Defending government, not the people

Institutions do learn to defend themselves, even at the cost of the people who built them.  Setting up a department, a committee, a sub-committee are all relatively straightforward tasks.  Come back in a few months or years and find that it's almost impossible to dismantle them, even if their relevance is long dead. 

We get it wrong when we rail against "the elites."  What we're really talking about is "the establishment."

So when you find that the CIA is costing us billions (and paying AT&T $10 million a year) to duplicate the work of the NSA, you want  to bang your head against the wall, right?  And when you go on to find that the CIA is "paying AT&T more than $10 million a year to assist with overseas counterterrorism investigations by exploiting the company’s vast database of phone records, which includes Americans’ international calls, according to government officials," you think about moving to Idaho and bunking down with the militants?

The program adds a new dimension to the debate over government spying and the privacy of communications records, which has been focused on National Security Agency programs in recent months. The disclosure sheds further light on the ties between intelligence officials and communications service providers. And it shows how agencies beyond the N.S.A. use metadata — logs of the date, duration and phone numbers involved in a call, but not the content — to analyze links between people through programs regulated by an inconsistent patchwork of legal standards, procedures and oversight.

Because the C.I.A. is prohibited from spying on the domestic activities of Americans, the agency imposes privacy safeguards on the program, said the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because it is classified. Most of the call logs provided by AT&T involve foreign-to-foreign calls, but when the company produces records of international calls with one end in the United States, it does not disclose the identity of the Americans and “masks” several digits of their phone numbers, the officials said.

Still, the agency can refer such masked numbers to the F.B.I., which can issue an administrative subpoena requiring AT&T to provide the uncensored data. The bureau handles any domestic investigation, but sometimes shares with the C.I.A. the information about the American participant in those calls, the officials said. ...NYT

But here's the thing: if we realize that not only are we being spied on by  our own  government but that we're actually paying for duplications of that spying in several agencies while under suspicion ourselves, do we finally get to tear the structure down and start fresh? 

No way.

Are we allowed to empty offices? Unplug machinery? 

Dream on!  For a start, we the people do not have the security clearances to do the job.

But wait!  Congress can be expected to protect us from such the easy alliance of corporations with goverment in government's spying on its own people? 

No, silly.  "... The report warned that the existence of the government’s still-classified legal theory created a 'significant gap' in 'accountability and oversight' and urged Congress to modify the statute. Lawmakers have not acted on that recommendation."

Doesn't that tell you who and what "national security" is really designed to protect?

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Meanwhile, the White House is considering some changes that could easily be dismissed as cosmetic.

The Obama administration is considering ending a controversial policy that since 2010 has placed one military official at the head of both the nation’s largest spy agency and its cyber-operations command, U.S. officials said.

National Security Council officials are scheduled to meet soon to discuss the issue of separating the leadership of the National Security Agency and Cyber Command, a shift that some officials say would help avoid an undue concentration of power in one individual and separate entities with two fundamentally different missions: spying and conducting military attacks.

The administration is also discussing whether the NSA should be led by a civilian.

Officials said privately that the changes could help tamp the current furor over the NSA’s sweeping powers by narrowing the authorities assigned to its director. ...WaPo

Would Hillary Clinton "tamp the fury" or actually do something to change the system? I think we know the answer to that, unfortunately.