From: The Guardian
Obama is draping the banner of change over the NSA status quo. Bulk surveillance that caused such outrage will remain in place
In response to political scandal and public outrage,
official Washington repeatedly uses the same well-worn
tactic. It is the one that has been hauled out over
decades in response to many of America's most significant
political scandals. Predictably, it is the same one that
shaped President Obama's much-heralded Friday
speech to announce his proposals for "reforming" the
National Security Agency in the wake of seven months of
intense worldwide controversy.
The crux of this tactic is that US political leaders
pretend to validate and even channel public anger by
acknowledging that there are "serious questions that have
been raised". They vow changes to fix the system and
ensure these problems never happen again. And they then
set out, with their actions, to do exactly the opposite:
to make the system prettier and more politically palatable
with empty, cosmetic "reforms" so as to placate public
anger while leaving the system fundamentally unchanged,
even more immune than before to serious challenge.
This scam has been so frequently used that it is now
easily recognizable. In the mid-1970s, the Senate
uncovered surveillance
abuses that had been ongoing for decades, generating
widespread public fury. In response, the US Congress
enacted a new law (Fisa) which featured two primary
"safeguards": a requirement of judicial review for any
domestic surveillance, and newly created committees to
ensure legal compliance by the intelligence community.
But the new court was designed to ensure that all of
the government's requests were approved: it met in secret,
only the government's lawyers could attend, it was staffed
with the most pro-government judges, and it was even
housed in the executive branch. As planned, the court over
the next 30 years virtually never said no to the
government. MORE
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