Photo Credit: APBy Trevor Timm
Does President Barack Obama think we’re stupid?
That’s the only conclusion possible after watching Friday’s bravura performance in which the president announced a set of proposals meant to bring more transparency to the National Security Agency — and claimed he would have done it anyway, even if Edward Snowden had never decided to leak thousands of highly sensitive documents to The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald.
But even as he grudgingly admitted that the timing, at least, of his suggestions was a consequence of Snowden’s actions, the president declared, “I don’t think Mr. Snowden was a patriot.” When you look at what has changed over the past two months, though, it’s hard not to wonder, “What could be more patriotic than what Snowden did?”
First, the results: More than a dozen bills have already been introduced to put a stop to the NSA’s mass phone record collection program and to overhaul the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has reinterpreted the Fourth Amendment in secret, creating a body of privacy law that the public has never read. A half-dozen new privacy lawsuits have been filed against the NSA. The Pentagon is undergoing an unprecedented secrecy audit. U.S. officials have been caught deceiving or lying to Congress. The list goes on.
These actions have been accompanied by a sea change in public opinion about surveillance. Poll after poll has shown that for the first time ever, Americans think the government has gone too far in violating their privacy, with vast majorities believing the NSA scooping up a record of every phone call made in the United States invades citizens’ privacy.
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McCain: Young Americans admire Snowden, see him as ‘some kind of Jason Bourne’
By Ben Wolfgang.
A deep distrust of government has led young Americans to hold up NSA leaker Edward Snowden as a hero, Sen. John McCain said Sunday.
“There’s a young generation who believes he’s some kind of Jason Bourne,” the Arizona Republican said during on “Fox News Sunday,” referring to the lead character in the Bourne movie trilogy who battled his own government, particularly the CIA.
Mr. Snowden’s revelations — including details of the National Security Agency’s data-collection efforts — have led to a debate on the national security vs. privacy question, and how to balance the two.
President Obama last week laid out a series of proposed reforms to government spying programs in an effort to reassure Americans that their Fourth Amendment rights aren’t being trampled. His proposals include having a privacy advocate argue against the federal government in court, more restrictions on the mass collection of phone records and other steps.
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