The Brother sells out to Big Brother

From the WaPo. This is the kind of bullshit Americans are getting tired of from their government. The duplicitous, sleight of hand crap. Please read the linked page. I said over a year ago that Obama had shit all over his base, a base he would probably need one day. I believe that the chickens are finally coming home to roost.

Obama administration had restrictions on NSA reversed in 2011

The court in 2008 imposed a wholesale ban on such searches at the government’s request, said Alex Joel, civil liberties protection officer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The government included this restriction “to remain consistent with NSA policies and procedures that NSA applied to other authorized collection activities,” he said.

But in 2011, to more rapidly and effectively identify relevant foreign intelligence communications, “we did ask the court” to lift the ban, ODNI general counsel Robert S. Litt said in an interview. “We wanted to be able to do it,” he said, referring to the searching of Americans’ communications without a warrant.

Great rationale. "We wanted to be able to do it." Fuck the constitution. Like who's going to stop us...

“The [surveillance] Court documents declassified recently show that in late 2011 the court authorized the NSA to conduct warrantless searches of individual Americans’ communications using an authority intended to target only foreigners,” Wyden said in a statement to The Washington Post. “Our intelligence agencies need the authority to target the communications of foreigners, but for government agencies to deliberately read the e-mails or listen to the phone calls of individual Americans, the Constitution requires a warrant.”

Senior administration officials disagree. “If we’re validly targeting foreigners and we happen to collect communications of Americans, we don’t have to close our eyes to that,” Litt said. “I’m not aware of other situations where once we have lawfully collected information, we have to go back and get a warrant to look at the information we’ve already collected.”

The "oops, what have we here" defense. Pretend to be looking for one thing while we vacuum up all this other stuff under the pretense of national security.