It’s time to ask tough questions about the National Security Agency’s surveillance activities — even for conservatives who have given the NSA the benefit of every doubt up until now....
Former NSA director Mike Hayden, in a speech to the Bipartisan Policy Center last week, dismissed the nation’s most outspoken transparency groups and privacy advocates as “nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous twentysomethings who haven’t talked to the opposite sex in five or six years.” That’s reminiscent of former CBS News executive Jonathan Klein’s 2004 defense of the forged George W. Bush National Guard memos that ultimately cost Dan Rather his anchor chair at the network. Klein lashed out at the bloggers who broke the news that the documents had been forged by contrasting CBS’s “multiple layers of checks and balances” with “a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing what he thinks.”
The fact is that we need to double-check all those “checks and balances” the NSA assures us will prevent abuse of its surveillance powers. Similarly, the media should inject some balance into how they treat President Obama’s assurances that nothing is wrong at the NSA.
◼ Oops: Typo made NSA intercepts mistakenly target Washington, not Egypt - Twitchy
Obama officials: Maybe a mistake by #NSA every now and then. Internal audit: 2,776 violations in just 1 year in just 1 metro area
— James Wheeler (@wheelertweets) August 16, 2013
To be clear, that was only an audit spanning 12 months, May 2011 to May 2012. There may have been more violations by NSA before and after.
— Anthony De Rosa (@AntDeRosa) August 16, 2013
WaPo: NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times. Obama: "Strong oversight by all 3 branches of gov and clear safeguards to prevent abuse"
— Byron Tau (@ByronTau) August 16, 2013
