June 11, 2013
The Enemy is Us
By Christopher Chantrill

It's great for President Obama to grandly assure the world that "This war, like all wars, must end." That's what liberals have been wanting to do since about ten minutes after 9/11. But the president wants to hedge his bet. For political reasons, if nothing else, he wants to be sure that there isn't a repetition of 9/11. So there will be no end to the war at the NSA.

If the president wants to end the war on terror while keeping the intelligence apparatus on a full wartime footing, it's a problem, according to Walter Russell Mead.

Zitat

---

Here's the big problem: to the degree that the strategy works, and the public begins to feel safe and the war atmosphere fades, the intelligence work and the drone strikes that the strategy requires look less and less justifiable. After all, the President's message is that the threat is under control and the terrorists are on the run. Why then is the NSA tapping every phone and reading every email in the country?

---

If the war has ended, there is no justification for massive and intrusive eavesdropping on Americans any more. No war emergency means no need for emergency war powers.

Of course, it could be that the NSA really needs all that signal intelligence to detect the bad guys. Or it could be that it's much easier for intelligence agency bureaucrats to build huge computer databases and huge data-mining operations rather than do the difficult and dangerous job of identifying and penetrating terrorist cells.

There is another reason to curtail emergency powers in peace time. It is that the government will find a reason to use its powers. To a politician, a domestic opponent is just as much of a threat as a foreign enemy. That's what the IRS scandal is all about. Normally, the IRS agents would be sitting around counting the days until retirement and merely going through the motions of vetting 501(c) applications. But if there's a war, I mean an election, to be won, that's different.

So as sure as eggs is eggs, the government will end up using the NSA data for the harassment of its domestic opponents. Unless we stop it now.

Read more:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/06/t...l#ixzz2Vth0HkIP

Thanks for posting.

Zitat

---

The only real job for a government is to make war on enemies, foreign and domestic, but liberals don't want to make war on foreign enemies, and they don't want to enforce the law on domestic enemies, the common criminals. Yet government must have a war, otherwise it can't justify its power and its expense. So liberals look around them for something to fight, and the first thing they see is corporations, conservatives, gun owners, Chick Fil-A.. And it sure would help to have all that NSA metadata.

---

Or why you should never cede power to government that you would not want your worst enemy to have. That enemy gets to define what is 'doing something wrong'.