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July 30, 2010
NYT: Obama Breaking a Promise on Surveillance
Topics: Political News and commentariesAs an NYT editorial notes, the Obama administration says it's just a technical matter, no big deal: We just need to make a slight change in a law to make clear that we have the right to see the names of anyone's e-mail correspondents and their Web browsing history without the messy complication of asking a judge for permission.
No big deal? Quite the contrary, it's a very big deal - it's far more than a technical change, and as the WaPo reported, it's an unnecessary and disappointing step backward toward more intrusive surveillance from a president who promised something very different during the 2008 campaign:
[...] President Obama campaigned for office on an explicit promise to rein in these abuses. "There is no reason we cannot fight terrorism while maintaining our civil liberties," his campaign wrote in a 2008 position paper. "As president, Barack Obama would revisit the Patriot Act to ensure that there is real and robust oversight of tools like National Security Letters, sneak-and-peek searches, and the use of the material witness provision."Read more ...Where is the "robust oversight" that voters were promised? Earlier this year, the administration successfully pushed for crucial provisions of the Patriot Act to be renewed for another year without changing a word. Voters had every right to expect the president would roll back authority that had been clearly abused, like national security letters. But instead of implementing reasonable civil liberties protections, like taking requests for e-mail surveillance before a judge, the administration is proposing changes to the law that would allow huge numbers of new electronic communications to be examined with no judicial oversight.
This is coming from the NYT and the WaPo, both of which have been consistently and enthusiasticlly deep on the tank for Barry Hussein. Could it be that the lamestream media is beginning to sour on Barry?
Posted by Richard at July 30, 2010 9:20 AM
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- NYT: Obama Breaking a Promise on Surveillance - Jul 30, 2010
