US Politics: Papers of Nefarious Clinton Regime Released!

[Castel]

So with the now years of uproar about spying on American citizens, why hasn't Congress tried to do anything about it, rather than sitting there and looking complicit? Nancy Pelosi has apparently answered

I took out some parts about Diane Fienstein because really, to hell with her and her self-righteous hypocritical, "The CIA is spying on people and that's okay because it makes us all safe.... wait, the CIA is spying on me! Outrage! Condemnation! Rabble!"

Why would you? Isn't this exactly why Feinstein is right? I mean, sux2bU peons but there isn't there something to be said for the people said peons rely upon being free to remedy the situation?

[Inigima]

So what's the proposal to fix it?

I spoke to a savvy forum acquaintance from elsewhere and he felt that the only possible tool to address it is funding. The war on terrrrrrrrrrr in his view returned us to Cold War style black box intelligence accounting where we just give them a shitload of money and they do what they like and don't tell us. That cannot continue in my opinion.

And yes, I personally object to limitless spying on me and other "normal" people, but if we are at the point where Congress can't control their own intel agencies then we are far past the point of reason. A hard, hard tug on the leash is necessary.

At some point I wonder if the culture becomes so ingrained that it's difficult to recover control. The obvious initial step is to replace leadership there with someone with a reform mandate, but if you're an intel drone and you think what you're doing is right and proper, why would you tell that person what you're doing? Why would you tell Congress? Why would you tell the President?

To some extent once you've developed (and normalized) these capabilities you are kind of fucked as a system. You are now unable to control their use at all. You might need some kind of technical solution, installing someone you trust in a position that controls access to these things, much as I loathe technological solutions to management problems.

[TerraPrime]

Re: TN

I wouldn't say that the GOP has no plan for healthcare reform. I think they do have a plan. It's called dismantle more of the healthcare system and privatize Medicare/Medicaid.

Re: Commodore

Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech

Yes, and the Queen of England is currently Elizabeth the Second.

[Inigima]

While I think you might be able to make a case for it in the right circumstances, protecting political speech was pretty central to the original purpose of the First Amendment and is still pretty vital. Tread very carefully in these areas.

[TrackerNeil]

Re: TN

I wouldn't say that the GOP has no plan for healthcare reform. I think they do have a plan. It's called dismantle more of the healthcare system and privatize Medicare/Medicaid.

Well, I can't say you're wrong. Fortunately, however, they don't have to stones to attempt this.Sure, they'll talk about it, but at the end of the day they just don't try very hard, most likely because the welfare state is popular and dismantling it would ruin them in elections.

[TerraPrime]

Well, I can't say you're wrong. Fortunately, however, they don't have to stones to attempt this.Sure, they'll talk about it, but at the end of the day they just don't try very hard, most likely because the welfare state is popular and dismantling it would ruin them in elections.

I think privatizing Meidcare/Medicaid is out of the question, but dismantling parts and pieces of it is not. I mean, look at PlanD expansion under W. Bush.

[Jackson5tributeband]

So what's the proposal to fix it?

I spoke to a savvy forum acquaintance from elsewhere and he felt that the only possible tool to address it is funding. The war on terrrrrrrrrrr in his view returned us to Cold War style black box intelligence accounting where we just give them a shitload of money and they do what they like and don't tell us. That cannot continue in my opinion.

And yes, I personally object to limitless spying on me and other "normal" people, but if we are at the point where Congress can't control their own intel agencies then we are far past the point of reason. A hard, hard tug on the leash is necessary.

At some point I wonder if the culture becomes so ingrained that it's difficult to recover control. The obvious initial step is to replace leadership there with someone with a reform mandate, but if you're an intel drone and you think what you're doing is right and proper, why would you tell that person what you're doing? Why would you tell Congress? Why would you tell the President?

To some extent once you've developed (and normalized) these capabilities you are kind of fucked as a system. You are now unable to control their use at all. You might need some kind of technical solution, installing someone you trust in a position that controls access to these things, much as I loathe technological solutions to management problems.

Dianne Feinstein getting her knockers in a twist over the CIA spying on her staff (or something like that). The same woman who happily extols the virtues of the NSA being allowed to spy on every American's email, phone calls, bank records at will. One law for thee one for me.

[Castel]

So what's the proposal to fix it?

No idea. The problem I have is that it seems as if this isn't a matter of some organizational problem than a problem of will and interest or culture. In those situations what can be done? It's quite easy to say that we should "tug the leash" but the question is why no one will and what you'll do to make them come to their senses.As of right now? The answer seems to be "nothing".

[DanteGabriel]

Feinstein is kind of a reverse mine canary on the topic of civil liberties. Once she starts complaining, we already know the rest of us are fucked.

I don't know how to reverse the encroachment of the surveillance state. I don't trust laws or oversight to stop it. I believe any power these agencies possess will be abused, and there's not much to be done to stop them. Indeed, my first reaction to the Snowden revelations was, "What, they weren't already doing all that?"

[TrackerNeil]

I think privatizing Meidcare/Medicaid is out of the question, but dismantling parts and pieces of it is not. I mean, look at PlanD expansion under W. Bush.

Sure, I agree with that. Republicans will nibble around the edges where they can, but in the end the welfare state is here to stay and they know it. When a few Republicans forget, the rest remind them, as with Bush's ill-fated plan to privatize Social Security, back in 2005. The Democrats didn't kill that plan, and neither did the dreaded filibuster; the Republicans did that themselves. In a Republican-controlled Congress, not one Republican was willing to introduce a bill into committee. They'll try to trim Social Security benefits, but they'll never kill that sacred cow.

[lokisnow]

Nobody's going to touch the CIA because the last president to try to cut their funding was assassinated.

[Lord Mord]

For whatever reason, while I don't much credit assassination conspiracies, at least regarding our own President, it's quite easy for me to believe that in response to funding cuts the CIA would gladly permit known threats to kill some attention-grabbing number of Americans in retaliation. No decisive action required, just negation. "Whoops. Sorry, sir. If only we'd been better funded ..."

[Shryke]

Sure, I agree with that. Republicans will nibble around the edges where they can, but in the end the welfare state is here to stay and they know it. When a few Republicans forget, the rest remind them, as with Bush's ill-fated plan to privatize Social Security, back in 2005. The Democrats didn't kill that plan, and neither did the dreaded filibuster; the Republicans did that themselves. In a Republican-controlled Congress, not one Republican was willing to introduce a bill into committee. They'll try to trim Social Security benefits, but they'll never kill that sacred cow.

Sure they will. They'll just do it slowly.

Bush's problem was he tried to openly kill the welfare state. That's cause he's an idiot.

The way the GOP has been succeeding at this for the past 30 years is the way they'll do it with Obamacare: cut funding and then complain the program "costs too much" years later and use the deficit as an excuse for large but necessary cutbacks. They love this shit. They've actually tried it with SS. And the Dems will play along because the culture of DC loves deficit hawkery.

[TrackerNeil]

The way the GOP has been succeeding at this for the past 30 years is the way they'll do it with Obamacare: cut funding and then complain the program "costs too much" years later and use the deficit as an excuse for large but necessary cutbacks. They love this shit. They've actually tried it with SS. And the Dems will play along because the culture of DC loves deficit hawkery.

And here is where we disagree. From my point of view, the welfare state has only grown over the past 80 years, and Republicans never manage to do more than slightly curtail that growth. Sometimes they encourage that growth. A Republican Congress enacted SCHIP in 1997, and a Republican Congress enacted Medicare Part D in 2005, both huge expansions of entitlement programs. So I don't see a whole lot of Republican success at whittling down the welfare state.

[Shryke]

So with the now years of uproar about spying on American citizens, why hasn't Congress tried to do anything about it, rather than sitting there and looking complicit? Nancy Pelosi has apparently answered

I took out some parts about Diane Fienstein because really, to hell with her and her self-righteous hypocritical, "The CIA is spying on people and that's okay because it makes us all safe.... wait, the CIA is spying on me! Outrage! Condemnation! Rabble!"

On this subject, I would suggest using more then one source for looking up details. Especially beyond the one you are quoting here which is quite far from unbiased many times.

Anyway, the situation with Feinstein is not as cut and dry as they claim. Here's a decent summary from The New Yorker:

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2014/03/24/140324taco_talk_coll

But it was under Feinstein, after 2009, that the Select Committee took on an ambitious investigation into the defunct black sites. Senate investigators worked in a skiff near C.I.A. headquarters, in Virginia. Under a protocol that Feinstein described last week, the agency provided a segregated computer network and loaded in some six million pages of classified documents. Several times, by Feinstein’s account, C.I.A. officers secretly withdrew documents from the Senate staff’s collection. When they were caught, she said, they claimed, falsely, that the White House had ordered their action. The agency later apologized.

In 2012, after three years’ work, the Senate staff completed a six-thousand-three-hundred-page report. It, too, remains classified. According to press stories and statements by Feinstein and other senators, the first draft concluded that C.I.A. and Bush Administration officials had greatly overstated the interrogations’ role in generating useful intelligence, and that the C.I.A. had seriously misled Congress as well. Feinstein showed the draft to the agency. The C.I.A. objected, as the current director, John Brennan, said last week, to “factual errors” and “errors in judgment or assessments.” The two sides have been arguing for months about what the report should say.

The Panetta Review figures in all this because it may influence the final report’s conclusions. C.I.A. officers apparently composed the review after reading the same documents that Feinstein’s staff studied. According to Feinstein, the officers also reached some of the same judgments, and acknowledged “significant C.I.A. wrongdoing”—a form of dissent, she implies, that agency superiors have overruled or suppressed. At some point after last June, Senate investigators removed printed copies of parts of the Panetta Review from the skiff in Virginia and took them to Capitol Hill, without telling the C.I.A. The agency, conducting electronic searches on the segregated computers to examine how the files had been handled, found what its lawyers believed to be evidence of criminality, implicating Senate investigators, and referred it to the Justice Department. Last week, Feinstein replied to the accusations, and, by the standards of Washington scandal instigation, she delivered a full Monty. She said that the C.I.A., in searching her staff’s computers, might have “violated the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the C.I.A. from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.”

I bolded the parts here the cover the spying accusations.

What the claims actually boil down to is that Senate staff remove classified documents from secure computers, the CIA investigated the issue and then gave over their evidence to the Justice Department.

Did Senate staffers break the law when they removed classified documents? Were they justified in doing so? Was the CIA's investigation into the taken documents legal? Should it be if it is? Etc, etc, etc. It's not quite as simple as some articles claim.