Spies Like Us

Well Obama has messed up big time in my opinion. (I know I will give you a moment to sit down and read this again, yes I have criticized our new president who is a Democrat—take your time, I have a while.) Obama has sided with the Bush Administration on wire taping and is actually seeking to expand the whole shebang so that the government can NEVER be sued for listening in on normal Americans. So not only has he protected Bush's folks on torture, but now he is also doing the same on surveillance.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is throwing around terms like "state secrets" and "sovereign immunity" to explain why they think in the words of Salon's Glenn Greenwald "the Patriot Act bars any lawsuits of any kind for illegal government surveillance unless there is "willful disclosure" of the illegally intercepted communications."
Greenwald goes on to say:

In other words, beyond even the outrageously broad "state secrets" privilege invented by the Bush administration and now embraced fully by the Obama administration, the Obama DOJ has now invented a brand new claim of government immunity, one which literally asserts that the U.S. Government is free to intercept all of your communications (calls, emails and the like) and -- even if what they're doing is blatantly illegal and they know it's illegal -- you are barred from suing them unless they "willfully disclose" to the public what they have learned.

I get that Obama's administration doesn't want to piss off the folks who are doing intelligence work, but this seems to go against everything that Obama ran on. It brings me no joy to denounce Obama and the DOJ on this, but this kind of continuation and expansion of Bush-era tactics is something that we can not stand for as Americans. Not cool Mr. President.

As a citizen I am not at all comfortable with the idea that we citizens have no recourse against being bugged by our government. Hello, what about my civil liberties folks? Yeah I believe that Obama and his government is a better bunch than Bush, but that still doesn't make it cool. I don't want Gandhi listening in on my calls or reading my emails. I don't care who you are, I want my privacy no matter how inconvenient it is to my government or my political party.

Olbermann covers it in his fifth story last night:

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And here is a skoosh more from Keith:

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