Spy vs. Spy Citizen

What did the "infamous" Snowden leaks tell us? Many things, and we're still learning, but here's one, via Joan McCarter of Kos, reported by the WaPo:

NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year, audit finds
By Barton Gellman, Published: August 15

The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents.

Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans

NSA vs, Us

or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by statute and executive order. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of U.S. e-mails and telephone calls.

The documents, provided earlier this summer to The Washington Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, include a level of detail and analysis that is not routinely shared with Congress or the special court that oversees surveillance. In one of the documents, agency personnel are instructed to remove details and substitute more generic language in reports to the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

In one instance, the NSA decided that it need not report the unintended surveillance of Americans. A notable example in 2008 was the interception of a “large number” of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused the U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt, according to a “quality assurance” review that was not distributed to the NSA’s oversight staff.

In another case, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has authority over some NSA operations, did not learn about a new collection method until it had been in operation for many months. The court ruled it unconstitutional.

...

(Bolds mine. - SB) Please read the whole thing. It will provide you your morning dose of confidence in the competency and goodwill of this most important government agency. [/irony]

UPDATE: Bryan has some additional insight, and a link to some rather trenchant observations by Charles Pierce.

Espionage And Leaks... And Presidents Who Cannot Or Will Not Tell The Difference

Leak stopper

With the laying of charges of espionage against Edward Snowden, Barack Obama joins Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush in the exclusive group of presidents who have used the Espionage Act of 1917 as a club with which to beat leakers of information that embarrassed their administrations. Kevin Gosztola of FDL, who actually can tell the difference between espionage and leaks, explores the likely consequences if this course of action... so far used by Obama eight times, more often than by all other presidents combined... becomes common practice.

Leak stopper

Gosztola's article is long and thought-provoking, and I will not attempt to summarize it. If you give a damn about whether the American press and media are able to operate to the advantage of an open and democratic American government and a passionately motivated American people, you need to read the whole thing. If you don't, and if Obama succeeds where the other above-named presidents failed in establishing espionage charges as a default brickbat against leakers, you may be literally asking for the consequences Gosztola outlines, quoting Jonathan Alter's words from the latter's book The Promise:

Obama had one pet peeve that could make him lose his cool. It was a common source of anger for presidents: leaks. Complaints about loose lips became a constant theme of Obama’s early presidency. At his first Cabinet meeting he made a point of saying that he didn’t want to see his Cabinet “litigating” policy through the New York Times and the Washington Post. At a Blair House retreat for the Cabinet and senior staff at the end of July he devoted about a quarter of his comments to urging his people to keeping their disagreements within the family: “We should be having these debates on the inside, not the outside.” And during his twenty hours of deliberations over Afghanistan in the fall, he returned repeatedly to the theme. Naturally in Washington nearly every time he got upset about leaks it leaked.

For all his claims that he didn’t want yes-men around him, no one on his staff was brave enough to tell the president that obsessing over leaks was a colossal waste of time. (Aides should have recognized that the age-old problem in Washington isn’t managing leaks, but managing the president’s fury over them.) But it wouldn’t have mattered: leaks offended Obama’s sense of discipline and reminded him of everything he disliked about the capital. He was fearsome on the subject, which seemed to bring out his controlling nature to an even greater degree than usual...

I am increasingly convinced, notwithstanding all of Obama's mitigating virtues, that his essence is the stuff of which totalitarian leaders are made. He needs to be watched closely, and prevented to the extent possible by the counterbalance of other branches of our government from enforcing an un-American discipline on the world of American journalism. Our nation's survival as a free and open society may depend on it.

Journalism, including the release and publication of leaks, is not espionage: it is an essential element in the ongoing battle against the actions of controlling presidents and their governments. It must never be shut down or chilled out of existence by threats, applied through archaic laws, to the lives and freedoms of journalists.

Obama's War On Leaks

From MichaelMoore.com, with the usual reminder that individual items on Moore's front page are not linkable directly, we have a link to a post at Capital Comment by Shane Harris on the Obama administration's obsession with stopping leaks, and the extremes to which they will go to catch and prosecute leakers... and reporters who use them as sources:

“We’re out for scalps.” That’s what a senior Justice Department official told me when I asked what was behind the Obama administration’s unprecedented number of leak prosecutions. The “we” referred to federal prosecutors, but the official said the desire to see leakers punished extended to the White House, as well. The official, who also made it clear that reporters who talked to sources about classified information were putting themselves at risk of prosecution, asked not to be quoted by name.

The use of the DoJ for manifestly punitive measures against the press, to an extent not pursued by any prior president (even Bush 43), should be grounds for concern by Americans who believe we have a right to know what our government is doing.

This is not a liberal/conservative issue; this is a good-government issue. All presidential administrations... all of them... bend or break the rules all the time, doing favors for friends, sending business their way, giving them advance information about administration plans, trying to make their opponents look bad in press and media, etc. Without leaks, Americans have no hope of knowing about these abuses of government power; with leaks, there's at least a hope. A government without leaks is a government free to be as totalitarian as it wishes. And that is, to all appearances, the kind of government Obama has in mind. Please read the linked post for details. They are unsurprising, but you need to confront them.

Would Rmoney be any better? Silly question... of course not. Rmoney would unhesitatingly throw the whole White House press corps in jail on the mere suspicion that one received a leak. Draconian responses are the M.O. of the Republican Party, and Mittens is about as uninspired, uninspiring and unimaginative a Republican as you'll find.

But I cannot offer Obama more than my personal vote, and that mainly because he is less evil on women's rights. I cannot offer him my endorsement. The oh‑dash‑it‑all of hope has arrived, and my hopes are suitably dashed.