BREAKING: NSA Basically Treats Your Privacy the Way You Always Feared

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty

August 6, 2013

BREAKING: NSA Basically Treats Your Privacy the Way You Always Feared

Oh, NSA. What are we going to do with you?

The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents.

Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by statute and executive order. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of U.S. e-mails and telephone calls.

The documents, provided earlier this summer to The Washington Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, include a level of detail and analysis that is not routinely shared with Congress or the special court that oversees surveillance. In one of the documents, agency personnel are instructed to remove details and substitute more generic language in reports to the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

In one instance, the NSA decided that it need not report the unintended surveillance of Americans.

Is this part of that national debate on domestic surveillance that President Obama insisted he really, really wanted all along and just hadn't had a chance to start?

Mr. President, any response?

Let me be clear: I'm on vacation.

Bob Filner's Psychotic Behavior Needs to be a National Teachable Moment

Bob Filner and the rest of the bad boys of modern American politics are spectacular, vivid reminders of why the Founding Fathers distrusted the accumulation of too much political power, and sought to spread it around and install checks and balances.

Allahpundit at WarmerThanWarmAir.com points out what we're learning as one accuser after another comes forward against Filner:

He wasn't "coming on" to people, like a random person at a bar might do; he was using his status as mayor to pressure women, supposedly in great volume and sometimes with unwanted physical contact, who worked for him and with him into socializing with him. Given the freakish tenacity with which he's clung to his office, it seems like the power stroke he got from all of this was at least as exciting as the prospect of sex. In which case, why wouldn't he target a great-grandmother? Every woman he met was potentially at risk, I'd bet, but especially the ones who had official city business with his lordship, the mayor.

In short, Filner wants power, and his refusal to step down in the face of great embarrassment, the abandonment of his allies, and public outcry and ridicule suggests a certain psychological addiction to power.

A lot of people want power. With power, you get all the other stuff you want. For Anthony Weiner, power brings young women who want to talk dirty to him on Twitter. For Eliot Spitzer, power brought him access to the Emperor VIP club and the really expensive prostitutes. For Jesse Jackson Jr., power brought a lot of money in campaign donations that he could spend on a "$43,000 gold Rolex, cashmere capes, nearly $20,000 of Michael Jackson memorabilia" and a lifestyle significantly more luxurious than that of a standard-issue congressman.

My television viewing habits recently added Camelot, which early on features the villain King Lot, a classic brutal conqueror-ruler character. His motives are simple; he wants power, territory, sex, food, and the ability to enforce his will whenever he wishes, including the brutal murder of anyone who would defy him. That desire is not as rare as we might think in this world. Just look at Egypt; just look at Syria.

Thankfully, the United States does not suffer marauding warlords, raping and pillaging as they please. But we (and the rest of the Western world) do have our share of people who see political power as a path to achieving a certain status of fame, wealth, and so on, in which they can indulge themselves of anything they desire with no negative consequences. Look at Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the alleged "party king" of Paris and Washington, holding orgies with prostitutes in luxury hotels. Look at Silvio Berlusconi. Look at John Edwards, convincing his wealthiest supporter to finance a secret effort to keep his pregnant mistress quiet and hidden from the media. Heck, look at John F. Kennedy and his use of 19-year-old interns while in the White House.

What's more, these folks can pursue their own wealth and pleasures while convincing themselves and some segment of the public that they've dedicated their lives to public service.

If you've met some figures in public office who have earned your respect, and who show no signs of being a Nero or a Caligula, good. Not every politician is a selfish monster seeking to turn his public office into an entry key into a bacchanalia that would make the Eyes Wide Shut parties look tame. But a sufficient number of them are, and as a result of that, they shouldn't be put up on pedestals, and they shouldn't be greeted with messianic reverence.

They're contractors, and both we and they would be better if we all remembered that.

Disney/Pixar: 'Look, Parents, Just Give Us the Money and Nobody Gets Hurt.'

If you're a parent to small boys, you get used to signing over a portion of your paycheck every year to Pixar. And most of the time you don't even mind that much; they've earned the praise and billions in ticket sales. My older son's first movie he saw in a theater was Toy Story 3 and it remains one of his all-time favorites, and recently I took both of my boys to see what I thought was Pixar's latest offering, Planes.

The first catch is that Planes wasn't actually made by Pixar; Disney bought Pixar and had its own animation studio, DisneyToon Studios, make the film -- although the film had Pixar head John Lasseter as executive producer.

The first, and probably most important measure: Yes, Planes entertained my 3.5 and nearly 6-year-old for 90 minutes or so.

Critics usually offer rave reviews to Pixar's animated offerings, but Cars was pretty meh and the reviews of Cars 2 were worse, lamenting that it was pretty derivative of its predecessor and an uninspired rehash of spy tropes. If you've been living in a cave, or reside in cultural circles where Disney/Pixar's gargantuan marketing budgets can't reach you, Cars is about a world of anthropomorphic cars with eyes in their windshields and mouths in their bumpers that run in races.

As I thought more about what I saw in the theater, the weirder the off-kilter spectacle seemed, until I learned three things:

Planes was originally supposed to be released direct-to-video.
The film was animated in India, and some animation professionals contend the cheaper labor has resulted in a poorer-quality project.
Jon Cryer was supposed to provide the voice of the main character; comedian Dane Cook provided relatively late substitution.

So Disney's animation division, which took over Pixar, basically began by aiming for a cheaper, lower-quality knock-off, and things went wrong from there.

Planes re-uses a lot of the story elements of the Cars movies: a big international race; a green-colored bullying competitor who boasts he's certain to win; a bumbling best friend sidekick who's a truck; a grizzled, tough-taskmaster mentor hiding a dark secret; a bucolic small town that's so distant and forgotten it doesn't even appear on maps; sportscasters narrating the action . . . Eh, you know, as I rattle off the list, I realize this is pretty much the same movie.

In those few scenes where the Planes creative crew dares to throw in something new, it gets . . . really weird, at least for grownups stuck watching the film who begin to wonder about the ramifications of these revelations. For example, characters make reference to the film Old Yeller and dogs. Keep in mind, in these films no human beings appear and no animals appear to exist; birds are gliders and cows are tractors.

As the planes fly over India, the Indian plane character explains that in her country, they believe tractors are sacred and that the planes will be reincarnated as tractors. So there's some sort of Hindu belief system in the world we see on screen; are there other religions in the world of Planes? Did some sort of Jesus plane return from being totaled?

Wait, how did they build the Taj Mah -- eh, never mind.

Perhaps most bizarrely, in the world of Cars and Planes, World War Two happened. This is not me reading into an offhand comment; this is a major plot point. The crusty mentor character is a F4U Corsair who constantly refers to actual World War Two battles, and at a key moment we get a flashback to this character's entire squadron getting shot down by "the enemy fleet" -- what pretty much has to be the Japanese Navy. You're watching a happy little movie about smiling planes, and suddenly the film turns into Saving Private Ryan. There was a fun cliché in the old G.I. Joe cartoon series, where every spectacular dogfight ended with the pilots parachuting safely to the ground. As kids, we could see extraordinary violence of every kind but no character ever died. But in this movie, there are no pilots, and thus when we watch the planes explode, we're watching characters die. Some young viewers may have trouble with that scene; thankfully, my little guys had no idea what was going on at that point.

Needless to say, the filmmakers' decision to reference and depict World War Two has some really disturbing ramifications -- i.e., whether some future film will feature a Volkswagen with a distinctive square-grill mustache.

What's most disappointing about Planes is the sense that Pixar, or Disney, or Lasseter, or whoever is running the show over there has basically given up. This thing is predictable at every step, the dialogue is pedestrian, and an all-star cast of voices is pretty barely recognizable, never mind enjoyable. The whole vibe is, 'Eh, I guess that's good enough," and that's far, far below what we've come to expect from these films.

ADDENDUM: Egypt's pro-Morsi protesters announce today will be a 'Day of Rage' . . . raising the question of just what the heck we call Wednesday.

NRO Digest — August 6, 2013

Today on National Review Online . . .

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Forget about Congress — Obama is the law. Barack the Lawgiver

JOHN FUND: No more fact-challenged Candy Crowleys moderating presidential-primary debates. Taking Back the GOP Debates

THE EDITORS: The military's horrific violence yesterday does not alter the U.S.'s calculus in Egypt. Back Egypt's Military

ANDREW STILES: The notion that Republicans have no plan to replace Obamacare is news to Representative Tom Price. Tom Price's Plan to Replace Obamacare

CHARLES C. W. COOKE: The anti-Voter-ID crowd is beginning to descend into self-parody The Terrible Ordeal of Aaron Belenky

JOHN FUND: A program to help people sign up for Obamacare lacks privacy controls. State Attorneys General Warn Obamacare Navigators Are Off Course

To read more, visit www.nationalreview.com

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