Op-Ed: Bringing Democracy To National Security Policy

[Coyotl]

http://www.citizensforethics.org/blog/entry/op-ed-bringing-democracy-to-national-security-policy
February 21, 2014
Op-Ed: Bringing Democracy To National Security Policy
By Daniel Schuman

In the aftermath of Edward Snowden's disclosures, public debate largely focused on balancing personal privacy and national security interests as they relate to governmental collection of communications data. While this approach is fruitful, it consumes so much attention that it inadvertently overshadows a fundamental question: who authorized the government’s wide-reaching national security policies and who oversees and reviews their implementation?

Our political system depends upon a series of checks and balances to keep government in its proper place and avoid an undue concentration of power. The reverberations from Mr. Snowden's disclosures reveal just how broken our political system is when it comes to national security.

Take the FISA court. At creation, the court's role was very narrow: review executive branch requests to secretly surveil individuals inside the U.S. suspected of acting as foreign intelligence agents. Over time, however, its role expanded to review broad constitutional and operational questions. Yet, in the words of former Sen. Walter Mondale (D-Minn.), who helped create it, the FISA court "never had the authority to declare law" but nevertheless is "now taking cases that should go to regular federal courts." Indeed, the court’s jurisdiction now extends well beyond that envisioned by Congress, it evades public accountability by issuing secret opinions, and it undermines traditional Article III courts empowered to address these questions in an adversarial setting. It is secret law made flesh.

The executive branch also has shown a disturbing willingness to sideline co-equal branches of government by unilaterally and secretly reinterpreting federal law and the Constitution itself. The executive branch’s expansive interpretation of the law so disturbs Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), one of the authors of the USA PATRIOT ACT, that he now leads a bipartisan effort to amend the act to curtail the domestic surveillance powers of intelligence agencies. The administration has ignored this rebuke, claiming to have put in place its own mechanisms to prevent abuse ................

[riderinthestorm]

1. Great article. I especially liked this paragraph

"Inexplicably, Congress quietly acquiesced to the executive branch’s insistence upon maintaining sole responsibility for the government’s intelligence operations. The intelligence oversight committees—created after national security scandals that included the assassination of foreign leaders, infiltration of peaceful domestic political groups, and dirty tricks at home and abroad—have become the intelligence community's biggest cheerleaders. "

Because it underscores that Congress and the executive branch BOTH want the NSA to keep doing what they're doing which is basically spying to ensure economic imperialism for the elites. (please note this is different than industrial espionage - this is spying on OPEC, climate change summits, EU trade commissioner, Davos etc)

Alexander has already admitted the NSA has (maybe) stopped ONE terrorist attack in its history. Yet leaked information makes it clear that the billions (trillions?) of dollars we pay as citizens is going to prop up this shameful spy operation that's only used to get insider info on global economic movements so the insiders can get richer and richer.

The NSA's involvement in droning people, its spying on allies, its duplicity with the Five Eyes program ("oh no, we're not spying on Americans - the Australians are doing it for us and reporting it!), and more only makes us MORE susceptible to terrorism.