If he wants to claim he wasn't aware, OK. But he is now and it's his responsibility to fix it. Again, that's the nature of the job.

If the President wanted to eliminate these programs, they'd get eliminated. It would require the exercise of political will, but it absolutely could be done.

The problem, actually, is right here, when people start making excuses for our leaders.

Stop.

Hold them responsible. Responsibility is why the job even exists.

My assertion is that trust has broken down. And therefore the ability to validate has broken down.

Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that the President and the Congress eliminate these programs...

How would you or I... or any foreign person validate that?

How would I, in good faith, tell a foreign person, or even another citizen, that their communications are no longer being monitored?

I don't believe we could give such assurances.

So even in the BEST case where the President and the politicians eliminate the programs... we would not be able to assert in good faith that there is no longer any communications monitoring going on.

The flaw in your idea, is that it is predicated on trust in the system.

Obama is complicit with this system and quite happy for it continue.

How would you know? The answer is, essentially, "Trust".

You would trust the politicians when they say that the funding had been cut. The politicians, in their turn, would trust the functionaries when they say no funding was going into communications monitoring.

What if you don't trust the politicians or the functionaries... do you have any method of validating the elimination of the funding not based on "Trust"?

"...you can't redirect that level of funding from other projects without someone noticing..."

These are, at their core, intelligence agencies. "Redirecting that level of funding... without someone noticing..." is their job. It's what they are trained to do, among other things. I think it's a little optimistic to believe that they would not use that skill to accomplish their mission if they found it necessary.

Gov accounts are prepared and audited by civil servants. At a certain point a conspiracy is too large to be controlled, and I'd suggest managing to divert hundreds of millions from other budgets is a conspiracy just too large to hide from an entire people when gov. accounts are public. I'm all for official oversight as well by politicians, but politicians could easily cut funding for this sort of activity if they wanted to.

Obama certainly doesn't want to, for whatever reason, as evidenced by the his disingenuous lies about this topic to the public (no one is reading your email) and the way he left Clapper in power after lying to congress and proposed fig-leaf reform, not real reform.

"Redirecting that level of funding... without someone noticing..." is their job

No, it's not. Their job is spying on enemies of their country, nothing more, nothing less. In peacetime that should be a pretty simple job of spying on a few terrorist networks using targeted attacks.

> How would you or I... or any foreign person validate that?

How would the President validate that?

Just like Guantanamo Bay, right?

If Obama believed these programs (and Guantanamo Bay) were "wrong" with the same conviction Snowden believes – he'd do what it takes to shut them down, with the same career/livelihood risks that Snowden accepted.

It's precisely the sort of moral compromises that Obama has made to allow Guantanamo Bay to stay operating, that have allowed the NSA to grab so much extraordinary power amd avoid any sort of reasonable oversight.

I understand that "just closing Guantanamo" isn't as simple as it sounds - but letting things like that slide because they're complicated, and doing so for 40 odd years, has allowed a situation where people like Clipper think lying to congress is his job. Where intelligent people somehow perform the sort of mental gymnastics that allow them to claim collecting and storing personal communication isn't "collection" unless a person listens to the collected information.

If the president wanted it to stop - he'd stop it. If he's not stopping it, it's because there's something he considers more important.

He _might_ even be right. There might be a real and provable public interest reason why Guantanamo and the NSA have to be the way they are. There's no obvious or easy explanation along those lines – and it's super easy to cynically attribute it all to personal(and corporate) wealth and power motives which _are_ pretty obvious.

Right now, it's continued operation relies entirely on state secrecy laws. If Obama or some future president realizes that it is that one provision that is protecting illegal actions, he can promise to pardon anyone of the laws they have to break to expose those illegal actions.

One of the biggest problems with our whistleblowing laws is that if you have to break laws to make things right, you may be seen as righteous, but you'll still be prosecuted for the laws you had to break to accomplish that. We're still a nation of laws and the only laws that can overturn that is the constitutional power to pardon. The only crime the president cannot pardon is impeachment. Any individual that isn't in an impeachable position could expose wrongdoing if the president had their back.

I mean you can be cynical or you can be realist. The cynical explanation would probably be that the president/congress don't really control a few organisations like the NSA.

The realist reason would be that the NSA can point to a couple dozen cases where their surveillance saved thousands of lives, American or otherwise. That they have very, very convincing arguments that these policies are worth it.

Also I am a bit fatalist about privacy expectations. Have you seen how "working class" people live in Hong Kong and how much privacy they effectively have ?

That's the future for the vast majority of humans on this planet, unless growth stops. If growth does stop, death and famine is the future for the majority of humans.

Enjoy it while it lasts, or collect enough money that you can realistically enjoy privacy and space until you die. For the next generation, it's a lost cause.

Government intrusion of privacy is (should be) the least of anyone's worries.

At the end of the day, the presidency is the only position that is beyond the reproach of anyone behind the scenes that may be using their powers to pull strings. If he has ever been coerced by hidden powers, he alone could unveil them and be believed by all the non-believers. Alternatively, he could choose to promise exercise his pardon rights for people who want to expose wrongdoing but are afraid. He had the power to protect people from jail. That's the power to allow people to expose wrongdoing without fear of retaliation (unless we've gone so far down the rabbit hole that someone can make the whistleblower just disappear.)

If there were such hidden powers as to pull strings or coerce the president, I am not sure why we should believe that they didn't have a hand in his rise to power.

(1) the political work of defining the word "enemy". If you spend your time in your first 100 days of office trying to get the country to rally behind defining the "enemy" as actors within the US who are actively undermining the US Constitution and actors who are acting corruptly.

and

(2) the commander in chief work of defining the goals of the US military. The president is the commander in chief. If he decides that the primary goal of the US armed forces is to root out corruption and problems in the armed forces that are undermining the US Constitution in the interest of private interests.

By doing exactly both of those things and getting support for it, he has absolved himself of liability under the Espionage Act AFAICT. The reasoning here is that he's now defining the operation and success of the armed forces to be in line in a way that any information conveyed is no longer going to interfere with the armed forces of the United States. Furthermore, redefining the enemy means that he has also made sure that the information does not promote the success of the enemies of the US.

An American president with a moral backbone?

Give me a break.

That's like expecting it to rain candyfloss.

The presidency is a hollow man, a figurehead - it's all just a show to make you think you have a democracy. The tail wags the dog, and entrenched non-elected interests run the show, through corruption, lobbying (corruption), and special interests (corruption).

Just so we're clear - how exactly does the average citizen "hold them responsible", other than our legal right to simply not vote for them next time?

It's so easy to say we should "hold them responsible" - but so incredibly vague to do.

So when a President comes into office, they probably make it known that they have these N pieces of information, and well, they are going to do what they want unless said President wants those N pieces of information public.

Thats the really really scary realization here. Shadow government obtained through perfect intelligence with no checks and bounds.

Congress, perhaps.

Yes, these people are our fellow citizens. There is no conspiracy, merely functioning democracy.

That last phrase really spooks me. "Look to their own interests". Saddens me a bit, too.