Monthly Archives: June 2013

“I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom,” he said in a speech then. “No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. That is not who we are. And it is not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists.”

-President Obama in 2007

Limited government

Aside

If the executive branch is so vast that President Obama can’t be expected to know about all of these scandals, there’s an even bigger issue at stake here. The government is too big to be managed by the systems that we have in place. This transcends institutional incompetence and gets into a grand old American battle about the size of government, and in the wake of all of these scandals, it seems that big government’s advocates are the best case against it.

Limited government

Aside

So essentially the American public is subpoena’d all the time when they’re online according to the Washington Post. It’s really chilling that some companies are denying knowledge of this entire program and that lawmakers were oath-bound to not talk about PRISM when the law enabling it came up for review last year. This is very big brother-esque and just doesn’t seem right. If there are suspicious individuals out there, government can get a subpoena with probable cause and get information that way, but this entire program just assumes guilt and gives the government broad access to floods of information that simply make our right to privacy laughable.

NSA

Link

Funny, last time I checked, liberals didn’t like the PATRIOT Act. Don’t we have the right to privacy? The Obama Administration apparently doesn’t agree. This is a great example of how once powers are given to the government, they are never relinquished, as even those who vehemently opposed the PATRIOT Act are now using its most controversial provisions.

Obama

Link