Ever since the first big revelations about the National Security Agency five months ago, Dianne Feinstein has been in overdrive to defend the surveillance state. As chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, she generates an abundance of fog, weasel words, anti-whistleblower slander and bogus notions of reform \u2013 while methodically stabbing civil liberties in the back.<\/p>\n
Feinstein\u2019s powerful service to Big Brother, reaching new heights in recent months, is just getting started. She\u2019s hard at work to muddy all the waters of public discourse she can \u2013 striving to protect the NSA from real legislative remedies while serving as a key political enabler for President Obama\u2019s shameless abuse of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.<\/p>\n
Last Sunday, on CBS, when Feinstein told<\/a> "Face the Nation" viewers that Edward Snowden has done "enormous disservice to our country," it was one of her more restrained smears. In June, when Snowden first went public as a whistleblower, Feinstein quickly declared<\/a> that he had committed "an act of treason." Since then, she has refused to tone down the claim. "I stand by it," she told<\/a> The Hill<\/i> on Oct. 29.<\/p>\n Days ago, taking it from the top of the NSA\u2019s main talking points<\/a>, Feinstein led off a San Francisco Chronicle<\/i>op-ed piece<\/a> with 9\/11 fear-mongering. "The Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the United States was highly organized and sophisticated and designed to strike at the heart of the American economy and government," she wrote, and quickly added: "We know that terrorists remain determined to kill Americans and our allies."<\/p>\n From there, Senator Feinstein praised the NSA\u2019s "call-records program" and then insisted: "This is not a surveillance program." (Paging Mr. Orwell.)<\/i><\/p>\n Feinstein\u2019s essay \u2013 touting her new bill<\/a>, the "FISA Improvements Act," which she just pushed through the Senate Intelligence Committee \u2013 claimed that the legislation will "bridge the gap between preventing terrorism and protecting civil liberties." But as Electronic Frontier Foundation activist Trevor Timm writes<\/a>, the bill actually "codifies some of the NSA\u2019s worst practices, would be a huge setback for everyone\u2019s privacy, and it would permanently entrench the NSA\u2019s collection of every phone record held by U.S. telecoms."<\/p>\n <\/p>\n California\u2019s senior senator is good at tactical maneuvers that blow media smoke. In late October \u2013 while continuing to defend the NSA\u2019s planetary dragnet on emails and phone calls \u2013 Feinstein voiced concern<\/a> "that certain surveillance activities have been in effect for more than a decade and that the Senate Intelligence Committee wasn\u2019t satisfactorily informed." Spinning the myth that congressional oversight of the NSA really exists, she added: "Therefore, our oversight needs to be strengthened and increased."<\/p>\n As usual, Feinstein\u2019s verbal gymnastics were in sync with choreography from the Obama White House. The "certain surveillance activities" that she has begun to criticize are the NSA\u2019s efforts targeting the phones of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other allied foreign leaders. Feinstein mildly chided Obama for ostensibly not being aware of the eavesdropping on Merkel\u2019s cell phone ("That is a big problem"), but she was merely snipping at a few threads of the NSA\u2019s vast global spying \u2013 while, like the administration as a whole, reaffirming support for the vast fabric of the agency\u2019s surveillance programs.<\/p>\n The White House is now signaling policy changes in response to the uproar about monitoring Merkel\u2019s phone, the New York Times<\/i> reported on Nov. 5, but "President Obama and his top advisers have concluded that there is no workable alternative to the bulk collection of huge quantities of \u2018metadata,\u2019 including records of all telephone calls made inside the United States." Feinstein is on the same page: eager to fine tune and continue mass surveillance.<\/p>\n With fanfare that foreshadows a drawn-out onslaught of hype, Feinstein has announced that the Senate Intelligence Committee will hold hearings on NSA surveillance. "Her committee is now making preparations for a major investigative undertaking, which is expected to take at least several months," the Wall Street Journal<\/i> reports. When the show is over, "The report that results from the probe will be classified."<\/p>\n With Dianne Feinstein\u2019s hand on the gavel, you can expect plenty of fake inquiries to pantomime actual oversight. She has shown a clear commitment to deep-sixing vital information about the surveillance state, in a never-ending quest for the un<\/i>informed consent of the governed. "From out of the gate, we know that her entire approach is to make those hearings into a tragic farce," I said during an interview<\/a> on C-SPAN Radio last week. "Her entire approach to this issue has been to do damage control for the NSA\u2026. She is an apologist and a flack for the surveillance state, she is aligned with the Obama White House with that agenda, and we at the grassroots must push back against that kind of a politics."<\/p>\n Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include<\/i> War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death<\/a>. Information on the documentary based on the book is at www.WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ever since the first big revelations about the National Security Agency five months ago, Dianne Feinstein has been in overdrive to defend the surveillance state. As chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, she generates an abundance of fog, weasel words, anti-whistleblower slander and bogus notions of reform \u2013 while methodically stabbing civil liberties in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":112,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-22288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/112"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22288"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22292,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22288\/revisions\/22292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22288"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=22288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}