NSA's biggest congressional apologist is outraged that the NSA spied on him and Israel

[friendly_iconoclast]

https://boingboing.net/2015/12/30/nsas-biggest-congressional-a.html

Rep Pete Hoekstra [R-MI] calls spying "a matter of fact," he attacked a bill that would impose oversight on the NSA, and he "laughs at foreign governments who are shocked they’ve been spied on because they, too, gather information" -- except when the targets of the NSA's surveillance are Congress and Israel's leaders.

Then Hoekstra is "outraged" and wants "NSA and Obama officials... investigated and prosecuted."

This happens literally every time a Congressional spying apologist gets spied on: they freak out about privacy and the Fourth Amendment, and forget all about spying as a "fact of life" and "nothing to hide, nothing to fear."

What happened to all the dismissive lectures about how if you’ve done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to hide? Is that still applicable? Or is it that these members of the U.S. Congress who conspired with Netanyahu and AIPAC over how to sabotage the U.S. government’s Iran Deal feel they did do something wrong and are angry about having been monitored for that reason?

[delrem]

1. Well, Hillary wouldn't have done that. She'll realign with Netanyahu and everything'll be OK.

That's one thing that she says that I actually believe.
So that's a plus. Right?

[Midnight Writer]

2. Don't worry, Rep. Hoekstra. It's not a problem if you have nothing to hide, right?

[pwhtckll]

3. What's a spy agency to do?

Good. Foreign leaders are valid intelligence targets, and the members of Congress shouldn't be so naïve they think they can communicate with those leaders and not be incidentally intercepted.

But who expects intellectual consistency from the right-wingers who believe everything Obama does is wrong?

[underthematrix]

4. Let's clear something up because a lot of

Last edited Sat Jan 2, 2016, 12:38 PM - Edit history (1)

America is stuck on stupid. The NSA was not spying on the House member. The member got caught in the NSA sweep bcause he was having conversations with a foreign country on how to undermine US Iran which is a violation of the LOGAN ACT. I hope the conversations are leaked and he's charged with treason. Thank you NSA

[newfie11]

5. Thanks for putting the real truth out there nt

[davidn3600]

6. No one has ever been successfully prosecuted under the Logan Act

And from what legal experts say, the law wouldn't survive in court today because it's out of date.

Only one person has been indicted under the law in 1803, but the government dropped the case.

So many members of Congress over the course of decades have discussed politics with foreign leaders without permission from the executive branch. Heck, Nancy Pelosi went and talked with Bashar Al-Asaad against the wishes of the Bush administration. So she was violating Logan too. But she wasn't prosecuted because it wouldn't survive. And the federal government doesn't want a bad ruling on it.

Logan Act is an empty threat.

[randome]

7. If not treason, then can someone be charged with gross stupidity?

I mean, after all the attention given to the NSA for the past couple of years, how utterly clueless do you have to be to not understand that foreign communications are monitored?
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Stop looking for heroes. BE one.[/center][/font][hr]

[Octafish]

8. NSA turned on Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) - the last guy to lead a REAL investigation of NSA

Frank Church was a patriot, a hero and a statesman, truly a great American.

The guy also led the last real investigation of CIA, NSA and FBI. When it came to NSA Tech circa 1975, he definitely knew what he was talking about:

“That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.

I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”

-- Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) FDR New Deal, Liberal, Progressive, World War II combat veteran. A brave man, the NSA was turned on him. Coincidentally, he narrowly lost re-election a few years later.

And what happened to Church, for his trouble to preserve Democracy:

In 1980, Church will lose re-election to the Senate in part because of accusations of his committee’s responsibility for Welch’s death by his Republican opponent, Jim McClure.

SOURCE: http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=frank_church_1

From GWU's National Security Archives:

"Disreputable if Not Outright Illegal": The National Security Agency versus Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, Art Buchwald, Frank Church, et al.

Newly Declassified History Divulges Names of Prominent Americans Targeted by NSA during Vietnam Era

Declassification Decision by Interagency Panel Releases New Information on the Berlin Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Panama Canal Negotiations

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 441
Posted – September 25, 2013
Originally Posted - November 14, 2008
Edited by Matthew M. Aid and William Burr

Washington, D.C., September 25, 2013 – During the height of the Vietnam War protest movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the National Security Agency tapped the overseas communications of selected prominent Americans, most of whom were critics of the war, according to a recently declassified NSA history. For years those names on the NSA's watch list were secret, but thanks to the decision of an interagency panel, in response to an appeal by the National Security Archive, the NSA has released them for the first time. The names of the NSA's targets are eye-popping. Civil rights leaders Dr. Martin Luther King and Whitney Young were on the watch list, as were the boxer Muhammad Ali, New York Times journalist Tom Wicker, and veteran Washington Post humor columnist Art Buchwald. Also startling is that the NSA was tasked with monitoring the overseas telephone calls and cable traffic of two prominent members of Congress, Senators Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Howard Baker (R-Tennessee).

SNIP...

Another NSA target was Senator Frank Church, who started out as a moderate Vietnam War critic. A member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee even before the Tonkin Gulf incident, Church worried about U.S. intervention in a "political war" that was militarily unwinnable. While Church voted for the Tonkin Gulf resolution, he later saw his vote as a grave error. In 1965, as Lyndon Johnson made decisions to escalate the war, Church argued that the United States was doing "too much," criticisms that one White House official said were "irresponsible." Church had been one of Johnson's Senate allies but the President was angry with Church and other Senate critics and later suggested that they were under Moscow's influence because of their meetings with Soviet diplomats. In the fall of 1967, Johnson declared that "the major threat we have is from the doves" and ordered FBI security checks on "individuals who wrote letters and telegrams critical of a speech he had recently delivered." In that political climate, it is not surprising that some government officials eventually nominated Church for the watch list.[10]

SOURCE: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB441/

I wonder if Sen. Richard Schweiker (R-CT), a liberal Republican, also got the treatment from NSA?

“I think that the report, to those who have studied it closely, has collapsed like a house of cards, and I think the people who read it in the long run future will see that. I frankly believe that we have shown that the [investigation of the] John F. Kennedy assassination was snuffed out before it even began, and that the fatal mistake the Warren Commission made was not to use its own investigators, but instead to rely on the CIA and FBI personnel, which played directly into the hands of senior intelligence officials who directed the cover-up.” — Senator Richard Schweiker on “Face the Nation” in 1976.

Lost to History NOT

Hoekstra, the Republican, didn't give a hoot about any of that until NSA was turned on him, 40 years later. Wish his party and the rest of the People's representatives -- including our Party -- had stood up en masse with Church back then. We wouldn't have secret government spying running the world's great superpower as a "Money trumps peace" cash cow.