He gave orders to allow NSA to listen to international communications with individuals in the US who they clearly believed were involved in terrorism.
My response was "Damn, I HOPE so!" Is the solution to terrorist communications security to simply have one end of the communication in the US? NSA has always listened to international communication and is not prohibited from doing so in the US. The CIA is -- not the NSA.
I'd be shocked if his action was illegal. He has excellent legal advisors for such matters, and he well knows that there are those in Washington( and in the NSA) who would gleefully ratted him out to the press a long time ago regardless of the cost to the country. His action was politically offensive to a number of people, but that's not illegal.
And Congress can find out whatever it chooses, whenever it chooses. They control the budgets for the intelligence agencies, and be very certain that the career bureaucrats in those agencies know that. If Congress gets really irritated, they can zero out the budget for whatever activities they object to. It's happened before.
Someone once said "there never was a democracy that did not commit suicide." Turning into a "Big Brother" government is certainly one way to do that. Another way is to refuse to defend ourselves.
My response was "Damn, I HOPE so!" Is the solution to terrorist communications security to simply have one end of the communication in the US? NSA has always listened to international communication and is not prohibited from doing so in the US. The CIA is -- not the NSA.
I'd be shocked if his action was illegal. He has excellent legal advisors for such matters, and he well knows that there are those in Washington( and in the NSA) who would gleefully ratted him out to the press a long time ago regardless of the cost to the country. His action was politically offensive to a number of people, but that's not illegal.
And Congress can find out whatever it chooses, whenever it chooses. They control the budgets for the intelligence agencies, and be very certain that the career bureaucrats in those agencies know that. If Congress gets really irritated, they can zero out the budget for whatever activities they object to. It's happened before.
Someone once said "there never was a democracy that did not commit suicide." Turning into a "Big Brother" government is certainly one way to do that. Another way is to refuse to defend ourselves.