{"id":4504,"date":"2013-05-17T07:34:59","date_gmt":"2013-05-17T07:34:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/praag.org\/?p=4504"},"modified":"2013-05-17T07:34:59","modified_gmt":"2013-05-17T07:34:59","slug":"obama-has-placed-the-us-press-under-surveillance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/praag.org\/?p=4504","title":{"rendered":"Obama has placed the US press under surveillance"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Ilana Mercer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

by Ilana Mercer<\/p>\n

No wonder the language being deployed to describe the forlorn Associated Press reporters is something redolent of a jilted lover.<\/p>\n

The AP has been violated by its beloved Barack Obama and his gang-bangers. The news agency has gone from sexting, so to speak, with the president, to being snooped on by him.<\/p>\n

\n
Politico offered readers an endearingly intimate glimpse,\u00a0\u201cInside the AP,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0where the flaccid folks were overcome by feelings of \u201cfear\u201d and \u201cdetermination.\u201d Nevertheless, they had not lost their resolve and were proceeding with \u201cheads-down determination.\u201d<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

What made The Beloved and his dream team turn to rough play?<\/p>\n

According to the (idiomatic)\u00a0mainstream,<\/a>\u00a0Obama\u2019s Justice Department had been monitoring AP phone lines in D.C., in the Hartford and New York bureaus, and in Congress. Subpoenaed too were the phone logs,\u00a0\u201ccredit card receipts, airplane records and other digital information\u201d<\/a>\u00a0belonging to individual AP editors and reporters. All this in violation of Fourth Amendment protections; without presenting a judge with evidence of probable cause and absent a search warrant (all SOP, or standard operating procedure, at the Transportation Security Administration).<\/p>\n

The Justice Department in the person of Attorney General Eric Holder has claimed, comically, to have been looking to plug a \u201cvery, very, very, serious leak.\u201d Perhaps \u201cthe most serious\u201d since the AG started his prosecutorial career in 1976.<\/p>\n

A pesky detail has eluded all those invincibly stupid special interests who\u2019re piping up for the privacy of the press, as opposed to fighting for the privacy of all Americans.<\/p>\n

Have the various tele-lawyers, the director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and protesting members of the House Judiciary Committee forgotten the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, whose provisions were extended until Dec. 31, 2017, by the people\u2019s representatives?<\/p>\n

There is nothing new about warrantless wiretapping \u2013 other than that the American people haven\u2019t been particularly exercised about them. They\u2019ve trusted Uncle Sam to go about this activity judiciously.<\/p>\n

Order lIana Mercer\u2019s brilliant polemical work, \u201cInto the Cannibal\u2019s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa\u201d<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Peeping Sam had promised, after all, that covert surveillance would never be executed against\u00a0\u201cUnited States persons.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0Were a \u201cUnited States person\u201d to fall under suspicion, he or she would not be subjected to surveillance without \u201cjudicial and congressional oversight,\u201d puled the same perverts.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not as if the National Security Agency (NSA) under George W. Bush was not accused of bypassing the courts to spy on the 43rd president\u2019s many critics. It was!\u00a0Sideshow<\/a>\u00a0\u201cO,\u201d however, has done Bush one better. Obama is using the FISA provisions against \u201cfriendlies.\u201d<\/p>\n

George Bush, you\u2019ll recall (or maybe not), also authorized\u00a0the President\u2019s Surveillance Program (PSP)<\/a>. Subsumed within the PSP are activities whose scope has yet to be disclosed. Attorney General Holder \u2013 at the behest of President Obama, no doubt \u2013 is expanding the remits of the Surveillance State, as did \u201cW\u201d before him.<\/p>\n

The incontinent coverage of the AP outrage has a delusional quality. Contra those whose job it is to feign indignation on TV \u2013 America is not a free country. Media convulsions notwithstanding, the government is reading over your shoulder \u2013 has been doing so for some time. It can spy on Americans without breaking the law.<\/p>\n

It is perfectly permissible for the state to monitor you, me or The Other Guy, without a\u00a0\u201cperfunctory nod to due process and legal restraint.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0In other words,\u00a0without a court order<\/a>.<\/p>\n

National Journal is agreed,\u00a0writing<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cthe Obama administration technically broke no rules.\u201d Companies that give up this information to the government have \u201cimmunity,\u201d which has been \u201cbuilt into a 2008 revision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the other rub: FISA permits surveillance sans court order,\u00a0explains<\/a>\u00a0Wikipedia, for \u201cthe period of one year provided it is only for foreign intelligence.\u201d<\/p>\n

And provided the president has authorized the fishing expedition.<\/p>\n

In my understanding of the impossibly complex and cancerous Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Obama has to have authorized the dragnet that was cast at the Associated Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Ilana Mercer No wonder the language being deployed to describe the forlorn Associated Press reporters is something redolent of a jilted lover. The AP has been violated by its beloved Barack Obama and his gang-bangers. The news agency has gone from sexting, so to speak, with the president, to being snooped on by him. … Continue reading “Obama has placed the US press under surveillance”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3929,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,80],"tags":[469,12254,90,2797,2796,12251,2795],"class_list":["post-4504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-columns","category-ilana-mercer","tag-column","tag-ilana-mercer","tag-obama","tag-sexting","tag-snooping","tag-united-states","tag-wire-tapping"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/Ilana_Mercer_s640x427.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4504"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4504\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4506,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4504\/revisions\/4506"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}