Which Members Of Congress Voted For Domestic Spying?

Yesterday, when we talked about conservative assholes who voted to deny Climate Change was real, we were able to look at a roll call vote and see who voted well and who voted badly. We saw that one Republican, Chris Gibson, voted with the Democrats-- and that all the Republicans who try to pass themselves off "mainstream," like Dave Reichert (WA), Frank LoBiondo (NJ), Michael Grimm (NY), Jeff Denham (CA), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (FL), Charlie Dent (PA), Peter King (NY), Mike Firzpatrick (PA), and David Jolly (FL) voted with the crazy extremists like Michele Bachmann, Fred Upton and Steve King. We also saw the slimy Blue Dogs from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- John Barrow (GA), Nick Rahall (WV), Henry Cuellar (TX), Collin Peterson (MN), Jim Matheson (UT)-- slither over to the other side of the aisle to vote with the Republicans, as usual.

But when it came to giving the CIA and NSA the authority to spy on Americans… I can't find a roll call vote. I suspect my own lousy Blue Dog congressman, Adam Schiff, would have voted for that, but I have no actual vote to go by. In his book, The Edward Snowden Affair, Michael Gurnow reported that the 2 heads of the Senate Intelligence Committee, chair Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and ranking member Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), were big supporters of the end of the right to privacy for citizens. Chambliss, in fact, "freely admitted the order had been consistently renewed for seven years but dubiously added, 'Every member of the United States Senate has been advised of this.' (Five days later, as they left a congressional briefing concerning the headline surveillance, Representative Elijah Cummings sardonically stated, 'We learned a lot [ ... ],' and his peer, Bill Pascrell said, 'People should know what’s going on in their name but we need to start with Congress knowing what the heck is going on.')

Snowden told James Bamford in his just-released, extensive interview for Wired that he was pushed into leaking all those NSA documents when he watched James Clapper-- another crook still not in prison-- lying to Congress about the NSA's domestic spying activities against the American public. "It’s like the boiling frog. You get exposed to a little bit of evil, a little bit of rule-breaking, a little bit of dishonesty, a little bit of deceptiveness, a little bit of disservice to the public interest, and you can brush it off, you can come to justify it. But if you do that, it creates a slippery slope that just increases over time, and by the time you’ve been in 15 years, 20 years, 25 years, you’ve seen it all and it doesn’t shock you. And so you see it as normal. And that’s the problem, that’s what the Clapper event was all about."

More from Gurnow: "The NSA’s power underwent a paradigm shift after 9/11. It was granted access to information which it did not have legal right to act upon. Before, the NSA’s domestic domain was restricted to American embassies and missions. The FBI deals with domestic issues, while the CIA contends with foreign matters of security. After 9/11, it was allowed to eavesdrop upon foreigners, then permitted to involve itself in communications between foreigners and Americans, all be- fore obtaining the carte blanche ability to wiretap anyone." Just in case you haven't been paying close attention, Dick Cheney is still not in prison.

Shortly after 9/11, then-President George W. Bush signed a top secret executive order permitting the NSA to wiretap without a warrant. His administration later justified the directive by arguing the process of obtaining war- rants was too time-consuming. As a result of the Times article, the FISC ruled in 2007 that warrants must be obtained if an NSA-desired communication passes through an American network. The Bush administration bought itself time by rebut- ting with a stopgap that permitted the NSA to continue wiretapping. The stopgap expired in 2008. By then everything was in place. Five years later it would be revealed that the U.S. government had merely placated the public. It had re- stricted one clandestine order, thereby insinuating wiretapping had come to an end shortly thereafter, all while gradually imple- menting a covert clone directive. As with the executive order, the public wasn’t privy to these machinations because they had taken place behind closed doors before being classified as top secret.

…The irony is that in 1975 the NSA was subject to a congressional investigation. The inquiry revealed that the agency had been intercepting domestic communications without a warrant since its creation in 1952. The NSA was found guilty of abusing its power after spying on peaceful antiwar protests and civil rights activists. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was chartered in 1978 as a result. The representative secret court which was created to uphold the FISA laws and prohibit warrantless wiretapping was now rubberstamping one order after another. Americans had been watched by the NSA for almost 60 years… The data being collected is labeled "metadata" instead of "communications" because individual warrants must be issued before "communications" can be confiscated.

[Glenn] Greenwald soundly establishes that the NSA wasn’t acting alone and Congress was privy to and implicated in the surveillance dragnet. He tells the tale of two senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, both members of the Intelligence Committee, and their two-year history of cryptically alluding to the government’s current surveillance policies and practices. Despite being unable to openly discuss the covert directive, it was nonetheless admitted that the American public would be "stunned" if it were made aware of the "secret legal interpretations" which had led to current spying tactics. Perhaps intentionally, Greenwald fails to comment upon the paradox involved in a domestic surveillance directive coming from a court which oversees foreign intelligence. Though the order explicitly states that Verizon calls which originate and end in a foreign land are exempt, it shrewdly includes the clause "[telecommunications] between the United States and abroad" so the court’s authority is applicable.

OK, so Wyden and Udall were good guys here and Feinstein and Chambliss were bad actors. What about everybody else? And did they not vote specifically to prevent us from knowing? I think so.