New Chalcedon wrote:With all respect to your source, I must remind you that the nature of the interrelationship between the US government and favoured corporations has grown far more intertwined in recent years. While your professor may have been right for the time he worked at the CIA, things change - and many aspects of governance have changed.
My professor (who's a she, btw) left the CIA in 2006, and is quite critical of the influence of corporations in the federal government, but largely credits the IC for its insulation (although she noted that's had its own downside, particularly the state centric viewpoints the CIA adhered to in the 90s).
And so Australian companies should just wait and continue to be at a competitive disadvantage while we wait for the NSA to clean house?
No.
Or we could recognize the improbability of the situation and not worry about it, because there are people paid by the American tax payer to worry about it for us.
So classified that the Senate Homeland Security Committee was kept in the dark about key aspects of PRISM. That's "classified" all right.
Yes. It's classified. However, it's not off the books. There was oversight and record keeping, both by the NSA and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, not to mention the DNI and his staff as well as the Attorney General and the DOJ. Furthermore, key members of Congress (I'm thinking the Senate Intelligence Committee and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence) might have been informed, but I don't know. Nonetheless, even if the were briefed on the existence of the program, it is not necessarily their prerogative to interfere with the program, given the berth that the bureaucracy tries to keep from Congress.
As a side note - I find it particularly hilarious that the judge who signed the secret orders allowing the massive data hauls was none other than Judge Robert Vinson, who is on record describing Obamacare as a massive governmental overreach. Oh, the irony....
I don't really see the irony. Constitutional challenges to either PRISM or Obamacare come from completely different parts of the Constitution, but whatever.
