There are without a doubt, areas where we should have righteous indignation towards the actions of the Government: The way Benghazi was handled, the way the Department of Justice ham handedly approached the investigation of leaks, the way the IRS targeted Conservative groups, the way the EPA targeted groups, the way the EPA tried to hide their official communications… This list can go on and on.
We should not however be angry and upset about the National Security Agency doing its job. More so we should stop reporting on it and go on to more important things. One of the issues I brought up in my earlier post was after the Church Committee our intelligence agencies were crippled. Human intelligence gathering became more difficult because Congress outed sources and did so publically for the whole world to find out.
This week marked the beginning of Private First Class Bradley Manning’s trial. You know the guy who leaked all the information to Wiki Leaks. The Army is, as part of its case pointing out that OBL routinely would request Wiki Leaks files. The enemy reads our papers, they watch our TV news, and you better believe they have cells that live amongst us.
Yes we already knew for the most part the capabilities of how this intelligence groups work, but that isn’t an excuse to exercise in stupidity. Each time we reveal our capabilities, we tell the enemy how we can find him. This means the enemy now knows that he shouldn’t partake in that activity and must find an alternate means. Newspapers, the Drudge Report, CNN, and Fox News, really everybody including myself is guilty of perpetuating a weakness here.
I’m not going to write any more on this issue unless it becomes clear that ordinary citizens are being targeted for political reasons. There is nothing to say, it’s a non story and we need to focus on the important issues like the IRS, like the DOJ, like Benghazi, like the EPA. These stories matter because they directly demonstrate failures of the highest degree. The case of PRISM is not a case other than perhaps who the hell leaked it to begin with.
We shouldn’t, especially those who lean Conservative, be lambasting the Administration for doing something we supported under the previous Administration. Either it is good always or it isn’t, and in this case I think the NSA is still doing the right thing.
