[Infowarrior] - NSA Critics Gleefully Accuse Surveillance Hawks of Hypocrisy

[Richard Forno]

 NSA Critics Gleefully Accuse Surveillance Hawks of Hypocrisy

Steven Nelson

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015-12-31/nsa-critics-gleefully-accuse-surveillance-hawks-of-hypocrisy

Privacy advocates are accusing politicians generally deferential to the government's mass surveillance programs of hypocrisy after leading hawks expressed concern about the possible collection of their own communications.

Collection on members of Congress, revealed this week by The Wall Street Journal, was performed by the National Security Agency with a wink-and-nod from the White House, which was intent on countering Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's bid to derail the Iran nuclear deal.

According to the report, the congressional communications were "incidentally" collected. What exactly was done with those intercepts is unclear and the chairman of the House intelligence committee, historically a roadblock for privacy legislation, announced an investigation Wednesday as hawkish members of Congress squealed in disapproval of the surveillance.

Ironically, a budget deal negotiated by the congressional leaders this month stripped language that would have banned searches of some "incidentally" collected communications of Americans, despite the measure passing the House with broad support. The amendment also passed last year, but then too was stripped from a leadership-negotiated deal.

Privacy advocates were quick to gloat about their longtime adversaries' apparent double standard.

"Confused intelligence committee opens investigation into surveillance it authorized," tweeted Jameel Jaffer, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney who has worked on the group's lawsuits against NSA phone and Internet surveillance.

"Also BREAKING: Intel overseers who've hailed NSA minimization for 30 months discover it's inadequate for privacy,"  chirped journalist Marcy Wheeler, a prominent blogger who covers national security and civil liberties.

Wheeler harshly critiqued Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., the chairman of the House intelligence committee.

"Devin Nunes? He's a raging hypocrite who should be called out as such," she wrote. In another tweet, she wrote he "has NEVER ONCE voted [against] incidentally collecting [on U.S. persons], now objects when he is collected."

Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who exposed the vast breadth of NSA surveillance beginning in June 2013 using leaked documents from exiled whistleblower Edward Snowden, beamed in The Intercept that "[a]ll sorts of people who spent many years cheering for and defending the NSA and its programs of mass surveillance are suddenly indignant now that they know the eavesdropping included them and their American and Israeli friends rather than just ordinary people."

Greenwald singled out former Rep. Pete Hoekstra -- a past chairman of the House intelligence committee who had tweeted "NSA and Obama officials need to be investigated and prosecuted if any truth to WSJ reports. NSA loses all credibility."

"Now that he knows that it is his privacy and those of his comrades that has been invaded, he is no longer cavalier about it," the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter wrote, recalling a debate he previously had with Hoekstra.

Nunes told The Associated Press he received no notification of Iran deal surveillance affecting members of Congress.

Sounding at least publicly detached, Nunes told the AP, "We're going to play this right down the middle and determine whether or not somebody did something wrong."

Lawmakers in the past have been accused of having a double standard for surveillance that affects them and surveillance that broadly affects the public. Some privacy advocates dubbed it the "Merkel effect" after revelations that the German chancellor's phone conversations were recorded by the NSA.

The so-called Merkel effect manifested last year when one of the NSA's most ardent allies, then-chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., loudly denounced the CIA for surveilling the work of her committee staffers as they investigated the agency's alleged torture of detainees.

Activists accused Feinstein of being "two-faced" on surveillance and visited her office to drive the point home for a crowd of reporters. One privacy advocate covered her face with a photo of the senator labeled "pro-spy Di-Fi." Another did so with the label "anti-spy Di-Fi."

After putting on a poorly scripted political theater performance over the objection of Capitol Police, the activists left Feinstein a large pair of sunglasses that said "Stop Spying" and expressed hope she would one day wear them.

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