Nothing To See Here
… So, move along citizens, just move along.
Zero gave a speech that was supposed to be about reforming the NSA’s habit of spying on everyone, what came out was a speech to calm the intelligence community while doing nothing about the flagrant abuses of the civil rights of US citizens.
Marcy Wheeler has an annotated version of the speech. Lambert as Corrente called it a nothingburger. Digby noted that it didn’t restore her confidence. Charlie Pierce panned it. McClatchy noted that the Europeans didn’t see anything in the way of meaningful reform.
Since the Snowden documents started appearing, people have been looking at the effectiveness of this program. The justification for riding rough-shod over everyone’s privacy was to stop terrorist attacks. So far not one of these studies can find any evidence of it working. In the meantime, several attacks, including the Boston bombing, that should have been caught, weren’t.
People need to remember that the intelligence community had the necessary information to stop the 9/11 attacks, but they lacked the resources to put it all together. We didn’t need more data, we needed more people looking at the data we were collecting under the programs in place before 9/11 and the Patriot Act.
January 18, 2014 12 Comments
