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This hypocrisy makes me physically sick. Feinstein has been one of the biggest apologists[0] for violations of civil liberties, government surveillance, and (b

• sitkack 13y ago
  The only way for politicians to act is for them to be personally harmed. They don't represent us, they represent themselves. Same thing with Angela Merkel, she didn't even address the Snowden documents until they showed that her phone had been tapped, every German except her? No problem!
  • grej 13y ago
    You would think that these organizations would realize that and at least leave their apologists alone, lest they risk something like this occurring. The fact that they would go this far with one of their biggest allies only goes to show how little respect they have for any kind of legal constraints on their mission.
    • samstave 13y ago
      Feinstein is as corrupt as they come. She was probably holding her intel seat as leverage to get what she wanted from the MIC... I wouldn't be surprised if she was targeted because she was a conniving blocker who was using the position to her own personal advantage and the intel community wanted leverage over her position.
      • camus2 13y ago
        > I wouldn't be surprised if she was targeted because she was a conniving blocker It makes total sense!you may be close to the truth here.
    • sitkack 13y ago
      This is exactly how empires fall, they get greedy, take too much, push too far and something breaks. If the feudal kings only took 10% we would probably all still be serfs.
  • raintrees 13y ago
    It really brings to mind the Casablanca scene (changed to fit the OP): "I'm shocked, shocked that there is spying going on." "Ma'am, here is your secret report." (Pockets report), blows whistle: "This office is now closed."
• dkl 13y ago
  I came here to say just this. She is not liberal in any sense. She's the worst kind of politician. I will not vote for her again. Anyone but her.
  • dllthomas 13y ago
    "She is not liberal in any sense." Well, she'd like to give us all a pretty liberal helping of surveillance... "I will not vote for her again. Anyone but her." This is an odd time to have reached that point; I don't see anything objectionable about her complaint here, or even its relationship with what her earlier positions (which I oppose).
  • btilly 13y ago
    I said that about both her and Boxer. And held to it until Carly Fiorina was nominated on the Republican side. I decided there was someone worse based on her HP record...
    • deleted 13y ago
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• joyeuse6701 13y ago
  Well, I'd rather her see the light and right her wrongs than hold fast and avoid the hypocrisy.
• lern_too_spel 13y ago
  That other spying (phone metadata collection) that she agrees with also includes her data, so this isn't really an example of hypocrisy. She's fighting more invasive spying that applies only to a smaller group of people that includes herself.
• ChuckMcM 13y ago
  My father mentioned that Sigfried & Roy were attacked by the very tigers they trained. Sometimes the dangerous animal you need in order to do the show, turns on you. That said, even among politicians there is a sense of borders. And that the Senator has found that they are interpreted differently by others isn't a huge surprise. I still hope to get her out of the Senate at her next election cycle.
  • pekk 13y ago
    Who did you have in mind to replace her?
    • protomyth 13y ago
      Given its California, it's probably going to have to be a primary challenge. Looking at how the DNC is handling the South Dakota Senate race, it will be a tough fight because the party establishment is going to put the hammer down (not near as bad as the RNC lately).
      • dllthomas 13y ago
        Given recent changes to CA electoral law, a primary challenge to Feinstein would open the possibility of there being no Republican option on the general election ballot, which might change the calculus a bit. In the last election, if everyone who voted for Feinstein had instead flipped a coin, and voted for Feinstein on a heads and some particular other Democrat on a tails, the general election would have been a choice between two Democrats - which would have been interesting.
        • protomyth 13y ago
          Wow, I didn't realize that CA had gone that far off the track. I get mad when they don't allow 3rd parties on, so I guess this is just vote from the approved choices crap.
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• yaur 13y ago
  I honestly don't get what the hubbub is about. This is a case where the CIA detected the exfiltration of classified material from a CIA network on to a CIA owned computer that the user was likely warned was being monitored. I would speculate that the only reason that the users are not in jail is that they were there as representatives of congress. There maybe legitimate questions about why certain information is being withheld, but not monitoring what was going on on their network and the computers attached to it would be a dereliction of duty on their part. Anyone who thinks that this is the equivalent of the NSA sweeping up all of the "metadata" don't know enough about technology to be making policy decisions IMO.
• Spooky23 13y ago
  Her response is normal for someone living in her bubble. Think about it -- were you upset back in the olden days when you heard about US Navy divers tapping Soviet telephone lines? People like the President and senior Senators get daily briefings from the intelligence community. Part of that is to keep these folks apprised about what is up. Another part is to keep the paranoia level up so that these people see threats everywhere. The "intelligence community" is a modern analog to the Guardians in Plato's republic. The natural question to ask is "Who watches the watchmen?" Feinstein's reaction answers that question.
  • camus2 13y ago
    > "Who watches the watchmen?" nobody,so much for checks and b... (I'm tempted to say b like bullsh_t)
  • Zigurd 13y ago
    The Soviet Union was a true super-power with a plausibly totalitarian agenda (perhaps not so much late in the game, but Stalin was no joke), and they occupied half of Europe. There is nothing like that on the planet now, and nothing like it on any medium or even long-range trend. And yet our military spending in constant dollars is within a whisker of the Cold War peak when we were throwing money at SDI. A good first step would be to cut budgets in these areas very deeply. That would simplify watching many fewer watchers.
    • gatehouse 13y ago
      Is the US Gov. not like that? Wars of aggression, torture, massive prisonner population, ... it makes sense for them to spy on themselves.
      • nickff 13y ago
        Comparing the US government to the USSR demonstrates a complete lack of historical knowledge.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NKVD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NKVD [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivization_in_the_Soviet_Union http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivization_in_the_Soviet_... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi [6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KGB http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KGB [7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_the_Soviet_Union http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_the_Sovi... [8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Pact_invasion_of_Czechoslovakia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Pact_invasion_of_Czechos...
• drawkbox 13y ago
  Now that she knows she was spied on, maybe someone has a bunch of dirt or possible blackmail from those communications. She has benefactors based on her decisions. In a decade all these spy programs will primarily be used for government tracking and business/corporate espionage, strange they thought Congress would be excluded. Either that or she is taking a lead on this to squash it as a false enemy of it.
• joering2 13y ago
  > This hypocrisy makes me physically sick. You haven't been around the block enough yet. None of this is surprising, because Feinstein falls under a psychopath narcissism profile altogether with scumbags like Bloomberg ("we need to ban guns" [while I will have 15 armed body guards walking with me everywhere]), Turner ("we need a China policy of one child" [while I have five]), Gore ("our carbon footprint will kill us [while I fly my personal jet that generates as much green gases as all the air trips of one human being combined over the span of his life]), and many many others. Its been hidden in plain sight that those people wants all those rules BUT for other people, not for them. So while Feinstein fails to realize blanked over 300,000,000 cellphones is as clear violation of constitution as it gets, she will assume every citizen is a terrorist.... except Majesty herself! I only wish CIA would join the game. They should have used Feinstein own words and first admit they been spying on her, however this is #1) for citizens safety (you know everyone can be a terrorist, INCLUDING Feinstein), #2 tell her like she did tell us that if you dig enough you would find that CIA property IS CIA property and they deem to do with it whatever they desire (like she told us she is surprise anyone is angry, since mass survilence was all nicely written in public bills), and #3 (my favorite): that she shouldn't be worry about it at all, because you know, they have their own Internal Quality Board Committee to oversight survilence and there IS not a smidgen of abuse. I would love to hear that!! After all, what on Earth you think that old hag, her political party, or President himself can do to the most evil but yet most legal Government organisation in the USA.
• vidarh 13y ago
  Feinstein generally disgusts me, but I don't see how she's being hypocritical here. While I disagree with her point of view on intelligence services, there's nothing hypocritical if she holds the view that their wide remits are important and necessary while still believing that explicitly violating the legal remit of their spying (CIA is explicitly forbidden from engaging in most domestic spying) and spying on the group tasked with the oversight of their spying is one step too far. If she genuinely believes the intelligence committee is exercising real and important oversight, but that the agencies generally do the right thing, then her reaction makes total sense: Her trust has been utterly betrayed. That's what her speech sounds like - someone like Feinstein openly accusing the CIA of committing crimes is pretty spectacular. Most of us probably just didn't expect to find out where she'd draw the line. And presumably the CIA didn't either. In that respect this might prove to be a massive misstep for them unless they do masterful damage control, since you're right - she's been one of their staunchest advocates. She's also powerful, and a hard nail; if she's not satisfied with the way they respond to this, they might very well find they've found a foe they really don't need, as she's one of very few legislators who has a realistic shot of clipping their wings if she decides she needs to. I don't expect her to fully see the light, but she could make a huge difference even if she gets disillusioned enough with the agencies to simply stop putting spanners in the wheels when other lawmakers tries to make the intelligence agencies more accountable.
  • argumentum 13y ago
    The charge of hypocrisy rises due to her change of attitude when she is herself the victim of unlawful surveillance. Keep in mind that the NSA's surveillance has already been ruled unlawful by both courts and committees appointed by the government that supervises the NSA. So in both cases, "legal remit" was violated. She only feels this violation when it comes to herself. We call this hypocrisy.
    • vidarh 13y ago
      I don't agree that it is a change of attitude. That's the point. Unless you can point to her excusing previous instances of surveillance of the intelligence committee, there's no basis for the claim of hypocrisy. It's perfectly possible she is, but her statements so far does not appear to provide any evidence of it. She can consider the intelligence committee to be in a special position on the basis of its oversight responsibility: Even if every other person on the planet is fair game, she can still hold that the CIA has gone to far when conducting surveillance against the intelligence committee without being hypocritical just on the basis of a belief that it violates the ability of Congress to carry out its mandated oversight role. The arguments she has made about separation of powers etc. are all in line with a line of thinking that makes this a special case.
• spoiledtechie 13y ago
  Thanks for pointing out the obvious! Glad to see, more than just a few of us out there hate this hypocrisy.
• discardorama 13y ago
  After observing Feinstein for over a decade, I've become a cynic and believe that she engages in doublespeak. Here's what I think is going on: by being the first to take a position on the CIA's violation of the law, she has become the point person; so now she can do damage control and limit the blowback. She got caught unawares with the Snowden episode, so this time she wants to make sure she's at the front. She is, and always will be, an ardent supporter of NSA/CIA and all the violations they do of our rights.