As Mike Myers would say, "Exsqueeeze me?"
Here's the lede:
Obama expected to turn to Congress to help decide fate of NSA phone data collection
President Obama on Friday is expected to announce some new limits [SOME NEW LIMITS? I guess we are supposed suspend disbelief and to wait for the full speech thingie...] on the National Security Agency program that collects billions of Americans’ phone records, but he will call on Congress to help determine the program’s future, according to current and former officials familiar with the administration’s plans.
Obama has concluded that the program has value as a counterterrorism tool, the officials said, but is also confronting difficult political realities. [Even though there's not a single case the sneaks can point to, out of now trillions of "collections," that resulted in any Terrorist Takedown.] The program’s sweeping nature has prompted serious privacy concerns, and a divided Congress is unlikely to renew it when the law underpinning the program expires next year. ...
Officials have said Obama’s speech is part of an effort to restore confidence [!] at home and abroad in the government’s surveillance policies. While the NSA program has perhaps raised the most significant concerns about privacy, a series of disclosures over the past eight months has generated controversy over U.S. intelligence activities...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/... There's a lot more for the cynic and Jon Stewart in the rest of the article, of course...
How ludicrous and inane and insuperably idiotic can this all get? There's a set of entities, "agencies," that exist by act of Congress, signed off on by this and prior presidents, funded by taxpayer money and borrowing under appropriations and authorizations to expend by Congress, but run, or apparently or maybe NOT run, by the Unitary Executive. That conglomerate of omnisciency is led by people who apparently have the same genes and "interests" as J. Edgar Hoover and any number of other Peeping Toms and snoops and sneaks all across human political and of course economid history, now augmented by our voluntary submission to mental and intellectual and emotional strip-and-cavity searches by a combination of "government" and "business" interests. Interests that all want to reduce our awkward variability ("freedom") and resistance to regimentation ("liberty") to make the world safe for kleptocracy and corporatocracy.
We seem to have a little Overlooked Window, that is slowly closing, and closing faster as the technologies that seduce us and subjugate us and learn to "manage" and "persuade" us through our interests and desire. A window that might let a few despairing messages pass, human to human, with the possibility that there really might be Hope of some Change in the direction of healthier, free-er, more sustainable life for the ordinary people whose economic activities make the compression and repression possible: those server "farms" and broadband and optical and electrical taps and all that intrusive software do not get built by corporations acting out of some goodness of their missing hearts.
But our President and his people have seen some stress in the Force, resulting from a new and wider awareness of how completely and intrusively "the NSA" (a shorthand for a much larger thing) has insinuated all those probes into all our orifices. Looks to me like a nice sleight-of-hand is being prepared to wow the masses: A Congressional report says what "the NSA," fronting for all those other "investigative" and "enforcement agencies" including your local police department have been up to, was maybe possibly acting "illegally." And that the installed base, and the fast-metastasizing pseudopodia that are on and above the horizon, and overhead, might be maybe inconsistent with the Constitution and existing law.
And it appears the President and his crew have hit upon one way to spread the anxiety out a little thinner on the public's bread, by punting "the problem" to Congress to fix what a Unitary Executive ought to be able to fix by something as direct as Executive Orders, and appropriate woodshedding and, you know, like, leadership. It's all actions and functions of the executive branch of government. Of course I know "It's not that simple," given the power players and now entrenched interest and "contracts" and manifold little and large corruptions in the whole schmear. But we are led to believe that if the President just said STOP, these critters would be obliged to STOP. Unless there really is no "rule of law," or even an established hierarchy of command, in the enormous enormity that is the US Imperial Capital. But I guess that's one nice feature of our Republic under the Constitution we still, too many of us, believe is a check on the kind of arbitrary, self-interested, unbridled power and "legitimized use of force" by "government" that was part of the reason we have a Constitution and Bill of Rights in the first place.
So touching, that so many of us still BELIIEEEEVE that the umbras and penumbras of the Constitution protect our God-given or natural rights...
Congress, the members of which are learning that they, too, are being "surveilled" and their dirty little secrets and behaviors cataloged and cross-referenced like ol' Hoover used to do, many members of which are in cahoots with the Panopticon, we expect CONGRESS to Make Things Right?