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A comment on After Senate vote, NSA prepares to shut down phone tracking program. Parent comment

Re:After Senate vote, NSA prepares to shut down phone tracki... by DanielBMarkham on Monday May 25, 2015 @04:41AM (#9599161)
What we're seeing right now is some kind of weird kabuki dance where congress pretends to shut something down by having a debate over whether to re-authorize one of several justifications NSA uses for monitoring U.S. citizens. The only reason it's considered equivalent to "shutting down the program" is that folks haven't been paying attention.

As far as illegality, what the Executive has taken to doing over the last 20 years or so is lawyer-shopping until they can get an opinion that justifies what they already decided they were going to do. Then they classify both the decision and the legal justification. No information = no debate. No debate = no oversight. Very nice and easy. Problem solved.

We need the NSA. But the structure of the legal system the operate in has been totally fucked up by the War on Terror. I don't even think most politicians understand the nature of the problem, much less are able to provide needed oversight.

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Re:After Senate vote, NSA prepares to shut down phone tracki... by tsotha on Monday May 25, 2015 @07:09AM (#9599514)
We have fourteen separate agencies that do overlapping intelligence gathering of one sort or another. We don't need the NSA.
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Re:After Senate vote, NSA prepares to shut down phone tracki... by mike_hearn on Monday May 25, 2015 @01:03PM (#9600778)
> We need the NSA

There's no evidence of this. Many countries have nowhere near the intelligence capabilities of the 5 Eyes and yet seem to do just fine for themselves. In many ways, better than the USA.

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