You haven’t shown us anything to suggest the latter group is greater than zero. Again, The Guardian broke this story. They’re neither rightward nor anti-Obama.
Provide evidence that the link is tenuous. You’ve got people in-the-know saying exactly the opposite. You, I presume, are not in the know. So prove it.
Ha. Just for starters, here’s Michelle Malkin’s tortuous self-justification of why she cheered on Bush’s surveillance program but thinks this phase of it is SCARY. :rolleyes:
Evidently, this is something a little different. Not the Verizon shit, but something the Washington Post calls PRISM.
And it looks like the scope is more than just metadata
And it seems to be recently important
So the “cell phone scandal” isn’t a scandal, let’s see how far this thing goes before being poo-poo’d away.
I welcome these scandals because it gives Jon Stewart good material to work with.
I’m afraid you’re misusing the burden of proof here. It goes the other way. Provide evidence that there is a link. The mere say-so of “people in-the-know” (like Senator Feinstein, I suppose) is inadequate because of the obvious conflict of interest, so you’ll have to do better.
By the way, the idea that I’m “not in the know”? That’s part of my complaint. I should be in the know. You should be in the know. Everyone should be in the know. That’s essential to democracy. You can’t have a democracy if voters are incapable of making informed decisions.
I can’t help but think that information on that scale is useless. Suppose you could, suppose you could have recorded every single phone conversation in America for a whole day, where would you put it? You gonna rent God Almighty’s server? Even if you had Big Blue Godzilla, what search terms would you use? And where will you get five million hamsters?
Proactively, sure. But retrospectively? “Hi elucidator, you don’t know us. Just call us Agent Black and Agent White. As I’m sure you’re aware, since she was elected last year, Madame President Bachmann has announced a number of new initiatives aimed at to promoting love of country. You do love your country, don’t you elucidator? Of course, of course. But looking back a number of years ago, you made some comments on the Straight Dope Message Board that . . . concerned us. And it was right around that time . . . oh, some time before your divorce, if I recall correctly . . . that you began FB chatting, and then later calling by mobile, a miss Gennifer Quickly. Those conversations never emerged in the custody hearings for your children, did they? It’d be a shame to reopen old wounds at this late date, especially now that you’re getting along so well – calling them almost every day, I see. As I say, elucidator, we just want to make sure that everyone understands how important it is to love one’s country, and the good people who are guiding the country, even as much as one loves one’s own children. Wouldn’t you agree?”
The shameless cannot be blackmailed.
Good on yer, then, but I have a feeling that just a month or two ago you would have been pointing and laughing at me for being a tinfoil hatter, with the above post. Fact is, it now emerges that there’s nothing at all I’ve written that is in the slightest bit implausible, is there? ('cept maybe for President Bachmann, but who’s to say there won’t be someone even worse by your lights?)
As I understand it, they are not recording conversations, but they are recording who called whom. Not because they think you call me to discuss blowing up the Statue of Liberty, but just because they want a record that you called me for whatever reason. That amount of information is easy to store.
Now, they supposedly have a FISA judge’s approval to do this, and so it’s perfectly legal.
The question is: Do we want it to be “perfectly legal”.
I don’t. Do you?
Someone can correct if I’m wrong, but I don’t see that Obama is doing anything illegal here. Maybe some folks (including me) expected more of him; I don’t know. I can’t say I’m completely surprised, but I am a bit disappointed. Still, I’m happy the he is the president and not Romney. I would expect worse form Romney, but that doesn’t make me any less disappointed in Obama.
Well that’s fine then.
Because the two are not equal. Unfortunately, we DFHs are a much smaller fraction of the body politic than the wingnuts on the right. Since there’s a rough balance between the two parties in our politics, that means the wingnuts have a lot more clout in the GOP than we DFHs do in the Democratic Party.
While said wingnuts weren’t as powerful during the Bush Administration as they are now, they had the clout back then to kill things like immigration reform and the Harriet Miers nomination.
Nowadays, pretty much nobody in the GOP can cross the wingnuts. Chris Christie is about the only exception, representing a Northeastern state, and he’ll stop being one if he tries to run for President as a Republican.
By contrast, Obama pretty much ignores anybody to his left, and has been able to get away with that for four and a half years.
What is a DFH?
Dirty Fucking Hippie. I think Duncan (“Atrios”) Black originated the acronym.
Why would they bother? Seriously, why would they bother?
If nothing else, I am guessing that is the major reason why so many voters don’t seem to care about the issue. Until you can explain to them why the FBI would bother to knock on elucidator’s door and blackmail him, no one is going to get any traction on this issue.
ETA: As a (partial) aside, I’ve always wondered when the first federal agent in charge of looking through Internet data (if such a person exists) is going to make millions blackmailing someone wealthy and powerful, or do industrial espionage/insider trading based on intercepted e-mails. Maybe THAT will get some concern amongst both general population and the rich/powerful…
It’s been re-upped a couple of times since, IIRC, the latest being 2011.
Back in 2001 I lauded Russ Feingold for his solo opposition to the Act.
I guaran-damn-tee that no matter how much Faux News gets their collective panties in a bunch over this, they will not praise Russ’s no vote of 2001.
The problem with these scandals is that they are so politicized. People are killed in Bengazhi: it’s reasonable to provide some oversight to see if we could do better next time, but instead it’s a conspiracy to not use the work “terrorist” for some advantage I can’t fathom.
We should look at things like the Patriot Act to see if it oversteps; but it was passed with support of both parties, and been used by administrations of both parties, so why turn it into a partisan witch hunt?
Conservatives want their Watergate moment, but that was an actual scandal, not some made up bullshit.
Pretty sure this NSA thing isn’t going to be made up bullshit before it’s over…
And I’m pretty sure Congress didn’t repeatedly approve the Watergate burglaries and didn’t speak up in favor of the break-ins after they happened. That does tamp down the scandal potential pretty well, but we can hope against hope that we’ll have a sensible discussion of intelligence gathering instead of a lot of screaming. If this intelligence has been used to disrupt terrorist plotting, is there some way to accomplish the same end without casting this incredibly broad net? Is the secret court thing not sufficient after all even though it sounded so great the first time? :rolleyes:
Oh trust me, I’m not putting this all on Obama’s plate.