Why Alan Grayson's Big Brother Is Not Watching You Act Is The Way To Go After Obama's Disappointing Speech Yesterday

After Obama's speech defending the incompetent and corrupt U.S. spy agencies, Democrats who disapprove of the way he has continued the Cheney NSA agenda that completely guts the Constitution, were in an awkward position. How to disagree with his bullshit authoritarian stand without completely trashing him. Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley gave it a try:

“It is unacceptable that our government has indiscriminately swept up millions of cell phone records of law-abiding citizens. This is an outrageous abuse of Americans’ privacy. I’m glad the President has acknowledged the concerns with bulk collection and will explore options to remedy those concerns. It remains to be seen whether significant changes will be made, and I vow to continue to advocate for substantive reforms to protect Americans’ privacy.

“The FISA court also needs dramatic reforms. I support the President’s proposal of a public advocate in those court proceedings for the constitutional privacy rights of American citizens. I also appreciate the President’s commitment to declassify FISA court opinions, which is the principle embedded in my 2012 amendment to the FISA Amendments Act Reauthorization. Secret law cannot be tolerated in a democracy.

“Our nation is stronger when our civil rights as Americans are respected. I will continue to work with the Administration, Senator Wyden, and other colleagues to ensure our constitutional rights are honored in our laws and by our government.”

Civil libertarian David Swanson was less diplomatic in his assessment: "President Barack Obama gave a eulogy for the Fourth Amendment on Friday, and not even his fans are proclaiming victory.  In this moment when Obama is actually doing one thing I agree with (talking to Iran), more and more people seem to be slowly, agonizingly slowly, finally, finally, finally, recognizing what a complete huckster he is when it comes to pretty speeches about his crimes."

Similarly, Glenn Greenwald, writing for The Guardian yesterday, laid bare Obama's sad, tired tactics of deception.

In response to political scandal and public outrage, official Washington repeatedly uses the same well-worn tactic. It is the one that has been hauled out over decades in response to many of America's most significant political scandals. Predictably, it is the same one that shaped President Obama's much-heralded Friday speech to announce his proposals for "reforming" the National Security Agency in the wake of seven months of intense worldwide controversy.

The crux of this tactic is that US political leaders pretend to validate and even channel public anger by acknowledging that there are "serious questions that have been raised." They vow changes to fix the system and ensure these problems never happen again. And they then set out, with their actions, to do exactly the opposite: to make the system prettier and more politically palatable with empty, cosmetic "reforms" so as to placate public anger while leaving the system fundamentally unchanged, even more immune than before to serious challenge.

This scam has been so frequently used that it is now easily recognizable. In the mid-1970s, the Senate uncovered surveillance abuses that had been ongoing for decades, generating widespread public fury. In response, the US Congress enacted a new law (Fisa) which featured two primary "safeguards": a requirement of judicial review for any domestic surveillance, and newly created committees to ensure legal compliance by the intelligence community.

But the new court was designed to ensure that all of the government's requests were approved: it met in secret, only the government's lawyers could attend, it was staffed with the most pro-government judges, and it was even housed in the executive branch. As planned, the court over the next 30 years virtually never said no to the government.

Identically, the most devoted and slavish loyalists of the National Security State were repeatedly installed as the committee's heads, currently in the form of NSA cheerleaders Democrat Dianne Feinstein in the Senate and Republican Mike Rogers in the House. As the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza put it in a December 2013 article on the joke of Congressional oversight, the committees "more often treat … senior intelligence officials like matinee idols."

As a result, the committees, ostensibly intended to serve an overseer function, have far more often acted as the NSA's in-house PR firm. The heralded mid-1970s reforms did more to make Americans believe there was reform than actually providing any, thus shielding it from real reforms.

CREDO was more diplomatic, but the effect was similar. They released a statement that is likely to anger and discourage the Democratic base and further point to a low turnout among Democratic voters in 2014. "As a former constitutional law professor who campaigned against warrantless surveillance of Americans when he ran for office in 2008, it should be a no-brainer for President Obama to put an end to the unconstitutional dragnet that captures data about the phone calls of virtually all Americans."

CREDO CEO Michael Kieschnick wrote that “Whether the president moves his telephone data dragnet to AT&T and Verizon, to some other third party, or keeps it at the NSA makes no difference. It’s still clearly unconstitutional and must be dismantled.”

As you can see in the video up top, Alan Grayson has already moved towards remedying the situation. He introduced a bill in Congress, likely to gather wide bipartisan support from Members (if not from the leadership of either corrupt Beltway party, the Big Brother Is Not Watching You Act (H.R. 3883). Following the recommendations of Obama's own blue ribbon report on how to deal with an out of control, Cheney-enabled NSA, Grayson's will would end the whole idea of mass warrantless data from U.S. citizens not suspected of any criminal activities. Grayson: "This is what it all comes down to: Are we going to live as men and women, as free autonomous beings, or are we cattle? I vote for human beings… The Fourth Amendment requires particularity and probable cause whenever the government gets anybody's private information. And that includes cellphone calls, websites you browse, your physical location and so on.  In neither case is the NSA adhering to those rules."

Grayson's bill, which Boehner and Cantor will probably try to bury in committees run by their cronies, is very simple and straight-forward, basically, just two sentences:

(a) Required Action-- The President and all Executive Departments and Independent Agencies shall take all such actions, including all necessary rulemaking, needed to implement the 46 enumerated recommendations of the report entitled “Liberty and Security in a Changing World” issued on December 12, 2013, by the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies.

(b) Grant Of Authority-- The President, Executive Departments, and Independent Agencies are granted all statutory authority necessary and proper to implement the recommendations referred to in subsection (a).