Eugene Robinson on PRISM
Whenever there's a complicated issue, I turn to Eugene Robinson for an explanation. Over the years, he's impressed me as the most thoughtful and level-headed political writer out there. His take on the issue:
In the coming debate, someone should explain why a mid-level computer guy working for a private contractor had access to so many of the NSA’s most closely held secrets. Someone should explain why the intelligence court is evidently so compliant. Someone should explain — perhaps in French, German and Spanish — why our allies’ e-mails are fair game for the agency’s prying eyes.
But here’s the big issue: The NSA, it now seems clear, is assembling an unimaginably vast trove of communications data, and the bigger it gets, the more useful it is in enabling analysts to make predictions. It’s one thing if the NSA looks for patterns in the data that suggest a nascent overseas terrorist group or an imminent attack. It’s another thing altogether if the agency observes, say, patterns that suggest the birth of the next tea party or Occupy Wall Street movement.
Is that paranoia? Then reassure me. Let’s talk about the big picture and decide, as citizens, whether we are comfortable with the direction our intelligence agencies are heading. And let’s remember that it was Snowden, not our elected officials, who opened this vital conversation.
Read the whole op-ed here.
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Thanks for posting. Note that Eugene does not protect the Obama administration in his op-ed.
He writes:
"Did you know that the NSA is compiling and storing a massive, comprehensive log of our domestic phone calls? I didn’t. Nor did I know that the agency can access huge volumes of e-mail traffic and other electronic data overseas— not just communications originating in trouble spots such as Pakistan but also in countries such as Germany and Britain. I would have thought that anyone who accused the U.S. government of “omniscient, automatic, mass surveillance,” as Snowden did in an exchange with Post contributor Barton Gellman, was being paranoid. Now I’m not so sure.
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The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has to issue the orders that allow the NSA to collect “metadata” from telephone providers. But as far as I can tell — we are not allowed to know the content of the court’s rulings and have to make do with crumbs of, well, metadata — the court’s standard answer is yes. In its 34 years of existence, the court has approved more than 30,000 government requests for surveillance authority while rejecting a grand total of 11. That is not what I’d call oversight.
The NSA’s snooping is also subject to scrutiny by the intelligence committees of the Senate and the House. The chairmen of those panels — Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) — have been among the NSA’s most vocal supporters in recent days. But since so much of the committees’ work is classified, they say they can’t tell us why.
And as for Obama, he said last week that “I welcome this debate and I think it’s healthy for our democracy.” Why, then, didn’t he launch the discussion rather than wait for Snowden’s leaks?
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yes, Eugene Robinson is one of the best journalists out there. 
