As the report in today's Post tells us, the claims that NSA needed to violate the law to keep us safe have been discredited. The judicial system is waking up, has called NSA's intrusions into our lives unconstitutional. The pressure is on the President "decide whether to stand behind the sweeping collection or dismantle it and risk blame if there is a terrorist attack." Which is the same dilemma faced by an anti-secrecy senator when he walked into the Oval Office as president in 2009.
Now he also faces the results of an inquiry he ordered. The results of his panel's inquiry, the Post says, have "stunned" the White House.
NSA officials, who rarely miss a chance to cite Snowden’s status as a fugitive from the law, now stand accused of presiding over a program whose capabilities were deemed by the judge to be “Orwellian" and likely illegal. Snowden’s defenders, on the other hand, have new ammunition to argue that he is more whistleblower than traitor.
Similarly, U.S. officials who have dismissed NSA critics as naive about the true nature of the terrorist threat now face the findings of a panel handpicked by Obama and with access to classified files. Among its members were former deputy CIA director Michael J. Morrell and former White House counterterrorism adviser Richard A. Clarke, both of whom spent years immersed in intelligence reports on al-Qaeda. ...WaPo
Rebecca Rosen, writing at The Atlantic, points out the panel urges the end to government interference in "people's attempts to encrypt their communications." Period. "Again, it is the same theme: Just because you are capable of something doesn't mean you should be doing it."
Such steps would all place constraints—institutional and legal ones, not technological ones—on the government's surveillance practices. That is the essence of law: It is a system for allowing less than what is possible.
As Ben Wizner, Edward Snowden's lawyer, wrote to me over email, “Snowden’s revelations showed the world what some of us had long worried about: that surveillance practices are being driven by technological capabilities, rather than being constrained by laws and values. We’re finally having the normative debate that we should have had before the NSA deployed its global dragnet.” ...Rosen,TheAtlantic
