An American Lion

  There's no right to privacy when you're a lonesome prairie dog

If you care about privacy, it should shock to you to have to read things like this:

When Attorney General Eric Holder invoked the “state secrets” privilege to quash a lawsuit alleging illegal National Security Agency spying last Friday night, his department’s lawyers sounded a lot like those who worked for President George W. Bush. In fact, they justified the action by filing an affidavit from President Obama’s director of national intelligence that is nearly identical to one filed by President Bush’s intelligence director two years ago.

The strikingly similar affidavit—making the same arguments in the almost exactly the same language—is among the strongest examples yet of how Obama administration officials are adopting Bush-era secrecy positions in major national security cases.

Holder’s move came in the case of Shubert v. Obama, a lawsuit filed in 2006 by four residents of Brooklyn, New York. They allege that their overseas phone calls were illegally intercepted by the NSA as part of a massive “dragnet” of warrantless surveillance ordered by Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The reality is, government policies under Obama and Bush are pretty much the same thing:

“Confirming or denying such allegations, again, would reveal to foreign adversaries whether or not the NSA utilizes particular intelligence sources and methods and, thus, would either compromise actual sources and methods or disclose that the NSA does not utilize a particular source or method,” Blair wrote on page nine of his  11-page affidavit.

That’s what Bush’s DNI McConnell said two years ago: “Confirming or denying such allegations would reveal to foreign adversaries whether or not the NSA utilizes particular intelligence sources and methods and, thus, either compromise actual sources and methods or disclose that the NSA does not utilize a particular source or method,” McConnell wrote on page eight of his  affidavit.

Those must be some deep, dark secrets they're hiding. Could the real truth be that they are unable to stop terrorism and that their methods don't work anymore? Could the real truth be that they don't have qualified people evaluating a vast stream of data that can't be adequately searched for relevant information? If everything is on the up and up, and if all of the eavesdropping is overseen by the courts, then what's the problem here? Are they afraid that, if people see how ridiculous their efforts truly are, then their vast funding stream, to the tune of billions and billions of dollars, will dry up out of necessity? It's not about good government. It's about how much cash you can ram into those pants pockets. Whether there is an "R" or a "D" next to your name is irrelevant.

The political elite protects itself, and you have no right to know what your government is doing to protect you. I don't want to hear a single liberal screech about how bad things were under Bush. Nothing has changed, except for how they're marketing "change" to you. As long as there's a pretty man in the White House, none of those deep thinkers are going to get spun up about what's really going on.