Adumbration

I wrote earlier in the summer of my skepticism concerning President Obama's interest in a public debate about the massive spying campaign that is being waged against American citizens by the US government; the recent news doesn't do much to improve my opinion of his treatment of our 4th amendment protections.

"President Barack Obama bowed to public concerns over US government data collection today" asserts the tag line from the CS Monitor, which goes on to describe a letter from the President that directs his underlings to establish a "Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies".   Other sources report a similar tale, but it is difficult for me to see this as anything but a pro forma response to the public uproar on this topic when the person tasked with naming the members of this Review Group is the current Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, whose current occupation can hardly be considered an unbiased position, let alone one that would place priority on the rights the US Government is charged to respect. MSNBC even reports that Clapper admitted to misleading Congress over the scope of the National Security Agency’s spying programs.

Reuter's quotes another section of the directive, that the Review Group consider whether the widespread data collection "optimally protects our national security and advances our foreign policy while appropriately accounting for other policy considerations, such as the risk of unauthorized disclosure and our need to maintain the public trust".   Over the years I have spent a fair amount of time reviewing specifications, to the point of being very suspicious of non-specific words - "optimally" and "appropriately" can hide many sins.  And note no question as to whether such spying is even authorized by the Constitution - the document he and all those other characters are sworn to uphold - only to maintain the "public trust".

In all this, President O is known as a constitutional scholar, but it's clear he places little weight on the original construction of that document or the terms of the Bill of Rights.  Particularly galling is how he invokes "the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America" to charter the Review Group, but like his predecessors he appears to believe the Constitution is infinitely flexible.