Sometimes it takes a whistleblower.
July 19, 2013
...The head of the NSA, (click here) Keith Alexander, said that the agency was implementing the "two-man rule" in which analysts could only access classified information in the presence of a colleague....
Now, about that spying nonsense that goes on....
July 19, 2013
...More than one generation (click here) has been brought up hearing that Carter was one of the worst presidents of all time, that his administration was egregiously corrupt and grossly incompetent, and that he made America a laughing-stock among nations. The fact that Carter was and is a man of extraordinary personal character and integrity, and that he has displayed these qualities in abundance since leaving the White House, has made no difference. Every time he makes the news, he is denounced by a chorus of yahoos who remind us that he is, after all, Jimmy Carter, the man who made us all look stupid, the man we couldn’t wait to be rid of.
What a curious consensus this is.
For President Carter started no wars, bombed no civilians, and committed no crimes against the Constitution. He did not sell weapons to terrorists or spy on his political opponents. The handful of “scandals” associated with his term in office seem hilariously trivial in our age. He was, certainly, far from perfect—but perfection is a fairly useless standard to apply to any elected official. If we can move past the automatic associations that spring to mind when we think of Carter—the “malaise” speech, the killer rabbit, the hostage crisis—his presidency may be relevant for us in an entirely different way....
...Carter’s criticism of the NSA carries particular weight because he was the last president to date—and perhaps the only president of the entire modern era—who even tried to do something about the national security state. As investigative journalist Mark Ames recently wrote, President Carter attempted to clean up the CIA, firing almost 20 percent of its employees, focusing on the “clandestine operatives” whose cloak-and-dagger exploits were then fresh news. He also dispersed the Agency’s paramilitary arm, put legal restrictions on the Agency’s power to spy within the United States, and passed an executive order banning assassinations. All of this was entirely in keeping with Carter’s mandate, after Watergate and Vietnam and revelations of various CIA misdeeds, to restore the moral integrity and authority of the federal government.
But none of Carter’s reforms would last. President Reagan signed an executive order in December 1981 authorizing the CIA to collect “foreign intelligence” inside the United States—the first of many steps his administration would take to restore the power and prestige of the Agency. As Ames notes, it did not take CIA and military apparatchiks long to realize that the ban on assassinations could be circumvented quite easily as long as they could be framed as something other than “assassinations.”...
And now, today, we are spying on each other. How great is that? Not very.
