{"id":8848,"date":"2013-06-08T08:21:41","date_gmt":"2013-06-08T08:21:41","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2013-06-08T08:21:41","slug":"en-US","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=8848","title":{"rendered":"WaPo: Wonkbook: These programs might well have been legal. That\u2019s almost worse"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>WaPo: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/blogs\/wonkblog\/wp\/2013\/06\/07\/wonkbook-these-programs-might-well-have-been-legal-thats-almost-worse\/\">Wonkbook: These programs might well have been legal. That\u2019s almost worse<\/a> by Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cRather than dismantling Mr. Bush\u2019s approach to national security,\u201d Peter Baker writes in today\u2019s New York Times, \u201cMr. Obama has to some extent validated it and put it on a more sustainable footing.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The fog surrounding the United States\u2019s national-security apparatus has lifted a little over the last forty-eight hours. Reports from Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian and Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras in The Washington Post sketch the outlines of a surveillance program that is large, indiscriminate, and unaccountable that everything from Americans\u2019 phone records to the contents of their personal emails lie at the fingertips of federal officials \u2014 officials, no less, whose powers have been granted in special courts that disclose neither their decisions nor their legal justifications.<\/p>\n<p>. . .<\/p>\n<p>The administration\u2019s response is that the program is legal and is overseen by both Congress and the courts. They also gesture towards, but don\u2019t really identify, \u201cnumerous inaccuracies\u201d in the reports.<\/p>\n<p>If the reports of how these programs work are wrong then the reports are wrong. But if not, it\u2019s true that these programs might well be legal under existing law. They might well have been subject to congressional oversight. That\u2019s even scarier.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>b2evALnk.b2WPAutP <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=8848\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"pingsdone","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8848"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8848\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}