It's a very contemporary American belief: if you have the means to do something, just do it. The strength of one's belief in that can obliterate all kinds of reasons for not doing that something: the fact that doing it for pleasure or gain could endanger or hurt others should not necessarily deter you. If you can do it, do it.
(For me, the huge cost to others of this fanatical egotism was summed up by a snowy photo I saw somewhere. It was attached to a news story about an incident in a park in Alberta? Colorado? Some place with deep snow and high, ragged mountains. We see a patch of level, deep snow, a sign indicating danger ahead, a fence at the edge of a cliff. Standing at left a couple of rangers talking. In the snow, the tracks of a snowmobile, a break the fence where two people on a snowmobile had sped past the danger sign and straight over the cliff. They had brought the machine into the park against the rules. They had been speeding around, pursued by park rangers. They (evidently) didn't read signs. They had driven straight through a fence and fallen to their deaths. Except one didn't die immediately. A rescue was attempted by one of the rangers who (unclear) either died in the attempt or was severely disabled. In the end, a joy ride by a couple of adults who decided that if they could do it, why not do it?)
Thus Romney buying out other people's businesses and leaving thousands out of work, all for a tricky financial gain. Or NSA's decision to accept no limits other than the limits posed by the technology they were using. NSA has been riding the snowmobile, fast and without consideration for outcomes, through all our lives and the lives of our friends and allies.
Who knew?
People who follow intelligence matters always knew that the technical capabilities of the N.S.A. and its British sibling, C.G.H.Q., were far-reaching. But five months after Snowden’s initial revelations, it is evident that its appetite for intercepting data, and its willingness to circumvent legal and diplomatic niceties, were also extraordinary. Indeed, the agency now appears to be using the astonishing extent of its activities as a justification for failing to keep the President informed that it was listening in on the German Chancellor and other world leaders. According to the Journal, “officials said the NSA has so many eavesdropping operations under way that it wouldn’t have been practical to brief him on all of them.”
Well, that’s O.K. then. Except, of course, it isn’t. From the very beginning of this, the biggest question has been about the supervision—or lack of supervision—of the spying agencies: Who watches the watchers? ...JohnCassidy,NewYorker
Followed by the political question: did Obama know?
Did Obama know then that the U.S. government had been routinely spying on Merkel and other prominent leaders of countries allied with the United States? Did he know that it was busy sweeping up metadata about phone calls in France, Spain, and other friendly countries? (According to press reports, this N.S.A. program logged telephone numbers and the duration of conversations, but didn’t record the content of calls.) If he did, it is disturbing. If he didn’t, it is even more disturbing. ...JohnCassidy,NewYorker
It's quite probable that he didn't know. I don't think we fully grasp the extent of secrecy and turf-guarding within the federal government. Sometimes a guy at a desk worries a lot more about protecting his job from another guy in another agency at another desk than he worries about protecting America from conspiracies in Central Asia. In the same way, he may be more worried about his job tenure if he says "we shouldn't be looking at this stuff" than if he sails ahead, along with rest, into off-limits areas because the technology supports it. Never know what you might find that could get you a raise -- or at least some entertainment.
As it happens, the program targeting foreign leaders and allies like Angela Merkel was set up in 2002.
Obama never knew that the program targeted American allies, officials said, adding that he was aware of collection efforts aimed at leaders of “adversarial countries.”
Officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe still-classified activities in general terms, declined to outline the scope of the “head of state” collection program. They added that although Obama ordered the curtailing of some of the program and informed Merkel that the United States was not currently monitoring her calls, he was not angered that intelligence officials had not told him sooner about the extent of the eavesdropping.
“Their job is to get as much information for policymakers as possible,” a senior administration official said. “They’re used to coming at this from the other direction — that is, being criticized for not knowing enough. This is a new dynamic for them.”
If Obama and senior officials at the White House were unaware of the scope of the program, so, too, were key lawmakers, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who said Monday that her panel had not been properly informed of activities going back a decade or more. ...WaPo
So (surprise! surprise!) the administration doesn't run the bureaucracy, the bureaucracy does its own thing, periodically informing Congress if requested.
Here's how it works:
White House officials said Obama was not told about the extent of the world leader surveillance program before this summer because briefings are tailored to the president’s priorities. Iran, China, counterterrorism and other concerns ranked ahead of an accounting of intelligence collected about leaders of allied nations such as Germany, the officials said. ...WaPo
We should be forgiven for believing that the elected president is really an elected patsy, expected by both Congress and the bureaucracy over which Congress is supposed to oversee to be the fall guy for what goes wrong in government. As if.
When Bush and Congressional Republicans created the Department of Homeland Security, they created a monster -- a bureaucracy so enormous that just dragging itself through any given day must take all its energies. It's hard to imagine such a creature finding time to meet the standards of accountability most American citizens believe they have the right to expect. And with NSA in tight with both Defense and Homeland Security, we need to know a great deal more about the extent to which voters -- small "d" democrats -- are able to know and take responsibility for their government.
