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December 31, 2015 04:00 am

NSA Cheerleaders Discover Value of Privacy Only When Their Own Is Violated

Advocatus Diaboli sends this report from Glen Greenwald:The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the NSA under President Obama targeted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his top aides for surveillance. In the process, the agency ended up eavesdropping on "the contents of some of their private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups" about how to sabotage the Iran Deal. All 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. The long-time GOP chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and unyielding NSA defender Pete Hoekstra last night was truly indignant to learn of this surveillance. In January 2014, I [Greenwald] debated Rep. Hoekstra about NSA spying and he could not have been more mocking and dismissive of the privacy concerns I was invoking. "Spying is a matter of fact," he scoffed. As Andrew Krietz, the journalist who covered that debate, reported, Hoekstra "laughs at foreign governments who are shocked they've been spied on because they, too, gather information" — referring to anger from German and Brazilian leaders. As TechDirt noted, "Hoekstra attacked a bill called the RESTORE Act, that would have granted a tiny bit more oversight over situations where (you guessed it) the NSA was collecting information on Americans." But all that, of course, was before Hoekstra knew that he and his Israeli friends were swept up in the spying of which he was so fond.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/M9TqB9is3IQ/nsa-cheerleaders-discover-value-of-privacy-only-when-their-own-is-violated

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