FISC Chief Judge: We Can't Effectively Oversee the NSA 185
An anonymous reader writes "According to the Washington Post: 'The leader of the secret court that is supposed to provide critical oversight of the government's vast spying programs said that its ability to do so is limited and that it must trust the government to report when it improperly spies on Americans. The chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said the court lacks the tools to independently verify how often the government's surveillance breaks the court's rules that aim to protect Americans' privacy. Without taking drastic steps, it also cannot check the veracity of the government's assertions that the violations its staff members report are unintentional mistakes.' President Obama said in June, 'We also have federal judges that we've put in place who are not subject to political pressure. They've got lifetime tenure as federal judges, and they're empowered to look over our shoulder at the executive branch to make sure that these programs aren't being abused.' Not so much, Mr. President."
They should just appoint a special investigator. (Score:5, Interesting)
They should just appoint a special investigator.
They could give the investigator over-arching extra-legal authority, just like the agency he'd be investigating.
I hear Edward Snowden has some experience in this area, and is currently in need of a job...
Re:They should just appoint a special investigator (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not, because Congress long ago abandoned a key role as a check on the Executive in favor of near constant partisan bickering. The end result is little more than a bitching chamber, where the party on top pushes its agenda, the other party consumes itself in trying to fuck up that agenda and get to the top. They are basically blind to all other considerations, and a pure political animals, squared off into two warring tribes, who have no sense of civic duty, no sense of morality or any sense of their purpose.
Re:And the peices fall into place (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't think making fun of Obama's overused campaign catchphrase indicates that he's a Republican.
And I find Obama's transgressions worse, as his stated goals ran COUNTER to this yet he has in fact expanded it drastically.
For one, Bush was definitely for it but not at this scale.
For another, Bush is no longer president, nor even a major force, so you bringing him up is pointless blather.
Re:Sigh... (Score:4, Interesting)
we have a bad process. so your solution is to fork another process.
what we need is a new bashrc. using the old broken one and forking new instances will never fix our hung process.
Our .bashrc is fine. The problem is that for 240 years, the sysadmins have been writing hackish, winding, indecipherable spaghetti code extension scripts designed to circumvent or undo all the good things .bashrc does. Then the auditors come in, look very closely at the scripts, and say, "Yup. Looks good. Those are definitely legitimate extensions to .bashrc."