Eugene Robinson:
WASHINGTON — President Obama’s message about the government’s massive electronic surveillance programs came through loud and clear: Get over it.
The president used more soothing words in his pre-vacation news conference Friday, but that was the gist. With perhaps the application of a fig leaf here and a sheen of legalistic mumbo jumbo there, the snooping will continue.
Unless, of course, we demand that it end.
The modest reforms Obama proposed do not begin to address the fundamental question of whether we want the National Security Agency to log all of our phone calls and read at least some of our emails, relying on secret judicial orders from a secret court for permission. The president indicated he is willing to discuss how all this is done — but not whether.
“It’s not enough for me, as president, to have confidence in these programs. The American people need to have confidence in them as well,” Obama said. But if this is truly what he believes, he should have kicked off this confidence-building debate years ago, long before former NSA analyst Edward Snowden blew the whistle.
Snowden’s disclosures do look increasingly like whistle-blowing, by the way, rather than espionage or treason. If administration officials really welcome the discussion we are now having, shouldn’t they thank Snowden rather than label him an enemy of the state?
As part of its public relations campaign, the administration released a 22-page white paper outlining its legal rationale for collecting and keeping a detailed log of all our domestic phone calls. The document depends on novel definitions of words whose meaning, I always thought, was fairly clear.
Section 215 of the Patriot Act gives the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court the authority to order businesses to hand over “any tangible things” needed for an investigation into international terrorism. “Metadata” about our phone calls is classified as a tangible thing. In the digital age, I suppose that’s an understandable stretch.
But those tangible things must be “relevant to an authorized investigation” to obtain foreign intelligence or protect against terrorism. The administration — with the secret intelligence court’s blessing — essentially argues that “relevant” can be construed to mean its exact opposite.
