

Obama knew CIA secretly monitored intelligence committee, senator claims - denzil_correa
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/05/obama-cia-senate-intelligence-committee-torture?CMP=twt_gu

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jboggan
When the NSA revelations were first revealed many of my coworkers said "so?"
\- thinking they and most citizens had little to hide. My first complaint was
that the incredible power this would afford a sitting president (or any
political animal in control of the apparatus) would lead to a dismantling on
all effective checks on their power in an entirely silent way.

I think the defusing of Petraeus as a future presidential candidate and
political player was the first example of this.

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bediger4000
Are you sure the defusing of Petraeus was the _first_ example of the use of
"parallel constructions" to ruin potential political rivals?

How could we (those not in the know) distinguish some politician's real,
stupid, online sex solicitation bust from a parallel construction? That is,
Larry Craig probably wasn't a victim, but maybe Eliot Spitzer was, eh?

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hackinthebochs
In stories like this I never see a discussion of the upside of our elected
leaders being monitored. I'm reminded of the show alias where they had a
"security section" that monitored everyone, even the head of the secret
organization was monitored and subject to repercussions for breaking the
rules.

On the face of it, it seems like a good thing for our elected leaders to be
monitored to a degree to ensure no outside influence or abuse of power. The
threat isn't the monitoring, but the fact that information gathered from
monitoring can be used to influence the balance of power. If there were a
"sacred wall" between those doing the monitoring and those with political
power, such a scenario could work. It's the same concept of separation of
powers in the branches of government, or the separation of the three branches
of the military: diffusion of power. One group holds all the guns, another
group holds all the information. Neither is of ultimate power without the
other. Of course we would then need another group or process that could
monitor access and usage of information without itself having total access to
it.

Of course none of this would justify blanket monitoring of the public at
large. But elected officials and those who may potentially be given large
amounts of power and trust by the public shouldn't be subject to the same
rules.

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skywhopper
I expect he "knew about it" in the sense that he knew the CIA/NSA/whomever
probably monitors everything they can, and he would likely know that
Congressional offices, computers, etc, were not exempt.

I doubt that this particular discussion was of specific interest to Obama.

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TrainedMonkey
Given current mode of CIA operations, that does makes a certain twisted brand
of sense. They were getting away with monitoring communications of highest
echelons of allied nations. Presumably to provide white house and military
with up to date info on global state of affairs. From their point of view, why
should they not monitor internal affairs to provide white house with clear
picture of what is going wrong? Never mind that it is outside of their
mandate, legality of surveillance is hotly debated topic right now.

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jaxytee
Off course he did.

