Obama’s Path From Critic to Overseer of Spying

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/16/us/obamas-path-from-critic-to-defender-of-spying.html

by mjstahl • 13 years ago

249 185 13 years ago

coob• 13 years ago

What is it, do you think, that causes former critics of spying to become 'overseers'? The Presidency is limited to two terms, so it's not like it's being used to weild power. Are there honest intentions related to safety, or is it all about money/lobbying?

Skalman• 13 years ago

Was he ever that critical? From the article:

Mr. Obama was a sponsor of a bill in 2005 to raise the standard required for federal agents using ... national security letters ... He joined other Democrats fighting the renewal of the Patriot Act until it was amended to address civil liberties concerns, then voted for its extension in 2006 after a compromise, breaking with Mr. Wyden who voted no.
“The rhetoric was probably sharper than his votes.” By summer 2008, with the Democratic nomination secured and the White House now a real possibility, Mr. Obama voted for legislation essentially ratifying Mr. Bush’s surveillance programs.

brown9-24• 13 years ago

When you are the head of (one branch of) the government and you know that people will blame you foremost for any attacks or intelligence failures, I think almost anyone would tend to see these types of powers and programs differently than when they were merely one of 100 senators.

rrggrr• 13 years ago

Perhaps it's about supporting the people who have to collect and analyze Intel in the face of withering public criticism. The rank and file are skilled and intelligent and can find work elsewhere. If the President doesn't defend the value of their work then many will bail. He may still be a vocal critic behind the scenes.

Spooky23• 13 years ago

The Federal government is a byzantine web of regulation, conflicting rules, agendas and actions.

Big programs have tentacles so intertwined into things, it's difficult/impossible to unwind and even figure out what they are doing. Think of it from the President's perspective -- getting someone whom he trusts in a position to actually know anything about the programs probably takes a year.

Say you have someone on top whom you trust and the President says "dismantle X program". The bureaucracy is awesome and effective at slowing things down. Keeping up the pressure to do something that the bureaucrats don't want requires alot of energy. And with something like Intelligence, attacking the people running those programs means that they won't be motivated to make the President look good.

So from the President's perspective, you have to invest massive energy, take body blows when things don't go well and distract yourself from whatever it is that you ran for office for. It's a high cost, and the benefits are minimal -- nobody is going to carve your head into the side of a mountain for shutting down some Top Secret program that nobody knew about anyway.

grandalf9• 13 years ago

The headline might as well be a more Onionesque "After gaining power, politician turns out not to actually hold the strongly principled views he expressed while campaigning".

I'd be surprised if Obama holds any of the views he expressed during his campaign. A campaign is a marketing effort intended to install a team of people in power.

Generally speaking, the vast majority of power holders agree that aggressive spying is a good idea. This is closely related to their strong preference for maintaining the status quo across the board. We should not be surprised that Obama did not reverse any of Bush's controversial decisions because they were not actually controversial among those with power or with the potential to gain power.

Generally speaking, when an issue is touted as being highly controversial between the major parties, it consists of 98% solid agreement and 2% hyped up disagreement. The disagreement and the "fray" are part of the choreographed propaganda undertaken by powerful interests to create the illusion of dissent.

rayiner8• 13 years ago

Talking about "majority of power holders agree" is so disingenuous. See: http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/05/poll-public-supports-nsa-sp... ("As we’ve written about before, the American public has widely supported the NSA’s activities before and after the scandal. I’m no fan of the secretive spying, but if the government appears to be acting slowly on surveillance reform, it could be because they’re responding to constituents.").

And this is a poll of people. If you polled likely voters, who skew older (i.e. more who lived through the cold war), you'd see even healthier margins in support of the NSA.

Also, it's a bit of historical revisionism to paint Obama as extremely anti-surveillance. Yes, he opposed certain of Bush's programs, but look at the whole picture. He's answer to "what would you have done instead of going into Iraq?" was "I would have hit Afghanistan harder!" He was a candidate who was self-conscious about the perception of Democrats as being "weak on security" and campaigned to avoid that label. And on his second go, he campaigned as "the guy that killed Osama." He's been quite consistent as someone who wants to project a lot of U.S. military power abroad, and in the grand scheme of things the NSA is part and parcel of that.

grandalf9• 13 years ago

Most Americans learn about the issue from media stories created by firms owned by powerful interests, so public opinion is not surprising.

If you look back at the early coverage of the Snowden leaks in the NY Times, the story was reported but the paper dutifully prepped a character assassination attack on Snowden himself, while intentionally suppressing the story of James Clapper's perjury and while also avoiding suggesting that Obama owed the public an explanation.

untog3• 13 years ago

Yes. Taking on the government is the wrong fight when they are (at least broadly) representative of public opinion. The fight should be educating people on the dangers of NSA spying, something that I haven't really seen anyone try to do. All commentary comes from the perspective that "NSA = bad" is already a given.

grandalf9• 13 years ago

Yes, he opposed certain of Bush's programs, but look at the whole picture.

True, since his days as a Senator from Illinois he has positioned himself as "power ready" by adopting power-friendly "moderate" stances on various key issues.

nsns• 13 years ago

"A campaign is a marketing effort intended to install a team of people in power."

You've just described the current crisis of representational democracy.

brd2• 13 years ago

Any campaign will be a marketing effort in any context. The crisis is that the marketing effort is the only data point that most of the voting population considers prior to the vote. Without an informed population there is no incentive for honest campaigns.

TelmoMenezes2• 13 years ago

It's not current and it's not a crisis. It's working exactly how it was designed to work. We changed, not them. The Internet disrupted the popular perception of democracy by creating a massive global communication channel that is not under the control of the people in power.

skylan_q2• 13 years ago

Current?

I think it's the defining trait of representational democracy.

clarkmoody• 13 years ago

I believe it's high time to repeal the 17th Amendment and return a fair bit of power to the states. This would ease the democracy crisis and decentralize some of the power from D.C.

chongli• 13 years ago

No, just the current crisis in a subset of electoral systems. A voting system such as Range Voting[0] would go a long way towards solving these problems, predominant among them being the issue of spoilers.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_voting#Example

cjf4• 13 years ago

The portion of the status quo most related to spying is "Safe and Peaceful", so not sure I blame him.

tunap• 13 years ago

"I'd be surprised if Obama holds any of the views he expressed during his campaign."

His nomination of the original author of the Patriot Act[1] to be his running mate was my confirmation that we were no longer one choice away from a dictatorship. Geitner & Gates' retention was just salt in the wound.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnibus_Counterterrorism_Act_o...

psaintla3• 13 years ago

Does it really have to be that cynical? Don't you think it is entirely possible pre-2008 Obama's opinions were formed with the same information as the rest of us and post-2008 Obama received more information (national security briefings) that completely blew away his belief system? I don't agree with much of what the Obama administration has done regarding domestic and international surveillance but I always feel like we should give ALL Presidents a little slack when it comes to these things because they have two burdens that the rest of us do not. Information and the responsibility to act on that information.

aaronem14• 13 years ago

Well, to be sure, the job always seems to turn their hair white.

On the other hand, I'm easily cynical enough to wonder whether a modern president's staff hairdresser is expected to have an unusual degree of skill with dyes and bleaches.

grandalf9• 13 years ago

Good point. I used to be more sympathetic to that line of reasoning. It's tightly coupled to the argument for the existence of state secrets... granting the state the power not to act in a fully transparent manner.

How might any institution act if it wanted to earn the credibility to behave in a way that was non-transparent to its constituents?

A firm might pay out consistent dividends or go public and comply with the additional regulatory requirements. A government might declassify information as quickly as possible to prove that information was classified judiciously (once the classified status was no longer needed).

In the US, there is still lots of classified information that is decades old. Clearly the government feels no need to earn its credibility when it comes to what information may be classified and for what purpose (or for how long). For a long time this was fine b/c the public had no good reason not to trust.

Things like WikiLeaks and Snowden's leaks have given us insight into the kinds of things that are classified. The most damning in my opinion were the WikiLeaks revelations that information was classified during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars that effectively filters out bad news from the information available to reporters. This is not judicious use of secrecy, it's using secrecy to achieve a propaganda motive.

Snowden's leaks reveal more than just the existence of a secret program, they reveal that the program was deliberately extralegal and far-reaching in a way that normal legal and law enforcement processes would never have allowed to happen.

It comes down to the question of whether we value (at a basic level) the rule of law, or if we prefer to be ruled by a trusted council of elders that makes secret decisions on our behalf without any kind of transparency or accountability.

ilovepolitics3• 13 years ago

It's a combination of hubris and intentional ignorance on the part of OP and others like him.

It's really fascinating to see otherwise intelligent people completely unable to challenge their own beliefs about the nature of the world.

Is Obama simply reacting to new information he has been made privy to since becoming the president? Is it possible that there are genuine threats to America that are not made public? Is it possible there are realities of foreign affairs that we may not understand?

No, the world is just as I conceive it and Obama is a liar prone to malfeasance.

Accepting otherwise would challenge the safe bubble of the reality I have constructed. One where everyone fundamentally shares my value system and I have the necessary information and skills of deduction to construct an accurate conception of reality.

I wonder if it's something particular to technically skilled people. They have a knack for figuring out things that most people in society don't care for or don't have the aptitude for so they assume that that applies to all things, even things outside of their sphere of experience or aptitude.

tmzt2• 13 years ago

If so it took about 3 days.

http://c-spanvideo.org/videoLibrary/transcript/transcript.ph...

See the question and non-answer at 17:36.

The first time I saw that live on C-SPAN my heart actually sank. It was huge wasted opportunity for the people, through their direct donations to a candidate, to make things better. In that moment the President-Elect proved one of two things: he had no idea what was going on, or he willfully misrepresented the notion of reform through the election. A third possibility is even more frightening, something or someone changed his position for him.

But more than that, the President-Elect laughed it off as a joke, as if asking a question about the state of intelligence reform was the same thing as asking the contents of the PDB, as if the plebs simple weren't entitled to a straight answer on something affecting the function of 'their' government. And this wasn't a nobody asking, it was Candy Crawley (I believe, the transcript did not state that but her first name was given as Candy.)

We elected an former Constitutional scholar as President, and he appointed a Civil Rights division lawyer as Attorney General, and they have seriously damaged both the Constitution (whose spirit remains the saving grace of this nation) and Civil Rights and Liberties.

United857• 13 years ago

A good test of this hypothesis is this: if Hillary Clinton runs for President, what would be her take (support or oppose)?

Unlike Obama the Senator, as Secretary of State she would have served on the National Security Council and would have been privy to much of the same intelligence info. Therefore, if she's still opposed on surveillance issues vs. Obama, that would be a very telling sign.

downandout5• 13 years ago

I'd be surprised if Obama holds any of the views he expressed during his campaign. A campaign is a marketing effort intended to install a team of people in power.

Usually we at least get to learn about candidates' fundamental views before electing them. A pro-life candidate, for example, isn't suddenly going to change that view after taking office. Even the much-maligned George Bush generally acted in keeping with the fundamental beliefs that he told the country he held prior to his election.

This is what is so disturbing about Obama and his supporters. He told them bald faced lies about his fundamental views, and is fairly unapologetic about it. Even worse, the vast majority of his supporters are OK with that. They have shown politicians that lying to us is fine as long as the lies are delivered with enough polish. That paves the way for even more egregious activities going forward.

alexeisadeski32• 13 years ago

Even the much-maligned George Bush generally acted in keeping with the fundamental beliefs that he told the country he held prior to his election.

Bush promised a humble foreign policy with no nation building. He had criticized the Clinton-Gore Administration for being too interventionist: "If we don't stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we're going to have a serious problem coming down the road. And I'm going to prevent that."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush_presidential_cam...

booruguru• 13 years ago

This is what is so disturbing about Obama and his supporters. He told them bald faced lies about his fundamental views, and is fairly unapologetic about it.

Can you give some examples? Seriously. I can't recall Obama giving a definitive opinion on anything. (e.g. his evolving "views" on gay marriage.)

His detractors keep calling him a leftist, socialist even though he doesn't seem to have a strong (or passionate) opinion on any subject.

joering2• 13 years ago

We should not be surprised that Obama did not reverse any of Bush's controversial decisions because they were not actually controversial among those with power or with the potential to gain power.

We are not surprised out of the blue; we are deeply disappointed, as he clearly won elections based on promises he pretty much knew he cannot keep.

Similarly this would be like getting into relationship based on trust and someone shows you their big house, their boat, their company, claim they can have children and care about animals, while within a time, it turns out that person is a neutered scumbag that runs a horse-kill house and that house and boat was his friend. And then he tells you "what do you expected honey, I wanted to be with you, this is normal that I lied otherwise I wouldn't win your affections".

Sure, plenty of us could do that; its just a matter of choosing one or another side of life: good or bad. If Obama knew he cannot change anything and continue anyways, he's just a scumbag like any other scam artist.

dragonwriter• 13 years ago

I'd be surprised if Obama holds any of the views he expressed during his campaign.

The evidence during his time in office and the battles he has chosen to fight from the White House suggests that the view he expressed during the campaign about the critical importance of health care reform toward a more universal system is, in fact, one that he holds in office.

On a less policy and more meta-political level there are, I would say, quite a few indications that his frequently expressed view that people who want change must "be the change [they] want" and not rely on getting some figure in office and then expecting change to magically happen on its own is also a belief he holds honestly in office.

mpyne4• 13 years ago

I would say, quite a few indications that his frequently expressed view that people who want change must "be the change [they] want" and not rely on getting some figure in office and then expecting change to magically happen on its own is also a belief he holds honestly in office.

A view he also expressed during a memorial I attended for the Washington Navy Yard shootings, in regards to gun control for those with mental illnesses. Sadly I think he's right.

fleitz4• 13 years ago

Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

dkl2• 13 years ago

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/

  Promises kept: 45%
  Compromised: 25%
  Broken: 22%
  Stalled: 1%
  In the works: 6%
  not rated: 1%

Your comment resonated with me, then I decided to check the facts.

angrybits• 13 years ago

Yeah you can tell that that those are facts, because it says so right there in the domain name.

joe_the_user• 13 years ago

And you throw-in the even more Onionesque: "A review of candidates speeches reveals the apparent 'strong principles' were actually a clever packaging of euphemisms, glittering generalities, rainbow-ruses and Barnum-statements"

I think Obama probably holds those small number of positions he unambiguously stated as a Candidate. He like doesn't hold doesn't hold the positions that he seemed to articulate but didn't really, unambiguously assert. Which is of the things people thought he said.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda

afterburner3• 13 years ago

Come on now. He's still a Democrat, with Democratic views, hardly pursuing the agendas the Republicans were pursuing before (for example, trying to get rid of social security; do you remember all the Bush town halls on that?). He's not going to suddenly oppose abortion.

First and foremost on his platform was bringing back bipartisanship in Washington. And he sure tried his damndest to do that, trying time and time again to compromise with Republicans, trying to get them on board, trying to meet them halfway. That was him keeping that promise, and it's one I think he fundamentally believes in. He's always trying to build a consensus, not trying to be a firebrand. If others chose to ignore that repeated refrain in his campaigning, then too bad.

He also expended nearly all his initial political capital on health care, as promised. And reformed health care. Please let's not forget this, as it's skewered the Democrats more than once in the last 50 years.

redknight666• 13 years ago

It is also good for the press, if he is going to do anything is another matter.

wwwtyro• 13 years ago

“When you get the package every morning, it puts steel in your spine,” said David Plouffe, the president’s longtime adviser.

This strikes me as backwards. Seems that a president with a steely spine would be strong enough to maintain the rights of citizens in the face of such challenges.

mikepurvis• 13 years ago

I wonder if the real answer is to simply reject that workflow. I can't imagine functioning in an environment where I'm being daily bombarded with information about dozens or hundreds of potential "threats" which never become anything.

What if the president simply told his advisors that he would take a weekly instead of daily briefing on these issues?

seunosewa• 13 years ago

He'll look bad when his failure to react to some threat on time leads to some unfortunate incident.

rfnslyr5• 13 years ago

What is honestly the point of even concerning ones self with politics anymore? There has been nobody I've talked to in real life that has their head in the game completely, who knows what they are talking about, myself included.

Nothing is going to change, it's a big boys club, debating it, writing about it, all fruitless.

brown9-24• 13 years ago

This seems like a really sad and poor way to concern yourself with how our society governs itself.

rfnslyr5• 13 years ago

There's just no way to do it from the bottom. All these protests, all this (sl)activism, it doesn't do anything.

You either need to dedicate your life to politics and get into the club and start working from the inside, and pray some holy fucking deity that there are others like you, or nothing will change.

Maybe severe violent revolt but I literally don't ever see that happening.

There isn't enough time in the day to concern yourself with shit that matters. Nobody wants to come home after working 8 hours with a two hour commute to dip their head into politics, just to even begin to know what's happening.

Where do you go? The mainstream media? Where do you inform yourself?

The reality is people just want to go home, flick the TV on, spend some time with the kids, and maybe if they're lucky, devote a few extra hours to a hobby every week. This scenario occurs in the poor, it occurs in the rich.

It takes a very very special type of person to run a country. You need people who are basically insane. Who have no problem getting up every day and just doing that one thing they do, all day, every day. That isn't 99% of the population. If the top tier of our government is run by similar people at the bottom, we're screwed.

rytis• 13 years ago

Do you truly believe that you as an individual can make any difference at all? And do you truly believe that it is in fact the society that governs itself?

aaronem14• 13 years ago

Roughly 125 million people voted in the last presidential election. Had I been among them, I'd therefore have had roughly 1/125,000,000 of a say in who gained the office. Perhaps, to a homeopath, such a marvelous dilution of political power might leave something meaningful in its wake. Not being a homeopath myself, I find it somewhat less than compelling.

I fail to see how resignation in the face of inevitable powerlessness can be anything other than healthy. "How our society governs itself" is a subject over which very few people have, or might gain, any sort of influence; not being one of those people, and having neither desire nor reasonable prospect of joining their ranks, the profligate expenditure of mental and physical effort, to say nothing of precious and irreplaceable time, to pursue the meaningless self-appellation of "good citizenship", strikes me as falling well within the realm of foolishness.

Local politics, depending on where one happens to live, may well present a more worthwhile prospect. In my own case, and being that I live in Baltimore -- a city whose corruption is almost as famous as it is nigh-boundless -- I see little more reason to involve myself on the local level than on the national. Those of a temperament for politics, and who find themselves living in places where local politics are other than an Augean stable of gerrymandering and nest-feathering, might be well advised to involve themselves.

pixelmonkey• 13 years ago

From the article: "Mr. Obama was acutely aware of the risks of being seen as handcuffing the security agencies. 'Whatever reforms he makes, you can be sure if there’s another incident — and the odds are there will be in our history — there’ll be someone on CNN within seconds saying if the president hadn’t hamstrung the intelligence community, this wouldn’t have happened,' Mr. Axelrod said."

And so, the wheel keeps turning...

zephjc• 13 years ago

If theres ever a time to do the right thing, it's in the President's second term: it's all downhill, what the pundits say doesn't matter to re-electability, since there is none (unless you plan on going to another office later on...)

privong• 13 years ago

(unless you plan on going to another office later on...)

Just curious, has a president ever done that?

danielweber• 13 years ago

If the President wants to accomplish anything in his second term -- which is the point of holding the office -- than he still needs to maintain popular support. The public can't (generally) vote him out of office any more, but they can vote out his allies in the House or local/state government.

Unless the President is just hoping to shut everything down. Almost by definition he can do that without cooperation.

supersystem• 13 years ago

Just seems like a worse version of http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/12/16/131216fa_fact_...

By the way if your getting most of your updates on this subject from HN, you're most likely out of the loop. Since a lot of the insightful content doesn't make it. IIRC there's even a penalty on this subject on HN.

Sambdala• 13 years ago

“He has more information than he did then. And he trusts himself to use these powers more than he did the Bush administration,” said the former Obama aide

Okay, so given the trend of these powers is to increase, and he's not going to be in power after 2016, does he trust the next guy with even more powers, or the guy after that with even more than that?

When civil liberties advocates visited to press him to do more to reverse Mr. Bush’s policies, Mr. Obama pushed back. “He reminded me that he had a different role to play, that he was commander in chief and that he needed to protect the American people,”

The role of President isn't to follow through on the platform you were elected on?

mcone• 13 years ago

What's interesting is that the article suggests that Obama himself did not know extent of the NSA's activities. ("At the same time, aides said Mr. Obama was surprised to learn after leaks by Edward J. Snowden... just how far the surveillance had gone.")

If that's true, it seems to indicate that Obama is not an overseer at all.

Have our worst fears been confirmed? Is the NSA an unstoppable organization that reports to nobody except itself?

adventured3• 13 years ago

The military industrial complex has been running the United States since WW2. It's best to take Eisenhower's speech as the acknowledgement of that. It was a sitting President issuing a dire warning of what can only be described as a coup to a free Republic.

The political power, the money, the might, the lobbying, the military budget slush fund, the endless scandals, the wars. It's pretty clear the military-industrial combination has done the most to shape the last five or six decades of America's existence.

drzaiusapelord• 13 years ago

This is a good point. We have this fetished ideal of the POTUS as this mastermind, but I imagine a great deal of things are purposely hidden from him or hidden via apathy/politicking/corruption and "lets not involve the president on this," kind of thing.

I'm also curious what would happen if we had a president who was strictly anti-intelligence and anti-military. I imagine that's a quick way towards impeachment or getting deposed. There are way too many powerful people and way too much money in intel/military to just reform it. Can you imagine moving to a military budget on par with Russia? Ever?

If anything, we're a military power first and a democracy last. The fact that we can casually lie about war justifications, end the lives of 130,000 civilians, get into almost 1T in debt for it, and have it considered uncontroversial by American citizens and politicians speaks a lot about our values and our system.

scintill76• 13 years ago

No kidding. This is either a lie "Golly, I had no idea, I am shocked! Until this news story blows over.", or a scary truth. If a contractor for the NSA was able to find more shocking abuses of liberty than the Commander in Chief knew of, it would seem what little oversight there is, is completely ineffective.

Both look bad for NSA and Obama, both should compel us to demand more transparency.

P.S. Some would say Snowden should have gone the sanctioned whistleblower route to bring this to the attention of the proper parties such as Pres. Obama. Personally I am not optimistic that that would have been effective. I believe Snowden has claimed trying to start conversations with superiors, and NSA claims he never did such a thing.

wmeredith3• 13 years ago

“When you get the package every morning, it puts steel in your spine,” said David Plouffe, the president’s longtime adviser. “There are people out there every day who are plotting. The notion that we would put down a tool that would protect people here in America is hard to fathom.”

That's the whole problem. The NSA spying is being sold as if it stops terrorist attacks. It does not. They have not cited a single incidence.

jasonlotito• 13 years ago

I'm agains the NSA spying as well, but saying they haven't cited anything isn't the same thing as proving they haven't stopped terrorist attacks.

Please don't read more into this than what I said.

wmeredith3• 13 years ago

The NSA existing in a state that doesn't stop terrorist attacks is the status quo (it's the same as them not existing at all). It doesn't need proving.

If they want to spy on everyone in the world all the time and their reasoning is that it makes Americans safer, then the burden of proof is very much on them.

fit2rule• 13 years ago

What I'd really like to know is what process does the President-elect endure that turns him into an alien lizard from hell?

I mean, seriously .. its like black and white with Obama. Pre-Presidentiality, Obama was real. After-President'ness, he's become some obscure caricature of all other Presidents who came before him..

So is there some sort of secret Presidential chamber that all the past Presidents get to donate their DNA to, which gets injected into The New Guy, to make him into some sort of transformed hybrid clone, or something? I seriously wonder sometimes, if the enemies of the USA haven't realized that the real backdoor to infiltrating America and bringing it to its knees is in the Presidential Training Program that goes on with newly elected victims. It sure seems like the President of the USA gets a new skin, anyway .. I've only been watching for the last 4 Presidents or so ..

Perceval• 13 years ago

What I'd really like to know is what process does the President-elect endure that turns him into an alien lizard from hell?

A Truman-era bureaucrat coined the phrase, "where you stand depends on where you sit."

When Obama was outside the executive branch and had only a year of Senate experience before embarking upon his presidential campaign, he had a very different set of interests and responsibilities. As a junior, back-benching senator with no Washington DC experience, Obama had very few capabilities or political capital. People who are weak decry the power of the strong and seek to limit it.

When Obama became president and was given responsibility not just for Illinois, but for the United States and its allies, he assumed a very different set of responsibilities, interests, and capabilities. Obama entered office with a tremendous amount of political capital and the full panoply of executive branch powers at his disposal. The powerful do not generally seek to limit their own power or to accept limits placed upon them.

This happens to every candidate-turned-president, but with some it's more extreme than others. Some presidents enter office with executive branch experience, e.g. Bush Sr. or Eisenhower. Some enter with tremendous political capital and experience with DC politics, like LBJ a.k.a. the "master of the Senate." The transformation is not so great with these presidents.

Some enter with almost no political experience whatsoever, like Obama. The subsequent transformation is much more jarring, because the change in their power is much starker.

I mean, seriously .. its like black and white with Obama. Pre-Presidentiality, Obama was real. After-President'ness, he's become some obscure caricature of all other Presidents who came before him..

On the contrary, pre-presidential Obama was fake. He was in campaign mode from his entrance on the national scene in 2004 through 2008. You cannot honestly believe that the campaign image of a politician is the "real" version of that person.

Presidential Obama is the real Obama. Abraham Lincoln said, "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." This is who Obama is. There's a reason why presidents seem to feature greater continuity than change, and part of that reason is that the responsibilities of the office don't change according to the president, rather the president must change in order to perform the responsibilities of the office. Many wildly different personalities can occupy the office, but the office structures and constrains those personalities.

Idealists often have a consequence-free vision of what presidents ought to do (a "deontological" ethic). But politics does not work that way. Max Weber contrasted the (deontological) "ethic of ultimate ends" with the "ethic of responsibility" in his essay "Politics as a Vocation," which I urge you to read. http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/ethos/Weber-vocation.pdf

Responsibility is a different ethical standard than what individuals on their own would be held to. And what an individual ought to do is very often different from what someone responsible for the lives of others ought to do. And the actions a responsible political figure ought to undertake are often morally repugnant to the private individual. But it is a mistake to judge the leader by the standards one would use to judge a private citizen. Weber says as much:

"It follows that as far as a person's actions are concerned, it is not true that nothing but good comes from good and nothing but evil from evil, but rather quite frequently the opposite is the case. Anyone who does not realize this is in fact a mere child in political matters."

Isaiah Berlin in his famous article on Machiavelli (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1971/nov/04/a-speci...) puts it even more starkly:

If you object to the political methods recommended because they seem to you morally detestable, if you refuse to embark upon them because they are, to use Ritter’s word, “erschreckend,” too frightening, Machiavelli has no answer, no argument. In that case you are perfectly entitled to lead a morally good life, be a private citizen (or a monk), seek some corner of your own. But, in that event, you must not make yourself responsible for the lives of others or expect good fortune; in a material sense you must expect to be ignored or destroyed.
To be a physician is to be a professional, ready to burn, to cauterize, to amputate; if that is what the disease requires, then to stop halfway because of personal qualms, or some rule unrelated to your art and its technique, is a sign of muddle and weakness, and will always give you the worst of both worlds. And there are at least two worlds: each of them has much, indeed everything, to be said for it; but they are two and not one. One must learn to choose between them and, having chosen, not look back.
There is more than one world, and more than one set of virtues: confusion between them is disastrous. One of the chief illusions caused by ignoring this is the Platonic-Hebraic-Christian view that virtuous rulers create virtuous men. This, according to Machiavelli, is not true. Generosity is a virtue, but not in princes. A generous prince will ruin the citizens by taxing them too heavily, a mean prince (and Machiavelli does not say that meanness is a good quality in private men) will save the purses of the citizens and so add to public welfare. A kind ruler—and kindness is a virtue—may let intriguers and stronger characters dominate him, and so cause chaos and corruption.

Ygg2• 13 years ago

Power corrupts. Simple as that.

Anyone that manages to get to be in the race for the presidents is so irredeemably corrupt they shouldn't be running. It's like top CEO of financial firms. You don't get to the top by being a nice guy. You get it by being the biggest shark.

PS. I'm reminded of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenzaccio In which a young idealistic person wants to end tyranny of his cousin. To achieve that he decides to gets close to the tyrannt, working inside, helping him and engaging in debaucheries. Eventually he becomes more and more like his cousin. Finally he decides to end his cousins life not because he thinks that it is the right thing to do, or because he believe that it will bring change (he considers the entire city irredeemably corrupt) but because he wants to atone for his sins.

He deposes his cousin and then goes around Florence, announcing to the noble men that he has killed the tyrant and that people are now free to rebel. People just ignore him.

I think this depicts life of pretty much politician, except they don't have the balls to commit their original intent, they just wallow in power and do what's worst for everyone.

res0nat0r• 13 years ago

What I'd really like to know is what process does the President-elect endure that turns him into an alien lizard from hell?

I'm going to go with it's the /r/politics and HN echo chamber.

The President's approval ratings are at all time lows right now and it has nothing to do with the NSA (which the majority of the USA is just fine with right now btw), it is due to the rollout of the ACA. I'm sure once things related to the ACA smooth over and keep improving between now and his end of term his ratings will slowly be climbing back up, barring anything major going on in the world.

Just because every other post in /r/politics is about how terrible everyone that works for the government is, and every NSA post (way too often here now unfortunately) on HN is evil, does not mean the majority of the USA thinks that way. Actually it is quite the opposite.

ck2• 13 years ago

Like anyone ever in any kind of law enforcement position:

"it's okay when we do it"

nathan_long2• 13 years ago

OK: once he got in office, it turned out that watching everyone seemed like a good idea.

But here's the thing: it's unconstitutional. It's illegal.

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized".

Meaning: 1) You can't read my email without a warrant and 2) you need specific suspicions of me to get one.

Any interpretation that says the grocery list in my pocket is covered by the fourth amendment, but every electronic communication I make is NOT covered, is insane. "Houses, papers and effects" was the writer's way of saying "everything I can think of belonging to that person." Email and phone metadata and GPS location weren't imagined, but can you seriously say they would have been excluded?

So: balancing security with privacy is a hard thing. It is. But pooping on the constitution isn't a solution.

You want to surveil everything? Say so openly, explain your case, and try to repeal the fourth amendment. We're America: we decide by voting.

Secretly discarding the highest laws of the land is tyrannical, whatever the justification.

rayiner8• 13 years ago

This has been debunked to death. The issue isn't "houses, papers, and effects" not encompassing e-mail, but the "belonging to that person" aspect. Phone metadata doesn't "belong" to you. It belongs to your phone company. They generated it, they store it--you never even see it. It's also quite questionable how much of say your Facebook data "belongs" to you. Or your GPS location data. It's about you, but much or all of it is generated by some company and stored by that company, and you are often even not aware of it nor do you have access to it. You have little to no recourse if they lose it, destroy it, or misuse it. You can't even make them let you see it.

Indeed, I strongly agree with your use of the word "belong" because I think the use of "houses" and "persons" purposefully puts the 4th amendment on a strong property rights foundation.[1] But viewing the 4th amendment through the lens of property rights (i.e. "everything I can think of belonging to that person") makes most of what the NSA is doing quite legal! Things that are about you do not necessarily belong to you. If I write down every time my neighbor enters and leaves his house, that's mine, not his. Is Facebook tracks what you click on and your cellular company tracks your GPS location or your phone company tracks who you call, that's their data, not yours.

[1] The prevailing Supreme Court view of the 4th amendment is broader than this property rights view, but still embraces third party doctrine which makes much of what the NSA is doing legal. And certain Justices seem partial to the property rights formulation.

sroerick• 13 years ago

No -- the FISC has ruled that the third party doctrine makes NSA spying legal. The Supreme Court has not ruled on mass metadata collection.

argumentum• 13 years ago

This is all true, but what if the government compels Facebook to hand over it's data about you? Clearly that is a violation of the fourth amendment?

dwaltrip• 13 years ago

Intelligence agencies automatically gathering and storing all data generated by mankind is very different from manual surveillance of an individual's house. I find these types of comparisons rather misleading. The changing nature of technogoly and the increasing tendency for highly personal data to be generated and then vacuumed up by the NSA & friends strongly implies, to me at least, that, in order to protect the sanctity of the individual's personhood as well as democracy itself, this data needs to withheld/protected from powerful institutions. Especially those that can kill you/lock you in jail. Even if the data isn't "owned" by the indiviudal in the traditional sense.

nathan_long2• 13 years ago

1) Even if you are correct about eg, metadata, they are also snooping your internet requests, emails, etc, simply because they pass through infrastructure not belonging to you.

Do you think the Founders would have said "if you send a message via Pony Express, you authorize the government to read it"?

2) "If I write down every time my neighbor enters and leaves his house, that's mine, not his." True, but one person writing down what one other person does is hardly scalable or powerful. Computers recording everything everybody does creates much larger potential for analysis and abuse. We don't know what the Founders would have said about this, but I oppose it on the grounds that the risks for tyranny are enormous.

socrates1998• 13 years ago

I just don't get why people don't believe politicians.

We are lied to all the time by them.

We don't need the US Congress. We don't even need the President in it's current version.

We can vote on legislation ourselves. We can approve a budget ourselves. We can veto stupid and corrupt laws.

We do everything else online, why can't we govern online?

The people in power don't want this to happen, so they convince us they are actually doing something.

pessimizer• 13 years ago

Mr. Obama was told before his inauguration of a supposed plot by Somali extremists to attack the ceremony[...]. Although the report proved unfounded, it reinforced to Mr. Obama the need to detect threats before they materialized. “The whole Somali threat injected their team into the realities of national security in a tangible and complicated way”[...]

So a non-existent threat was what made Obama decide that the surveillance state was necessary. Great decisionmaking here.

mbateman• 13 years ago

Everything that's wrong with the current intelligence approach in a sentence: "And he trusts himself to use these powers more than he did the Bush administration."

This completely vindicates Snowden's point about the current system being one of policy instead of law, and of enabling turnkey tyranny.

abvdasker2• 13 years ago

I think it's a symptom of corruption of the system's built-in checks and balances. The executive branch is much more powerful now than it used to be, and is the only branch that is composed entirely of a single party. The only politically homogenous branch is now far-and-away the most powerful.

equalarrow• 13 years ago

Sigh, I guess this is nothing new. Obama's the ultimate (in my mind) say one thing, do another. At least with Bush we knew he was just a bad guy that didn't give a shit for anything other that war, greedy buddies, and a good walk on the ranch.

With Obama, yah, he came in as the 'outsider' (typical of all candidates I suppose) with all these things he would 'Change' (Shepard Fairey anyone?). But alas, it's been one disappointment after another. Net neutrality, spying, real universal healthcare, not going after politicians of the Bush area that blatantly broke all kinds of laws, etc. All a sham.

It's playing out like a sci-fi story where anyone can be an enemy of the state, just choose your own adventure: leaker, no fly list, dissident, downloader, photographer/videographer; the list goes on and one.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised as this isn't really a democracy anymore. Every law, decision pretty much has to have some 'but what about business/economy?' question. Excessive lobbying makes sure these decisions/rules will never change short of revolution. The fact that corporations are 'people' and that they have no donation limits anymore, pretty much ends what the founding fathers fought for - we the people.

The message of the 21st century america: get rich. Get above the law and above the fold of the 99%. Go where the rules don't apply to you. Go where you make the rules for everyone else.

afterburner3• 13 years ago

"At least with Bush we knew"

The vast majority of people took Bush at his word for a long time, especially on matters of war. The recognition of the deceit in the mainstream came long after.

audiodude• 13 years ago

Reminds me of this comic: http://deep-hurting.deviantart.com/art/And-in-the-Darkness-B...

eof2• 13 years ago

My heart sunk when Obama won the election the first time; not because I wanted McCain to win, or that I had any actual hope that one of the third-parties could win; but because everyone was so happy.

I was in Burlington, VT; about as liberal a town as you will find in the USA; and there was a strong anti-war movement. That anti-war movement bought Obama's promises hook-line-and-sinker and the same people that were out holding signs and going to rallies were canvasing for Obama. There was a march through the streets when the counting was done; people cheered as if we were finally turning a new leaf.

I hope, so deeply, that people will have learned their lesson; that, if some politician you have never heard of suddenly starts getting a ton of press and magically enters your consciousness; he is being tapped by big players to do so. Obama, more than any other public figure in the last twenty years is proof positive that there does indeed exist a shadowy cartel that are fucking with us for power.

If you believe Obama started out pure-at-heart and was 'corrupted' after becoming president; you are naive beyond all comprehension. Remember early, early when Obama was asked about marijuana? One of the easiest, most obvious blatantly fucked up policies our government carries out.. something that every single non-political marginally liberal person is absolutely crystal clear on should be legal for adults: he laughs derisively like it's a terrible idea.

Why? What is it about Obama being so full of hope and change and feel-goody liberalness that makes him laugh at marijuana? Talk to 50 non politician democrats and you will find 49 think it's obvious to legalize marijuana. But talk to 50 politician democrats, and you will find maybe half of them. The higher up you go, the less likely they are to be pro legalization. Why? Because their interests aren't yours.

If you think that there will be ever be a 'main stream' candidate that will represent your interests over the 'shadowy cartel' of government interest and lobbyists, you are sorely mistaken; and we all pay the price.

dllthomas6• 13 years ago

So, if your analysis is correct... what do we do about it?

eof2• 13 years ago

vote third party only

discardorama• 13 years ago

If this thinking, that "we will do anything to prevent another terrorist attack, including give up our liberties", is acceptable, then why isn't giving up guns acceptable to prevent the next school massacre?

mpyne4• 13 years ago

What if I told you, that there is a large gulf of possibility between "doing anything" and "doing nothing"?

lasermike026• 13 years ago

The big lie is that surveillance has to do with nation security. It doesn't. You build a surveillance system to suppress political descent not stop terrorist attacks. Business has big plans and they don't want some republic to vote and screw things up for them. They have world to conquer. Follow the money.

mildavw• 13 years ago

The mere hand-wringing that current leaders are doing over this is so disturbing to me because of where I see it taking the country. It's not hard to imagine, say, Carl Rove or his ilk giving someone at the NSA a wink and a nod that they'll be taken care of if their candidate wins office. The NSA leaks or hands off information that tilts the election their way. Given that collection of all of this data is A-OK, no step in this process is blatantly illegal anymore. If I were Ron Wyden, this is what I'd be saying. "Do you want your representatives picked by the NSA? Because that's the logical path we're going down."

The ability read/listen to all electronic communication without warrants gives the NSA too much power for this not to happen.

forgottenpaswrd• 13 years ago

It is not probably a good idea surround yourself with the people you need to control.

Obama spends most of his time going to eat-dinner with the same rich people that benefit from printing money. The rest of the time it is with the praetorian guard that "protects" him.

Anybody believes he is going to make the same people he surrounds most of the time furious? The same people that put him in charge?

This people are the eyes and ears of the "king of the world". He is living in a bubble.

rummikub• 13 years ago

His administration's descent on this issue has been disappointing. I mean how is the quote any different than something that would have come out of the previous administration?

“There are people out there every day who are plotting. The notion that we would put down a tool that would protect people here in America is hard to fathom.”

RyanMcGreal• 13 years ago

At the same time, aides said Mr. Obama was surprised to learn after leaks by Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, just how far the surveillance had gone.

If this is meant to be taken at face value, and it's at least plausible given how the US government seems to operate, how can Obama not follow it up with at least a strong commitment to making the American security apparatus more clear and transparent?

mpyne4• 13 years ago

Probably because unlike crypto, this is one of those areas where "security through obscurity" really is an aid. That has always been the tension between intelligence agencies and public oversight, it's not like NSA originated the problem.

yew• 13 years ago

Mr. Obama hasn't changed more than would be expected over several years and, while I can't speak with certainty, I would be very surprised to find out that he was lying about his views during the presidential campaign (I don't know about his promises).

He has more information than he did then. And he trusts himself to use these powers more than he did the Bush administration.

Even postulating some revolutionary secret information seems to me to be unnecessary.

Obama has always trusted himself. Most people do. What's changed is that the president is now someone who is trusted by Obama. Everything that's happened up to this point falls nicely out of those circumstances.

gumby• 13 years ago

There is an interesting case of regulatory capture nobody seems to be discussing. From the article:

`"But they said his views have been shaped to a striking degree by the reality of waking up every day in the White House responsible for heading off the myriad threats he finds in his daily intelligence briefings.

`“When you get the package every morning, it puts steel in your spine,” said David Plouffe, the president’s longtime adviser. “There are people out there every day who are plotting....'

and then:

`Mr. Obama was surprised to learn after leaks by Edward J. Snowden...[we all know what]'

Every morning the president gets a propaganda dose from the very people he needs to reign in. OF COURSE they are going to tell him the sky is falling in and that they are the only ones holding it back. And since it's exciting and secret there is no cross check or balance.

He should be seizing the example of Snowdon's releases to realize that the books are being cooked. Instead he's been completely taken in by the briefing books. It's really no different from Joe Barton being taken in by BP.

Back in the Reagan era Alan Kay told me about his very short time as a white house advisor. Reagan's briefing book wasn't even a book, it was a three minute video. I'm sure it REALLY played up the Soviet threat, yet the security apparatus was as astonished as anyone else when the USSR collapsed.

dleibovic• 13 years ago

Mr. Obama was angry at the revelations, privately excoriating Mr. Snowden as a self-important narcissist who had not thought through the consequences of his actions.

I could not disagree more with that sentiment.

Obama’s Path From Critic to Overseer of Spying

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