Wow! Just Wow!

Ann Alhouse is a liberal/libertarian Law Professor and blogger, who voted for Obama in 2008 (see her rationale embedded below), and has this to say about the growing NSA phone scandal:

I suspect it was someone who wanted to distract us from the IRS scandal (and other scandals) so that the scandal of the moment would be one that's about Bush. I supported Bush's war on terror and resisted the "committed anti-antiterror partisan[s]." It became very important to fight terrorism after 9/11, and one reason I decided to vote for Barack Obama in 2008 was that I thought it would be helpful for Democrats to be put in a position where they would need to endorse things Bush chose to do to protect us from terrorist attacks.

So the purpose of leaking the phone record revelations was to distract from the IRS scandal?  Its seems more like an amplification of the central complaint behind the IRS scandal, the increasingly intrusive government being willing to force citizens to reveal all their secrets, needed or not, and then to be able to potentially use them in political attacks.  Do you trust the NSA not to leak potentially political damaging information on opponents to Obama?  Yes?  A few months ago you might have said the same thing about the IRS.


From the comments in the thread

Nathan Alexander said...

I understand the protections built in to prevent the improper use of citizen information. They are much like the protections built into credit card payment systems for Presidential campaigns that prevent foreign payments. They are also similar to the strong Constitutional free speech protections that prevent the IRS from targeting people due to their political affiliations.

I understand that in the modern electronic age, you cannot provide a clear loophole for terrorists to exploit to target the US. So you must collect lots of information, some of it on US citizens that you will discard after determining it to not be of anti-terrorism value. Despite my snark in the above paragraph, there really are strong protections for citizens' privacy rights.

The reason for the snark, however, is that those who carry out the system must be committed to protecting those rights. There must be a motivation to do so.

Under President Bush, I was fully convinced that President Bush was doing it only to catch terrorists. There was no indication before, during, or after, that any citizenry info was retained or used inappropriately.

But President Obama shows no commitment to fighting terrorism. He changed the name of the War on Terror to Overseas Contingency Operations. His administration changed the focus from Islamic terrorism to home-grown, so-called "right wing" terrorism, and started calling terrorist acts "man-caused disasters".

President Obama also has shown little concern for international issues, in comparison to an obvious intense focus on domestic political issues. He has never stopped being in campaign mode. He has never stopped demonizing conservatives merely for holding our views. His supporters have incessantly labelled any opposition to his agenda as "racist".

The EPA charges fees to conservative groups that it waives for liberals. The IRS targets conservative groups, and pressures at least one to stop protesting Planned Parenthood. In response to Benghazi, the DoJ leaked personal information about a filmmaker, who was jailed on an unrelated pretext in order to scapegoat and punish him for exercising free speech in order to cover for Administration mistakes.

In the 2012 campaign, the Obama administration used data-mining techniques on its supporters to maximize the effectiveness of campaigning and funds, and then won in extremely narrow margins in battleground states where all sorts of voting shenanigans occurred (democrat poll workers voting multiple times in Ohio, campaign managers demonstrating knowledge of how to effectively vote fraudulently in others' names in Virginia, conservative poll watchers illegally thrown out of polling locations in Pennsylvania, Democratic campaign manager forced to resign for vote fraud in Florida, and more).

So I have no confidence that this information was properly handled. I have every fear, with evidence to match, that the Obama administration deliberately sought this information for improper purposes, in order to continue to target conservatives and force them out of the public debate, in order to expand Democrat party power and fundamentally transform the nation (finally, a campaign promise he actually didn't break!) into a social justice utopia (meaning: totalitarian police state).