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blue bits. red rocks.
Tuesday 2 March 2010

…President Obama did not dramatically change at all the surveillance policies of his predecessor. When he was a candidate, when he was running for office, he actually took a fairly strong and, I think, rather principled stand against new surveillance laws that were being debated in Congress at the time, which would have granted legal authority to much of what the Bush administration had been doing and the NSA had been doing after 9/11 in secret and arguably outside the surveillance laws. So Obama was against that, in principle. He didn’t want to, he said, expand the government’s surveillance powers. He also didn’t want to grant immunity to the telecommunications companies who had participated in this secret surveillance program for five or six years. And he actually threatened to filibuster any bill that would have that immunity provision. But as he got closer to an assured nomination and as some of his intelligence advisers began talking to him about what these surveillance programs do and what they thought the value to be gained from them was, he flip-flopped. He changed his position. He said he was going to support new surveillance authorities. And I think what happened there is, as he got closer to the day that he was likely to become president and these would become his executive powers, I think he realized that they could be very valuable tools, and he wasn’t willing to give them up, because they were executive authorities. Shane Harris

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