Greg Sargent:
It needs to be said that Congress is heavily complicit — eagerly so, in fact — in preventing the country from moving in the direction of restoring a more rational balance between securities and civil liberties. It reauthorized the Patriot Act and the FISA provisions that make these tactics possible, and it has completely abdicated its responsibility to approach governing problems with any measure of seriousness — instead adopting the role of collective demagogue — when it comes to closing Guantanamo.
But ultimately, the basic question here is whether Obama actually wants to resolve the contradiction he himself has articulated as a pressing national challenge.
WaPo:
President Obama strongly defended the government’s secret surveillance of people’s phone records and Internet activities, saying there are “a whole bunch of safeguards involved” and that Congress has repeatedly authorized the programs.
Commenting on the surveillance for the first time since news organizations revealed the sweeping National Security Agency programs this week, Obama highlighted limits to the programs to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens and said the surveillance has helped the government anticipate and prevent terrorist attacks.
Trust us. Really, trust us. Except only transparency can make that happen. And while we are on the topic, note that nothing Republicans say on this matters. They are the ones who
routinely vote for this. On the other hand, little that Democrats say matters either, because they voted for it as well. As for the press, well, they ignored the story for seven years (first reported in 2006). So that's why transparency is so important.
Jill Lawrence:
Why PRISM is Different and Scarier Than Other NSA Spying
The metadata collected by the National Security Agency from Verizon and other phone companies is an aggregation of phone numbers and lengths of calls, and does not harvest the content of the calls. PRISM, first disclosed Thursday night by The Washington Post and The Guardian, is different. According to the intelligence official who leaked the information to The Post: "They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type."
More politics and policy below the fold.
NY Times:
New revelations about the scope of government surveillance elicited some bipartisan criticism in Congress on Friday, but beyond the bluster, prospects for a legislative response to curtail monitoring of Internet and telephone communications appear remote...
But the main vehicle for such changes — a reauthorization of the 1978 law that created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — passed in December and will not come back for renewal for five years. When the reauthorization was passed, the Senate, on a bipartisan basis, voted down a series of amendments that would have forced transparency or curtailed surveillance.
And the voices that most matter — Congressional leaders and senior lawmakers on the intelligence committees — have shown few qualms about the programs, lending them solid support. Attempts to address the surveillance programs could be made during the consideration of other legislation, like the annual defense policy bill that should reach the House floor this month and the Senate in September. Mr. Lee suggested that he and other opponents of the programs could press stand-alone legislation in the coming weeks.
But most Congressmen are too scared to change things.
Alec Macgillis:
The NSA Uproar Is Good for America—And Obama
Is our post-9/11, permanent-war mindset finally fading?
This is no way for people in the most powerful nation on earth to view the world around them, but the reaction to the NSA revelations suggests it is starting to shift. We now have people like Rep. James Sensenbrenner, the conservative Wisconsin Republican who introduced the Patriot Act in 2001, saying that the NSA’s phone-record seizures went beyond even what he had ever conceived of. Yes, chances are he would not be speaking out as strongly if these disclosures had occurred under a Republican president, but that’s politics. If reining in our security-state mindset and leviathan counterterrorism apparatus requires a Democratic president to be attacked not un-hypocritically from the left by Republicans, then so be it.
Charles M. Blow:
Maybe I’m a bit pessimistic when it comes to governmental paternalism and the unrelenting erosion of civil liberties, but I’ve always assumed that someone or something — including the government — is tracking, or could track, everything I do in an increasing virtual reality.
In other news,
Huffington Post:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has been signaling he may pick a fight on filibuster reform this summer, and a major litmus test will be whether Republicans block a handful of President Barack Obama's key nominees in the coming weeks. But for now, Republicans can't even agree on how to proceed.
