You know that something odd is happening when the New York Times editorial board tears the Obama Administration a new exit strategy just as a story breaks. The British Guardian published a scoop today. The Administration has been secretly gathering all of Verizon's call logs. I think that means that they have a pretty comprehensive record of who called who and when. Here is how the NYT puts it:
Within hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.
Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency's phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.
The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue.
Wow. When Obama loses the New York Times, who does that leave? Hacks like E. J. Dionne, perhaps.
I have to say that I side with the Administration on this one. If a terrorist act has been perpetrated or if one is in progress, it would be helpful if the investigators could find out, quickly, who the suspects were in contact with. It turns out that this kind of information mining has been going on since 2006. If you thought that George W. was Big Brother, well, Big Brother is still in office.
I gather that the records were obtained with the consent of a judge and they include contacts but not content. Only if there were real evidence of mischief would the security people be able to inquire into the identities of callers and for that they would need another court order.
This one shouldn't be a scandal, but it is. It is a scandal because Obama promised us when he was running for office that he wouldn't do this sort of thing. It is a scandal because, as the NYTs put it, the Administration has lost all credibility.
Do we have any reason to trust the Administration to use its powers of investigation responsibly? The answer to that is obviously not. The AP and Rosen scandals were bad enough. We now know that an IRS agent told a prolife group that they could get tax exempt status if they promised, in writing, not to picket abortion clinics. That is an egregious abuse of the tax power to stifle dissent. Do you really trust these people not to abuse all the information that the government is collecting?
Not even the Times is that stupid.
ps. George Will makes my point (alas, without citation). From National Review's The Corner:
“We are threatened by needles in a haystack — very few needles in a very large haystack,” he said. “We’re threatened not by a nation but by a network, and it is the nature of a terrorist network to be invisible until made visible, hence when there’s an attack, we talk about who didn’t connect the dots.” Will argued that the data being gathered by the NSA and the sophisticated algorithms the agency is applying to it may allow national-security analysts to connect the dots before terrorist acts occur.
On the flip side, he said, “We’re using technologies of information gathering . . . that are terribly important but terribly invasive, and they require reposing extraordinary trust in the executive branch of government, which some of us think it has recently forfeited.”
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