Guardian readers, perhaps?

Nobody posting here is shocked, shocked, but many commenting on the Snowden document dump in the mass media seem to be...

I don't want to get into a parsing battle with you, ;-), but the meaning of words do matter.

1) AFAIK, if you're referring to the Clapper answer to Wyden's question, Wyden hasn't accused Clapper of lying to him. Or were you referring to something else?

http://www.washingto...99ff459_blog.html

SEN. RON WYDEN (D-Ore.): ÂThis is for you, Director Clapper, again on the surveillance front. And I hope we can do this in just a yes or no answer because I know Senator Feinstein wants to move on. Last summer, the NSA director was at a conference, and he was asked a question about the NSA surveillance of Americans. He replied, and I quote here, ÂThe story that we have millions or hundreds of millions of dossiers on people is completely false.Â

ÂThe reason IÂm asking the question is, having served on the committee now for a dozen years, I donÂt really know what a dossier is in this context. So what I wanted to see is if you could give me a yes or no answer to the question, does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?Â

Director of National Intelligence JAMES CLAPPER: ÂNo, sir.Â

SEN. WYDEN: ÂIt does not?Â

DIR. CLAPPER: ÂNot wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly.Â

SEN. WYDEN: ÂThank you. IÂll have additional questions to give you in writing on that point, but I thank you for the answer.Â

[...]

On Tuesday, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) issued a tough statement, saying Director of National Intelligence James Clapper did not give a Âstraight answerÂ to his question. Wyden added that the day before the hearing, he gave ClapperÂs office advance notice that he would be asking this particular question and that Âafter the hearing was over, my staff and I gave his office a chance to amend his answer.Â

2) The NSA does not "spy" on US persons. They did in the past, as we know and as my link above indicates, but their activities were reigned in by the Church Committee reforms. Having a huge database of metadata that can only be accessed under tightly controlled circumstances is not "spying on US citizens". I'm sorry, but it isn't. It certainly has the potential for abuse, and maybe it should be ended, but I'm not willing to take it as evidence that some "deep state" (Hi Rand!) is destroying our Constitutional rights.

Again, I find the outrage about this NSA stuff to be a distraction from the real pressing issues we all face. Of course, the rules and procedures governing the NSA need to be amended now to give people confidence that they are not abusing their power. They can't properly function without that confidence from Congress and the people and the representatives of foreign partners. But I haven't lost that confidence, so I'm not the audience...

Wyden and some others filed an amicus brief in a US District Court case (First Unitarian Church vs. National Security Agency). You can read it here - http://www.scribd.co...in-NSA-Court-Case The argument, as I skim it, is that the bulk collection program is over-broad, not effective, and the critical information could be gathered other ways (and all of that may be true), not that the NSA has lied or that the NSA has in fact broken the law.

(IANAL, but it seems to me that the Senators are asking the court to take their view on the intent of the law over the Administration's. I don't know how much weight it will hold given all of the previous court cases on this stuff. I believe that courts usually don't want to get involved in "political" battles of interpretation between the Executive and Congress - i.e. the Congress could change the law without the courts getting involved.)

If Wyden's view is correct, then he should get support to change the law. Battling it out in court seems to me to be the wrong way for Congress to attack the problem.

Eisenhower's speech was a good one. He should have kept "Congressional" in that section - http://www.consortiu...2011/011611b.html It's a shame it took until the Church Committee to finally reign in many of the abuses.

Eternal vigilance - http://www.monticell...eternal-vigilance - Yes! But le'ts be clear-headed as well.

We'll see what happens.

My $0.02. FWIW.

Cheers,
Scott.

'overview-scale' Problem, the Generic math one:

Many/most? exponentials do not promise or present a reliable inflection point enroute to ever-^upwards^.
As we are amidst the burgeoning of unprecedented instant-techno advances in many fields, some by orders-of-magnitude!
so is it necessary for any Watchdogs to reliably note dV/dt and try to stay level with the daily 'improvements'.

Nobody in government (or.. the rest of us) can rely on former time-frames/past experiences of 'progressive oversight',
for checking how initial safeguards worked-to-date, where these did not; where to fine-tune etc.
--with some expectation that we shall have time to revise before much damage occurs, of irreversible scale.

I think that's where we Are.
Just as you can never retrieve anything, once on the Intarweb; so cannot you undo the--almost-certain--proliferation of ..'Oh, just a few'??
mondo-dbases being duplicated/secreted. Amongst the accelerating multitudes.

You still want to wait-and-see. We need only look at the 'end'-date of our (ongoing) Civil War --> 1964! when the first Civil Rights Acts-with-teeth ... finally came about,
largely if not Only, via the psychological zeitgeist of honoring an assassinated President.
(I watched the Reactionaries' ritual-objections fade-down as nearly all the meeja demonstrated both the Power and the Will ... to excoriate fringe nay-sayers.)

We Will See, of course. (We'd best both be actively Watching for the duration, though, eh?
I'm just not waiting for a fait accompli to confirm any of the easy extrapolations from today.)
Rampant clinical-insanity has never before approached today's levels. You tell Me what that 'means'??

[Rhetorical question]--there are no experts in the unprecedented. BHO is, however an Expert at reliably exuding calmness, in the face of.. umm, [What'cha Got?]

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