these unprincipled actions/inactions on deliberate lies and manipulation in service of power grabs. As several replies to you suggest, the reality is likely a lot less scurrilous.
There are very few truly principled people in Government. By this, I mean people willing to make big changes to hew to some "objectively right" principle even if it raises perceived risk, or causes any sort of new economic harm to some group, regardless of how short-term any of these may be[^]. On the other hand, if there is ongoing harm to some group, that doesn't typically generate enough support for change until you hit some inflection point in the zeitgeist, like what led to the "justice reforms" passed in the last administration.
Big changes that cause any kind of harm or perceived harm to a group need overwhelming levels of support, especially in political circles, to overcome the media seeding and political grandstanding that exact an inevitable toll. Obama was a profound disappointment to anyone hoping for any kind of structural reforms out of him, but the fantasy-driven ferociousness of the political headwinds he faced in office shouldn't be ignored. He was damned if he did or didn't.
Imagine you're in Obama's shoes and some Serious Intel Community Leader swears in classified briefings that if you undo any of what they're currently doing, there's high risk of "the next 9/11". Do you make a principled stand about the sanctity of the 4th Amendment despite their near-assurances that "Americans will likely be harmed on your watch if you do"? Probably not, because in the moment, you feel the ends are so overwhelming they justify the means. In the current Republican-leaning political environment, you don't want to risk feeding the claims that "by weakening the Intelligence Community, Democrats undermined America's safety, as they always do!".
It's easy to talk about principles until you have to pay the costs of being true to them.
[^] If you counterargue this using radical Trump administration actions, most of them cannot be categorized as "principled" or without ultimately fatal-to-the-administration consequences.
I imagine that anyone who becomes POTUS is quite suddenly exposed to a whole lot of new information that might change some of their previous views. Also, in so many areas of life (management, parenting, writing device drivers) you may have strong and idealistic views from the sidelines, but once you’re responsible for actually doing it your default view becomes “it’s complicated”.
It seems more to me like having the kind of power a modern president of the US wields is inevitably going to change all but the steeliest person, and mostly for the worse.
Once you have access to classified information, you can spend literally every waking hour reading nothing but classified reports prepared for you. It can seem foolish to waste time reading anything else, which "might not be the whole story". But it puts you entirely under the thumb of whoever is preparing your reading material.
Thus, Colin Powell famously had no idea he was being played when he persuaded senators to vote for invading Iraq.
Not in this case. The president has full authority over the NSA which is part of the DoD. With Guantanamo Bay, he needed to find states willing to take in the prisoners and he needed congress. As commander-in-chief Obama could have ended the domestic spying program with a single order.
That assumes that the president actually has full practical authority over the NSA and IC.
I don't know if that is true other than on paper.
These organizations consume the private details of the lives of every federal judge, every member of the legislature, every prosecutor, every staffer, and their entire families, all of their mistresses, drug dealers, fixers, and bag men.
I think this would put them in a position of significant leverage over anyone who is ever elected president.
> I think this would put them in a position of significant leverage over anyone who is ever elected president.
Worse than that, it gives them the ability to identify and eliminate threats to their power before they can even get to the point where they could build a viable campaign for the presidency!
That kind of power, along with access to information on any petty rival, or even just the nudes of the random but sexy person they met in passing the other day, is temptation enough to corrupt anyone. Even if we could assume it hasn't been abused to that extent so far (and we've already learned about many many abuses) there's nothing stopping it from happening in the future.
One my earliest concerns with the NSA collecting all of this data is that with the president at the top of the chain of command I expected every president would abuse this power for themselves. That Bush Jr would use it to target his personal enemies, that Obama would do the same, and I think it's safe to say that Trump wouldn't have been able to show restraint if he had any access to it, but we saw how Trump had to press people in foreign countries to dig up dirt on his enemies.
While I've seen some claims that Trump's access was more limited than it was for other presidents (due to his unstable behavior) I suspect no president has been given access to the massive amounts of data being collected and stored by the NSA, even though (officially) nothing could stop a sitting president from ordering it.
While it could just be true that no president has ever tried, it might also be true that in practice those presidents had less authority over the NSA than the NSA had over them and so the NSA could simply tell them "no".
This whole thread makes me wonder if a politician couldn’t use smart contracts staked with some substantial portion of their net worth, to credibly back their promises. If the break the promise, they lose the money
> but once he got into office he expanded the domestic spying program.
Exactly the opposite happened. According to the documents Snowden leaked, Obama had already shut down email metadata collection, and after the Snowden leaks, Obama limited the phone metadata collection. There are no other NSA domestic spying programs that we know of.
After Obama got into office the NSA got retroactive immunity, a massive shiny new data center, and they started collecting data from Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, Apple, Google, Microsoft, AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon as well as collecting credit card transaction data.
Your first article is about how the NSA asked for but did not get permission to track hackers who were not known to be tied to foreign governments — no expansion in domestic surveillance there.
Your second article is not about domestic surveillance at all but about foreign surveillance that isn't expanded but filtered by different agencies the same way that the NSA filtered it.
Your third article doesn't contain a single example of expanded domestic surveillance.
> Your first article is about how the NSA asked for but did not get permission to track hackers who were not known to be tied to foreign governments — no expansion in domestic surveillance there.
"In mid-2012, Justice Department lawyers wrote two secret memos permitting the spy agency to begin hunting on Internet cables, without a warrant and on American soil, for data linked to computer intrusions originating abroad — including traffic that flows to suspicious Internet addresses or contains malware, the documents show...The effort is the latest known expansion of the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program"
> Your second article is not about domestic surveillance at all
"the rule changes will make it easier for the government to spot and prevent potential terrorist attacks before they happen, at the expense of the privacy of millions of Americans, whose data may be collected in the surveillance dragnet...a total of 17 government agencies will have access to Americans' data without requiring a warrant"
Seems a whole lot like spying on Americans to me.
> Your third article doesn't contain a single example of expanded domestic surveillance
Except for the whole constant gathering of new types of data from an increasing (one could say "expanding") number of sources since Obama came into office...
For what it's worth while I haven't read every document that leaked I've read many of them. I've so read/seen several interviews and talks with Snowden, and even read his book. He seems pretty okay with what Greenwald came away with.
If you read the very next sentence after your first quote, you will find:
"The Justice Department allowed the agency to monitor only addresses and “cybersignatures” — patterns associated with computer intrusions — that it could tie to foreign governments."
This is surveiling foreign governments' data in the US only when they are hacking Americans. It is a mighty stretch to call this domestic surveillance when the surveilled are very specifically foreign governments (foreign non-governmental hackers are not included).
> "a total of 17 government agencies will have access to Americans' data without requiring a warrant"
If you actually read the rest of the article, they are required to filter out data of Americans anywhere and data of anybody in the US without a warrant, just like the NSA is required to. There is no expansion of domestic surveillance. The only change is that these other agencies get direct access to the taps, but they are subject to the same laws as the NSA.
> Except for the whole constant gathering of new types of data from an increasing (one could say "expanding") number of sources since Obama came into office...
Every single one of those sources was only allowed to provide data on foreigners living outside the US. This is explicitly not domestic surveillance.
> I've so read/seen several interviews and talks with Snowden, and even read his book. He seems pretty okay with what Greenwald came away with.
Snowden very clearly didn't understand PRISM when he leaked it. According to Gellman, Snowden seemed most intent on exposing PRISM, asking Gellman for a guarantee that all the PRISM slides would be published within 72 hours, believing it to be a domestic surveillance program. It wasn't. A well-intentioned dummy can make rash decisions and end up becoming a Russian stooge. Snowden is the poster-child for the Be Cool, Stay In School program.
It's also possible that once he got elected he was convinced that it was so worthwhile that it was worth violating his campaign promises, but what worries me most is the possibility that Obama honestly believed, and still believes, that it was a unacceptable violation of our constitutional rights and that he only had to be shown a sample of the data collected on him and his family to get him to fall in line and approve whatever the NSA wanted.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." The NSA has so much data on us that they could blackmail anyone, and could likely plant incriminating data as well. That power exists for them to use at any time. If they're willing to use it in order to keep that power over anyone they see as an enemy then it's possible that no president or politician will ever be able to do anything to stop America's domestic spying program.