Obama Through the Lens of PRISM

Dear Mr. President,

Turns out your snoops at the NSA/CIA/FBI complex know everything about everybody—not only every phone call made but the PRISM program collects every online photo, Facebook comment, Google query, bank transaction, Skype connection, Yahoo email… The disgruntled intelligence official who leaked all this about the phone logs and PRISM didn’t perform an act of whistle-blowing so much as an act of self-immolation, knowing it won’t take long to figure out who provided the information. Either he or she is already on a plane to Ecuador or, false identity papers in hand, visiting a plastic surgeon. What irony that you’re on your way to press Xi about China’s hacking and spying. I call that poetic justice. You got testy about all this coming out, calling it hype and decrying the leak. “If people don't trust Congress and the judiciary then I think we are going to have some problems here.” (today’s Guardian). I hope so. Not only don’t people trust Congress and the judiciary but they don’t trust you either, Mr. President. For 4½ years you’ve broken promise after promise, continued and expanded your predecessor’s policies that you railed against in 2008 to get elected, promoted wars of aggression, suppressed information, ignored laws domestic and foreign, violated the Constitution, ordered assassination of perceived enemies… why should we trust you? And why should we trust the rubber stamp FISA court which operates in secret and approved every request made in 2011 and from its creation in 1978 through the end of 2004, granted 18,761 warrants and rejected 5? And why should we trust Congress who long ago abandoned We the People in favor of the 1%? Even the staid NY Times called Senator Feinstein’s defense of the secret snooping absurd—“…the authorities need this information in case someone might become a terrorist in the future,” she said. Then she added that she didn’t actually know how the data collected was used. (Time to step down, Senator Feinstein.) I thought one of the most interesting quotes in the multiple stories on the secret spying programs was in a story on page A17 of today’s Times: “‘You have a president who’s basically arguing against himself,’ said James Jay Carafano, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. ‘It’s almost Shakespearean. In the speech, he’s saying we’re going to stop doing this stuff, it’s bad. But then he keeps doing it.’” I see more Machiavelli than Shakespeare but it’s definitely a Shakespearian tragedy for the world.