I've been trying to resist blogging too often about the NSA scandal, but this is just unbelievable.
On Friday, I took time to watch President Barack Obama's press conference. It's the one in which he promised to bring in a "high level group of outside experts to review our entire intelligence and communications technologies." The president said he would ask the "independent group" to give an interim report in 60 days and a final report at the end of the year. Wow, I thought. Who is he going to name to run this thing?
So who did the president name to head the "independent group" of "outside experts"? Bruce Schneier, maybe? Julian Sanchez? Cory Doctorow? Sen. Ron Wyden? Jimmy Carter? The head of the ACLU?
Give up? It's James Clapper!
Details here.
This sort of thing is bipartisan, of course.
"As Hannah Arendt noted, during the Vietnam War 'the policy of lying was hardly ever aimed at the enemy but chiefly if not exclusively destined for domestic consumption, for propaganda at home and especially for the purpose of deceiving Congress'.”
That's from an excellent James Bovard piece about lying as an essential tool of government policy.
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