Fair. But who voted for anyone running the NSA? When did we decide that the national security programs of the United States should operate without the consent of the governed?
65 million people voted less than a year ago for the guy who could order the NSA to stop or modify any of these programs immediately. Say what you like about the current occupant of the Oval Office, but he's not a rigid ideologue: Democratic voices and the resulting political forces can get him to move, and if by some chance they can't, there's a Congressional election in a year and a Presidential in three.
I understand that, and I want to jump on board the 'our representatives should have control' train and believe that we're voting for people in power to make these decisions, but I just don't think it's realistic. The President and Congress are simply limited by the finite amount of time they have, and it's about time that we realize that the size of the United States as a population and as a governing body has outgrown the framework designed just a few centuries ago.
Sure, we could expect that someone from the NSA would brief the President or congress on the happenings of surveillance. It seems like a huge priority. But I lean towards Hanlon's Razor and thus towards believing that there are multiple layers of people between the people who make these decisions and the President--layers of people who are balancing their job security (after all, who would hire someone fired from the NSA for overstepping the 4th amendment) and their job description (after all, who do we blame when terrorist attack?). It's simply the stupidity of the system rather that malicious individuals within it.
All that might be true, but nothing is stopping President Obama from ending any of these programs he's reading about in the New York Times with a phone call, followed by an executive order.
Maybe other programs would wiggle their way through the bureaucracy without his notice, but the fact that he hasn't made a big show of publicly terminating these particular programs suggests that he is responsive to the concerns of the public. Unfortunately the concerns of the public don't appear to line up with yours at the moment.
And to get back to my point, they don't line up with Snowden's either. Which is too bad for Snowden, but it doesn't give him the right to do whatever he wants with the classified information he was trusted and paid to protect.
Fair. But who voted for anyone running the NSA? When did we decide that the national security programs of the United States should operate without the consent of the governed?