The Patriot Act expires on June 1. Mr. Raimondo said it well: “The battle lines tell us everything we need to know about the state of the country and the prospects for liberty.” From Raimondo at antiwar.com:
With key provisions of the so-called Patriot Act set to expire on June 1, the fight to preserve the Constitution is heating up – and the battle lines tell us everything we need to know about the state of the country and the prospects for liberty.
On one side we have a grand alliance of authoritarians of the right and the left – the Know-Nothing wing of the Republican party and their neoconservative brain trust, the Obama administration, and present and former government officials with a financial interest in the Surveillance State. All these disparate elements are united around the alleged necessity of spying on innocent Americans without a warrant – a practice we once fought a revolution in order to end. Whatever their ideological differences, the Big Brother faction of the American polity can get behind the recent statement of Sen. Richard Burr (R-North Carolina), head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who gave voice to the Washington mindset on this and every other issue under the sun:
“I think it’s clear to say that the program as designed is effective. Members [of Congress] are reluctant to change things that are effective just because of public opinion. And we’ve got a program that’s never had one breach of personal privacy.”
Public opinion? Who cares? Our Washington patricians don’t even care what the courts think: a recent appellate court decision declared the entire bulk domestic surveillance program illegal. Not that this counts in Burr-World, which is right next door to Bizarro World. In that alternate universe, a provision that enables the government to collect all the communications of each and every American citizen without an individual warrant isn’t a breach of personal privacy.
Writing in 1950, Garet Garrett, conservative Cassandra and onetime editorial writer for the Saturday Evening Post, couldn’t have imagined Sen. Marco Rubio when he described the propaganda of the national security state as “a complex of vaunting and fear,” but surely his phraseology prefigured Rubio’s comments on the Senate floor the other day:
“If there were another attack, ‘the first question out of everyone’s mouth is going to be, ‘why didn’t we know about it?’ And the answer better not be, ‘because this Congress failed to authorize a program that might have helped us know about it.’”
His Senate colleague and fellow presidential aspirant Lindsey Graham chimed in, averring:
“I’m open-minded to doing reforms. I just don’t want to diminish the capacity of the program to prevent another 9/11. I believe if the program were in operation before 9/11, we probably would have prevented 9/11.”
Graham and Rubio are pretending not to know that law enforcement and counter-terrorism officials had plenty of clues pointing to the existence of the 9/11 plotters, including two messages intercepted by the National Security Agency the day before: “Tomorrow is zero hour” and “The match begins tomorrow,” both coming from known terrorist sources.
The problem isn’t that the government has too little information – it’s that they have too much, and don’t know what to do with the information they have. The problem, in short, is incompetence. I mean, how many different ways can you interpret a terrorist declaring “Tomorrow is zero hour?” But in fact these messages didn’t even get translated until months after they were received – long after the World Trade Center was turned into a smoking ruin.
The American people overwhelmingly oppose government snooping on their private communications: that’s why a phony “reform” bill was just passed by the House of Representatives, which would permit domestic surveillance to continue unhampered. Naturally they named it the “USA Freedom Act,” in an unintended tribute to George Orwell. Most of the votes against it were on the grounds that it served merely to mask the same abuses the public opposes.
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2015/05/17/litmus-test-will-patriot-act-spying-continue/
Reblogged this on The Grey Enigma.