NYT: The Criminal N.S.A.

[NorthCarolina]

THE twin revelations that telecom carriers have been secretly giving the National Security Agency information about Americans’ phone calls, and that the N.S.A. has been capturing e-mail and other private communications from Internet companies as part of a secret program called Prism, have not enraged most Americans. Lulled, perhaps, by the Obama administration’s claims that these “modest encroachments on privacy” were approved by Congress and by federal judges, public opinion quickly migrated from shock to “meh.”

It didn’t help that Congressional watchdogs — with a few exceptions, like Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky — have accepted the White House’s claims of legality. The leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia, have called the surveillance legal. So have liberal-leaning commentators like Hendrik Hertzberg and David Ignatius.

This view is wrong — and not only, or even mainly, because of the privacy issues raised by the American Civil Liberties Union and other critics. The two programs violate both the letter and the spirit of federal law. No statute explicitly authorizes mass surveillance. Through a series of legal contortions, the Obama administration has argued that Congress, since 9/11, intended to implicitly authorize mass surveillance. But this strategy mostly consists of wordplay, fear-mongering and a highly selective reading of the law. Americans deserve better from the White House — and from President Obama, who has seemingly forgotten the constitutional law he once taught.

The administration has defended each of the two secret programs. Let’s examine them in turn.

Link: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/opinion/the-criminal-nsa.html

A good read for those concerned about the NSA spying scandal. For those that prefer to defend such actions by the administration, well you may want to skip it.

[JayhawkSD]

1. According to Paul Krugman...

...liberal dean of the economics sphere and by my unofficial survey the person currently most often quoted by liberals, "the NSA stuff is a policy dispute." I don't know why anyone would get all lathered up over a mere policy dispute. He says it here.

[Pholus]

2. The context was the "right wing" scandal machine and by that he means

that they can't get traction as they were doing it too, so any debate on the issue becomes a difference between implementation. After all, it is clear that both parties have their share of 4th amendment trampling pervs. The difference is that our side has a rubber stamp court bless the action first.

Now of course, Krugman did weigh in on the actual "policy" as well. Not a fan.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/09/paul-krugman-nsa-surveillance_n_3411944.html

In an appearance on ABC’s “This Week”, The Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist cited a 2008 paper from Jack Balkin, a Yale Law School professor, indicating that increased surveillance is a predictable outcome of the rise in technology. Still, that doesn't mean the surveillance should be widespread and secretive, Krugman said.

“You can have a democratic surveillance state which collects as little data as possible and tells you as much as possible about what it's doing, or you can have an authoritarian surveillance state which collects as much as possible and tells the public as little as possible,” Krugman said. “And we are kind of on the authoritarian side.”

[midnight]

3. K&R