Shepard Smith and Chris Wallace are a credit to Fox News, and I mean that. They would be a credit to any cable news channel... even if it wasn't Fox News. Shepard Smith and Joe Scarborough are right to be concerned here. The president has been an utter disappointment when it comes to the transparency he vowed to bring to government, and as a guardian of our privacy. Why should we even expect transparency on how the government handles privacy, from an an administration that elsewhere claims its own activities within the IRS weren't even transparent to the president. Why are we so upset? As Jack Balkin notes the advent of the security state is inevitable. He notes that we can either have one that collects as little data as necessary and tells us as much possible about what it is doing, or we can have one that collects as much data as possible and tells us as little as possible. Anyone who thinks there is any doubt as to which one a secret program, most of our senators and representatives were unaware of, that is a vacuum cleaner sucking up the whole internet falls into is under a delusion. Hypocrisy is also troubling here. This president criticized the Bush administration for searching library records. What is the difference between what the Bush administration was doing in respect to those issues and the course that Obama has pursued? Is it that the Bush administration searched records without any transparency at all? Oh wait... that is what has happened here as well. Senator Merkley of Oregon started looking into this rabbit hole and found himself in a classified security wonderland he was not allowed to even address through legislation! He was reduced to introducing an amendment that in effect said, "Hey... um... there is a program that is classified that I can't talk about that is concerning... and maybe we could declassify some of it so that we could engage in some oversight." While Bush assumed the powers that he exercised, Obama has merely built up a secret legal architecture to defend them. One that is without proper oversight and predicated on a legal framework that is one of the most deferential interpretations defending the exercise of government power. While I usually respect the voice Chris Wallace brings to our national discourse, I am a bit perplexed here. He states that the FISA court is providing the necessary oversight, and that he wouldn't want to trade the freedoms we have for those that they have in China. First of all the FISA court is a joke that almost never ends with any punchline other than approval of the actions taken in the name of security. Rick Klein revealed that there was a letter sent to Senate leader Harry Reid from the NSA last year, in it is stated that the FISA court had 1,789 requests that same year as of late August. Only one was rejected. This must be because the people running our national security apparatus are so competent and almost never engage in overreach. Anyone who flirts with such a fantasy must dismiss the entire messy history these agencies have had, and why FISA was set up in an attempt to use smoke and mirrors to placate those who wanted to reign in the abuses perpetrated by them. We have courts that work and I don't see how one that has turned itself into a rubber stamp has any resemblance to them, or counts as oversight. While his reference to FISA is irritating, his reference to China is frightening. How is China any measure of what kind of state we want to live under. Is this any kind of argument at all. It ought to make us shudder. The security state we now live in has been bipartisan, and if you want to recognize how far it has come. China has become a measure of what kind of society we are.
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