Sunday, July 6, 2014

The only issue needed to get rid of Greg Walden.

Do you think the government should at least get a low-threshold FISA warrant to conduct spying on Americans, rather than have a wide open ability to do almost anything it wants, relying on in-house oversight?

If you believe that Big Brother should stop spying and storing information on ordinary Americans, then you should read WaPo's latest story on raw intercept data from Edward Snowden showing just how pervasive NSA's spying is.

How does this relate to Greg Walden?  Well, he voted to pass the 2008 FISA Amendments Bill which legally enabled all of this stuff, even as the NSA and other government officials continue to lie about what the NSA does and doesn't do.

In other words, he voted to allow a program that has been terribly inefficient in targeting suspects while storing data on non-targeted people, giving the FBI and others access to this non-targeted data. According to WaPo, this is what's in the stored data:
"Among the [people who crossed paths with a target] are medical records sent from one family member to another, résumés from job hunters and academic transcripts of schoolchildren.In one photo, a young girl in religious dress beams at a camera outside a mosque.

Scores of pictures show infants and toddlers in bathtubs, on swings, sprawled on their backs and kissed by their mothers. In some photos, men show off their physiques. In others, women model lingerie, leaning suggestively into a webcam or striking risque poses in shorts and bikini tops."
You should understand therefore, this is what Greg Walden enabled.

Some, including Walden, might pass it off as an uninformed vote.  Unfortunately, it is probably true, as all but one Republicans in the House (and three abstensions) voted to make NSA's warrantless spying program fully legal while expanding the NSA's powers.  Then the criticism is, how could Walden make such a horrendous error in judgement to not carefully examine the bill, but rather, simply stick to the party line?  This was no run of the mill bill.  There were dozens of lobbyists arguing against this bill, including the EFF, ACLU and the Chamber of Commerce, but Walden did not care to listen to what people were saying.


An aside: The 2008 FISA Amendments Bill was an indefensible vote -- it is one of my criticisms of President Obama, actually, that he voted for this bill.  Hillary Clinton voted against it, and she was my first choice for the Democratic nomination.  I think history would have proven out that, unlike Obama, Clinton would have pulled tighter on the reins of the NSA.  But if there was a worse choice than Obama, it was most certainly John McCain -- the Abstainer.  Have some balls to state which side you're on.


Or, perhaps as Frontline had suggested, then-NSA Director Michael Hayden misled them with convincing arguments.  That seems to me to paint Walden in a worse light of being easily influenced by smarter people, incapable of seeing past the propaganda.

But worse, what if Walden actually supported (and still supports) these dragnet programs and Big Brother?

Therein lies the core of why Greg Walden needs to go: His vote is indefensible, if you believe that Big Brother is contrary to the US Constitution's 4th Amendment against unreasonable searches and seizures.

If you want to stop Big Brother, you have to stop Greg Walden.  You see, limiting Big Brother isn't even on his radar.  Like the doomed Monica Wehby, his focus is on repealing the ACA.

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