“Polls show that public opinion on NSA spying shifts back and forth depending upon who is in the White House. In other words, liberal or conservative voters generally aren’t opposed to mass surveillance as long as their party is in power.”
Read more: https://fee.org/articles/the-fisa-reauthorization-only-boosts-big-brother/
“Both parties suppressed this evidence of FBI abuse of the FISA process until after the FISA Amendments Act could be re-authorized. They didn’t want Americans to know how corrupt the surveillance system really is and how the US has become far too much like East Germany. That might cause more Americans to call up their Representatives and demand that the FISA mass surveillance amendment be allowed to sunset.”
“The FISA court has been a fount of outrages because it is an American Star Chamber: the court meets in secret, only hears the government’s side, and approves 99 percent+ of all the search warrants requested.”
Read more: http://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/372324-will-fisa-secrecy-doom-democracy
“The FISA court has always done a dismal job of overseeing the vast surveillance regime it helped spawn. FISA provided a stamp of legitimacy for perpetual deceit and perhaps the worst trampling of constitutional rights in American history. Regardless of the outcome of the current brawl, Washington must radically decrease secret surveillance of the American people.”
“All this shows is that power will also be abused. Secret power that much more. But neither major party is actually fighting to strip these powers from the government. The GOP’s complaints of abuse of power ring hollow as they approve other Fourth Amendment violations authorized by the same legislation! They are just fighting for the upper hand over their political opponents. This is not freedom versus tyranny. It is a war of factions. That said, it is laughable that some worry the release of this memo will cause dangerous distrust in the FBI and DOJ. The more people distrust those dangerous and secretive government agencies, the better!”
“Why were all members of Congress but the 22 on this committee kept in the dark about NSA and FBI lawlessness? Why didn’t the committee reveal to Congress what it claims is too shocking to discuss publicly before Congress voted on surveillance expansion? Where is the outrage that this information was known to a few in the House and kept from the remainder of Congress while it ignorantly voted to assault the right to privacy? The new law places too much power in the hands of folks who even the drafters of it have now acknowledged are inherently unworthy of this trust.”
Read more: http://www.judgenap.com/post/a-conspiracy-of-silence-assaults-privacy
“Barack Obama left office as the first two-termer in American history to have been at war every single day of his presidency. In his last year alone, U.S. forces dropped over 26,000 bombs on seven different countries. Trump blew past that tally nine months into his tenure. Indeed, this putatively ‘isolationist’ president has deepened entanglements on every battlefield Obama left him, ramping up airstrikes, kill-or-capture missions, and civilian casualties.”
Read more: https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/donald-trump-flaunts-dangers-presidential-power
“Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan: This trifecta of semi-permanent US military engagements reflects the extraordinary power of the Pentagon to sway even a president who had made opposition to such policies a central element of his campaign.”
“U.S. and Western politicians avert their eyes from this data and this correlation; acts of terror are explained away as ‘random,’ ‘mindless,’ and, perhaps most disingenuously of all, ‘unprovoked.’ The public, either unfamiliar with secret operations carried out by the U.S. military or intelligence services, or uninformed about the brutal nature of the foreign wars fought in their name, tend to buy into this fantasy of an ‘innocent’ America hated and attacked by hordes of ‘mad’ Muslims.”
Read more: https://theintercept.com/2018/01/22/blowback-cia-drones-middle-east/
“President Trump’s new Nuclear Posture Review is expected to call for new ‘low-yield’ nuclear weapons and an expansion of the scenarios in which the US may use a nuclear ‘first strike.’ Is this a good idea? We discuss in today’s Liberty Report…”