Double Scoop of Lies

So everything that the government has said so far about the NSA Scandals has turned out to be wrong or just plain flat out lies?  Listen, I took a somewhat blasé approach to this initially.  The oodles of outrage seemed a little naive to me- I mean, were we really all the surprised?  Of course the government's been spying on us this entire time.  But with more and more revelations (this time from The Washington Post that broke last Thursday) my positions has moved from 'somewhat blasé' towards 'are you fucking kidding me?'

Let's consider:  WaPo had two big scoops on the NSA- but the one that really raised my eyebrows was the interview with the head of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, where he essentially admitted that they have to rely on the government agencies to tell them if they've broken the law.  I mean, I didn't exactly have a ton of faith in the FISA Courts to begin with- in their three decades or so of existence I don't think they've told the government 'no' once- which seems less like oversight and more like the government is the kid who wants to bum $20 off their Dad who's busy watching an NFL game, so they sneak downstairs and they're all like 'Daaaaaaad, can I have $20' and the Dad goes, 'I don't know, ask you mother.'  Or 'Sure, whatever.'   It's the equivalent of the police expecting criminals to call them to report crimes and it essentially seems that the supposed oversight of our intelligence programs is little more than farcical at best.

The other big scoop:  that the NSA has been giving Congress, the law and our privacy the old double bird for years now-  an internal audit of the NSA obtained by the WaPo reveals that they broke privacy rules thousands of times a year.   Not hundreds.  Not a couple of times a year.  THOUSANDS of times.  I'd be willing to say 'well, they go through a lot of data and maybe they just done fucked up somewhere' if it was closer to hundreds of times a year- but thousands?  Come on now.  That's the NSA just saying 'meh, fuck everybody, we're going to do what we want.'  (And please, please:  don't cue the Jack Nicholson 'You want me on that wall, You need me on that wall' bullshit from A Few Good Men. We are a nation of laws, people- if we can't rely on the government to follow it's own laws, then what kind of country are we going to end up being?)  There was an instance in 2008 (a Presidential election year, by the way) when a programming error started tagging calls from the 202 area code instead of country code 20.  So instead of Egypt, the NSA placed Washington D.C. under surveillance.  In 2012 alone, they logged 2,776 instances of unauthorized, illegal surveillance...  if your computer programs screw up that much, it's time to upgrade from Windows 95, people.

I'm honestly not sure what kind of oversight the NSA is under but it needs an upgrade, badly.  The FISA Courts need some serious teeth or they just need to be abolished, since apparently they don't do that much other than rubber-stamping whatever the government wants and more importantly, people have got to ignore the bullshit and demand some answers.  (EFF website is here, how to contact your Congresspeople and Senators, here and here.)

(Interesting postscript:  I don't know if this was random chance or a remarkably intelligent attempt to get the media to look at a bright shiny object that not related to this NSA business but the CIA has acknowledged the existence of Area 51 for the first time- and placed it on a map!)

UPDATED:  Well this is just wrong:  Glenn Greenwald's partner was detained by the UK police for over nine hours under the Terrorism Act.   So, just so we're clear:  Greenwald writes pieces exposing the shocking level of surveillance by the NSA that's quite possibly (yeah, let's go ahead and call it what it is:  illegal) and his partner gets detained, under the Terrorism Act?  So does this now mean that journalists = terrorists?   Whistleblowers = terrorists?  2016 is just around the corner and I'm hoping like hell people (and this incudes the media.  Any journalist that asks 'boxers or briefs?' at any televised debate should be dragged from his or her podium and tarred and feathered right then and there.  We need real live journalists not stenographers reporting puff pieces for the elites) start asking candidates hard, hard questions about where they stand:  with the new security state or with the Constitution?  (UK Wise: if the LibDems have any backbone left whatsoever, they'd withdraw from the Coalition and trigger new elections, but I doubt they will.  Which means the ball on the other side of the pond is square in the hands of Ed Miliband and the Labour Party.   Enough is enough already.)