Two Obama Lies Leave Little Room For Privacy Rights

[HomerRamone]

By Steve Weissman

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/21597-two-obama-lies-leave-little-room-for-privacy-rights

One of the 9/11 hijackers – Khalid al-Mihdhar – made a phone call from San Diego to a known al Qaeda safe-house in Yemen,” said the president in his speech on surveillance. “NSA saw that call, but it could not see that the call was coming from an individual already in the United States."...

contrary to Obama’s telling, the NSA recorded and transcribed at least some of Mihdhar’s calls and would have known he was calling from San Diego...Did Obama know he was telling a lie? What he said and did not say about Mihdhar suggests he knew. Without question, some of his senior national security advisors would have read Bamford, checked out any details they did not already know, and told Obama what they found.

Besides the Mihdhar fable, Obama repeated a second lie. “This program does not involve the content on phone calls, or the names of people making calls,” he claimed. “Instead it provides a record of phone numbers and the time and lengths of calls – metadata that can be queried if and when we have a reasonable suspicion that a particular number is linked to a terrorist organization.”...Or, as he promised the American people on June 7 in his initial response to Snowden’s whistleblowing, “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls.”

That is simply not true, at least as Snowden tells it...Sadly, as Snowden’s flood of NSA documents confirms, we can believe him where we cannot believe Obama. The NSA does suck up content, which at least some analysts can access. With all his cosmetic reforms and talk of finding a new place to store the data, Obama is fighting to preserve the invasion of the data-snatchers. We need bulk collection, he repeats the party line, to protect us from any new terrorist attack.

No matter that neither the NSA nor any other agency has produced a shred of evidence that collecting metadata – and its accompanying content – has prevented a single terror attack in the United States. Presidents and their intelligence agencies naturally want to have every tool they can to gobble up as much information as they can get away with. Their motives vary. In America’s corporate state, they have supporters who sell goods and services to expanding intelligence bureaucracies, which have their own internal drive to expand their empire and feather their own nests, as the NSA did. They can honestly believe that the latest technological twist will produce results even it hasn’t yet. And they know that they will be the ones the rest of us blame if we suffer another 9/11, and that they will have to show that they did everything they could to prevent it. All good reasons that we – and, in some cases, they – need the plain language of the Fourth Amendment to limit what they are permitted to do.

[Wilms]

1. ^

[treestar]

2. Snowden is the one lying

to exaggerate his importance.

[HomerRamone]

3. so the documents are forgeries? nt