I heard a clip of the POTUS on NPR last week shortly after Greenwald's Gaurdian piece first broke, concerning the firestorm that those NSA revelations ignited. I was going to write this diary back then but my work situation has been very intense the last several weeks and I didn't have the energy; I'm still swamped, in fact, so this is going to be short and to the point. Here's the Obama statement (from the Guardian live blog as it occurred) that hit me like a slap in the face (Obama's face, to be precise):
And the modest encroachment... on privacy in getting phone numbers and durations without a name attached, and looking at content that – [I decided] net, it was worth us doing. Some other folks may have a different assessment.
I think it's important to recognize you can't have 100 percent security and also 100 percent privacy, and also zero inconvenience. We're going to have to make some choices as a society.
In case you didn't catch the blatant moral contradiction he exposed in himself, let me just post those two highlighted sentences for you:
[I decided] net, it was worth us doing. Some other folks may have a different assessment.
{snip}
We're going to have to make some choices as a society.
If you still don't see it (for whatever reason) let me spell it out: we as a society (ie, the US citizenry) have to make some choices about how intrusively our security agencies are allowed to operate, a choice he unilaterally made in approving the NSA vacuum operations that Snowden exposed.
To put it more bluntly, the exposure of his decision to abridge the 4th amendment made him admit that that decision wasn't his to make, but ours.
Update: Elmo comments correctly below that another comment by Obama as transcribed in the link above was incorrect, he actually said the opposite of what they portrayed so i deleted the text and my commentary on it.
I have to go to work now so won't participate in any comments. Have at it as you see fit.