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> The most simple explanation is that he lied through his teeth and that he had no intention of stopping it. This doesn't really fit anything I understand abou

by cowpig 4y ago

> The most simple explanation is that he lied through his teeth and that he had no intention of stopping it. This doesn't really fit anything I understand about Obama or about the world. Much more likely is that upon taking the responsibility of president he learned a lot of new things and received a lot of new advice/opinions and changed his mind.

wrs 4y ago
I imagine that anyone who becomes POTUS is quite suddenly exposed to a whole lot of new information that might change some of their previous views. Also, in so many areas of life (management, parenting, writing device drivers) you may have strong and idealistic views from the sidelines, but once you’re responsible for actually doing it your default view becomes “it’s complicated”.
- ch4s3 4y ago
  It seems more to me like having the kind of power a modern president of the US wields is inevitably going to change all but the steeliest person, and mostly for the worse.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Once you have access to classified information, you can spend literally every waking hour reading nothing but classified reports prepared for you. It can seem foolish to waste time reading anything else, which "might not be the whole story". But it puts you entirely under the thumb of whoever is preparing your reading material. Thus, Colin Powell famously had no idea he was being played when he persuaded senators to vote for invading Iraq.
scottyah 4y ago
He was also determined to shut down Guantanamo Bay, but things ended up being a lot more messy than signing a paper to make bad things go away
- autoexec 4y ago
  Not in this case. The president has full authority over the NSA which is part of the DoD. With Guantanamo Bay, he needed to find states willing to take in the prisoners and he needed congress. As commander-in-chief Obama could have ended the domestic spying program with a single order. He used a couple of secret memos to expand the spying program without needing anything from anyone. https://www.propublica.org/article/new-snowden-documents-reveal-secret-memos-expanding-spying https://www.propublica.org/article/new-snowden-documents-rev...
  - sneak 4y ago
    That assumes that the president actually has full practical authority over the NSA and IC. I don't know if that is true other than on paper. These organizations consume the private details of the lives of every federal judge, every member of the legislature, every prosecutor, every staffer, and their entire families, all of their mistresses, drug dealers, fixers, and bag men. I think this would put them in a position of significant leverage over anyone who is ever elected president.
    - autoexec 4y ago
      > I think this would put them in a position of significant leverage over anyone who is ever elected president. Worse than that, it gives them the ability to identify and eliminate threats to their power before they can even get to the point where they could build a viable campaign for the presidency! That kind of power, along with access to information on any petty rival, or even just the nudes of the random but sexy person they met in passing the other day, is temptation enough to corrupt anyone. Even if we could assume it hasn't been abused to that extent so far (and we've already learned about many many abuses) there's nothing stopping it from happening in the future. One my earliest concerns with the NSA collecting all of this data is that with the president at the top of the chain of command I expected every president would abuse this power for themselves. That Bush Jr would use it to target his personal enemies, that Obama would do the same, and I think it's safe to say that Trump wouldn't have been able to show restraint if he had any access to it, but we saw how Trump had to press people in foreign countries to dig up dirt on his enemies. While I've seen some claims that Trump's access was more limited than it was for other presidents (due to his unstable behavior) I suspect no president has been given access to the massive amounts of data being collected and stored by the NSA, even though (officially) nothing could stop a sitting president from ordering it. While it could just be true that no president has ever tried, it might also be true that in practice those presidents had less authority over the NSA than the NSA had over them and so the NSA could simply tell them "no".
autoexec 4y ago
> This doesn't really fit anything I understand about Obama or about the world. The world should have taught you a thousand times over that politicians tell lies to get elected. If Obama was being honest, he would be the exception. Obama was a typical politician in a lot of ways. For example, he was bought and paid for by the RIAA and after he was elected he stacked the justice department with their lawyers and as a result his administration was extremely favorable to them. (see https://www.wired.com/2009/03/obama-sides-wit-2 https://www.wired.com/2009/03/obama-sides-wit-2). That said, listening to him talk about ending domestic spying, I believed him. It's worth mentioning that he also campaigned on promises of transparency and said that he supported whistleblowers, but he branded Snowden as a criminal and his ended up being the least transparent administration in history. It's possible he was shown a lot of things that convinced him, but I can't think of anything that would justify the ongoing violation of our basic constitutional rights. He gave some lip service about improving transparency at the NSA but ultimately did nothing to increase accountability for the misuse of the data being collected. Misuse that we now know was commonplace (thanks to Snowden). I'd like to think that if he did see some legitimate use that made him believe it was a necessary evil that he would have done something to minimize the number of people with access to that data, but instead he made it easier for that data to be abused and shared with other agencies. In the end Obama gave the NSA more power than they had when he entered office.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  As Charlie Stross explained, he was "their man" from the outset. You could see he was "their man" because they somehow arranged to get him a Nobel Peace Prize for, apparently, nothing. Recall Henry Kissinger, Woodrow Wilson, and Teddy Roosevelt got them too. (And Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Peres. And Yasser Arafat.)
  - arminiusreturns 4y ago
    Rahm Emmanuel is the muli-presidency mover and shaker of the Obama admin nobody seems to talk enough about.
  - autoexec 4y ago
sneak 4y ago
Or the most powerful group in the country implicitly threatened him.
twirlock 4y ago

by cowpig 4y ago

wrs 4y ago

I imagine that anyone who becomes POTUS is quite suddenly exposed to a whole lot of new information that might change some of their previous views. Also, in so many areas of life (management, parenting, writing device drivers) you may have strong and idealistic views from the sidelines, but once you’re responsible for actually doing it your default view becomes “it’s complicated”.

ch4s3 4y ago
It seems more to me like having the kind of power a modern president of the US wields is inevitably going to change all but the steeliest person, and mostly for the worse.
ncmncm 4y ago
Once you have access to classified information, you can spend literally every waking hour reading nothing but classified reports prepared for you. It can seem foolish to waste time reading anything else, which "might not be the whole story". But it puts you entirely under the thumb of whoever is preparing your reading material. Thus, Colin Powell famously had no idea he was being played when he persuaded senators to vote for invading Iraq.

scottyah 4y ago

He was also determined to shut down Guantanamo Bay, but things ended up being a lot more messy than signing a paper to make bad things go away

autoexec 4y ago
Not in this case. The president has full authority over the NSA which is part of the DoD. With Guantanamo Bay, he needed to find states willing to take in the prisoners and he needed congress. As commander-in-chief Obama could have ended the domestic spying program with a single order. He used a couple of secret memos to expand the spying program without needing anything from anyone. https://www.propublica.org/article/new-snowden-documents-reveal-secret-memos-expanding-spying https://www.propublica.org/article/new-snowden-documents-rev...
- sneak 4y ago
  That assumes that the president actually has full practical authority over the NSA and IC. I don't know if that is true other than on paper. These organizations consume the private details of the lives of every federal judge, every member of the legislature, every prosecutor, every staffer, and their entire families, all of their mistresses, drug dealers, fixers, and bag men. I think this would put them in a position of significant leverage over anyone who is ever elected president.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    > I think this would put them in a position of significant leverage over anyone who is ever elected president. Worse than that, it gives them the ability to identify and eliminate threats to their power before they can even get to the point where they could build a viable campaign for the presidency! That kind of power, along with access to information on any petty rival, or even just the nudes of the random but sexy person they met in passing the other day, is temptation enough to corrupt anyone. Even if we could assume it hasn't been abused to that extent so far (and we've already learned about many many abuses) there's nothing stopping it from happening in the future. One my earliest concerns with the NSA collecting all of this data is that with the president at the top of the chain of command I expected every president would abuse this power for themselves. That Bush Jr would use it to target his personal enemies, that Obama would do the same, and I think it's safe to say that Trump wouldn't have been able to show restraint if he had any access to it, but we saw how Trump had to press people in foreign countries to dig up dirt on his enemies. While I've seen some claims that Trump's access was more limited than it was for other presidents (due to his unstable behavior) I suspect no president has been given access to the massive amounts of data being collected and stored by the NSA, even though (officially) nothing could stop a sitting president from ordering it. While it could just be true that no president has ever tried, it might also be true that in practice those presidents had less authority over the NSA than the NSA had over them and so the NSA could simply tell them "no".

autoexec 4y ago

> This doesn't really fit anything I understand about Obama or about the world. The world should have taught you a thousand times over that politicians tell lies to get elected. If Obama was being honest, he would be the exception. Obama was a typical politician in a lot of ways. For example, he was bought and paid for by the RIAA and after he was elected he stacked the justice department with their lawyers and as a result his administration was extremely favorable to them. (see https://www.wired.com/2009/03/obama-sides-wit-2 https://www.wired.com/2009/03/obama-sides-wit-2). That said, listening to him talk about ending domestic spying, I believed him. It's worth mentioning that he also campaigned on promises of transparency and said that he supported whistleblowers, but he branded Snowden as a criminal and his ended up being the least transparent administration in history. It's possible he was shown a lot of things that convinced him, but I can't think of anything that would justify the ongoing violation of our basic constitutional rights. He gave some lip service about improving transparency at the NSA but ultimately did nothing to increase accountability for the misuse of the data being collected. Misuse that we now know was commonplace (thanks to Snowden). I'd like to think that if he did see some legitimate use that made him believe it was a necessary evil that he would have done something to minimize the number of people with access to that data, but instead he made it easier for that data to be abused and shared with other agencies. In the end Obama gave the NSA more power than they had when he entered office.

ncmncm 4y ago
As Charlie Stross explained, he was "their man" from the outset. You could see he was "their man" because they somehow arranged to get him a Nobel Peace Prize for, apparently, nothing. Recall Henry Kissinger, Woodrow Wilson, and Teddy Roosevelt got them too. (And Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Peres. And Yasser Arafat.)
- arminiusreturns 4y ago
  Rahm Emmanuel is the muli-presidency mover and shaker of the Obama admin nobody seems to talk enough about.
- autoexec 4y ago

sneak 4y ago

Or the most powerful group in the country implicitly threatened him.

twirlock 4y ago