I didn't watch yesterday's Senate debate over the reauthorization of the 2008 FISA Amendments, but my Twitter feed suggested that it was a grim affair. A few senators tried to introduce amendments that would have provided a tiny bit of oversight of the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program—remember that?—but they were basically shouted down by my homestate senator, Dianne Feinstein, and the program was quickly reauthorized with essentially no public oversight at all. Glenn Greenwald is quite reasonably angry:
It's hard to put into words just how extreme was Feinstein's day-long fear-mongering tirade. "I've never seen a Congressional member argue so strongly against Executive Branch oversight as Sen. Feinstein did today re the FISA law," said Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations. Referring to Feinstein's alternating denials and justifications for warrantless eavesdropping on Americans, the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer observed: "This FISA debate reminds of the torture debate circa 2004: We don't torture! And anyway, we have to torture, we don't have any choice."
....Here we find yet again a defining attribute of the Obama legacy: the transformation of what was until recently a symbol of right-wing radicalism — warrantless eavesdropping — into meekly accepted bipartisan consensus. But it's not just the policies that are so transformed but the mentality and rhetoric that accompanies them: anyone who stands in the way of the US Government's demands for unaccountable, secret power is helping the Terrorists. "The administration has decided the program should be classified", decreed Feinstein, and that is that.
Feinstein's America,
Strangely, she wasn't always against guns...
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