From the blog of David Simon (creator of the Wire)

07
JUN
Is it just me or does the entire news media — as well as all the agitators and self-righteous bloviators on both sides of the aisle — not understand even the rudiments of electronic intercepts and the manner in which law enforcement actually uses such intercepts? It would seem so.
–
Because the national eruption over the rather inevitable and understandable collection of all raw data involving telephonic and internet traffic by Americans would suggest that much of our political commentariat, many of our news gatherers and a lot of average folk are entirely without a clue.

You would think that the government was listening in to the secrets of 200 million Americans from the reaction and the hyperbole being tossed about. And you would think that rather than a legal court order which is an inevitable consequence of legislation that we drafted and passed, something illegal had been discovered to the government’s shame.

Nope. Nothing of the kind. Though apparently, the U.K.’s Guardian, which broke this faux-scandal, is unrelenting in its desire to scale the heights of self-congratulatory hyperbole. Consider this from Glenn Greenwald, the author of the piece: “What this court order does that makes it so striking is that it’s not directed at any individual…it’s collecting the phone records of every single customer of Verizon business and finding out every single call they’ve made…it’s indiscriminate and it’s sweeping.”

Having labored as a police reporter in the days before the Patriot Act, I can assure all there has always been a stage before the wiretap, a preliminary process involving the capture, retention and analysis of raw data. It has been so for decades now in this country. The only thing new here, from a legal standpoint, is the scale on which the FBI and NSA are apparently attempting to cull anti-terrorism leads from that data. But the legal and moral principles? Same old stuff.

http://davidsimon.com/we-are-shocked-shocked/

A lying murderer lies. Nothing new.

i find simons article lacking on so many levels.
it seems almost naive in many ways.

this articles addresses many of my concerns:
http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/surveillance-nsa?page=0%2C0

@enoch

What specifically do you object to in Simon's article?

What specifically do you object to in this NSA controversy?

I know you are angry, but you're arguments have been a little on the vague side.

Change my mind. No need to hold back, brother. There is no quicker way to my heart than drag-out bareknuckled debate.

@Yogi

Where is the lie?

What is unreasonable about this?

When he says "Nobody is listening to your telephone calls." I don't believe him.

He's lied and manipulated his entire time in office. Why in the fuck would you suddenly trust that this has congressional oversight?

Presidents have become more powerful over the years and they don't have to answer to congress. They do what they want, they declare wars. They launch attacks outside of warzones. They are judge, jury, and executioner of American citizens who don't get a trial.

You seem to think that after all that evil it's fine that this program exists, we can trust him. We can't, he's a bastard just like all of them.

He just isn't educated enough on history to understand what he's talking about. He's very intelligent and he makes very good arguments, but he relates all those arguments to his experiences working around Law Enforcement and what hog ties them.

Now if he saw Law Enforcement wiping out and destroying city blocks or paying gunman to drag women out of houses and murder and rape children than maybe he'd have a different idea of what this NSA thing means.

The fact is that he hasn't seen jack shit, because he hasn't stood in front of an Israeli bulldozer, he hasn't looked into a mass grave in East Timor. He's just not informed.

I do, but only because "nobody" = "no person". So that statement is technically true, even though computers (not people) are recording ALL phone calls, and doing speech-to-text, and looking for keywords, and those keywords being flagged as present in the metadata, and used by the algorithms. So yes, a court order might be needed for a human to actually listen to a full conversation, but it already goes way beyond the intentions of the old wiretapping laws.

Email, which is plaintext (unencrypted), should never be considered secure. The FBI used Carnivore before it was legal (Patriot Act) and continue to use electronic surveillance in every form possible. (within the secret "legal" framework and oversight)

I guess the only real controversy is exactly how many classified programs that congress knows about and approves of, and votes to renew regularly? How can the people know how their representative is voting if the ballots are done in secret?

Jesse Ventura 2016!

You destroyed your entire point by posting that. Ventura is a 9/11 Truther nutbag who wasn't a good wrestler.

I admit that last part was a bit of trolling, and while I disagree with many things Jesse Ventura says, he's the only (non-)politician that would even attempt to bring some real transparency to Washington.

I wouldn't vote for him because of that, but I would vote for him because it would be a very entertaining four years.

Governors are privy to some secret and top-secret information (still requires a need-to-know) - so maybe he became a conspiracy "nutbag" after being elected governor... tip of the iceberg kinda stuff.

He's was never a good wrestler, so he can die in a fire.

Moving this video to dystopianfuturetoday's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.