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 -- while
methodically stabbing civil liberties in the back.
Feinstein's powerful service to Big Brother, reaching new heights in recent months, is just getting started. She's hard at work to muddy all the waters of public discourse she can -- striving to protect the NSA from real legislative remedies while serving as a key political enabler for President Obama's shameless abuse of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.
Last Sunday, on CBS, when Feinstein told "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 that he had committed "an act of treason." Since then, she has refused to tone down the claim. "I stand by it," she told The Hill on Oct. 29.
Days ago, taking it from the top of the NSA's main talking points, Feinstein led off a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed piece 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."
From there, Senator Feinstein praised the NSA's "call-records program" and then insisted: "This is not a surveillance program." (Paging Mr. Orwell.)
Feinstein's essay -- touting her new bill, the "FISA Improvements Act," which she just pushed through the Senate Intelligence Committee -- claimed that the legislation will "bridge the gap between preventing terrorism and protecting civil liberties." But as Electronic Frontier Foundation activist Trevor Timm writes, the bill actually "codifies some of the NSA's worst practices, would be a huge setback for everyone's privacy, and it would permanently entrench the NSA's collection of every phone record held by U.S. telecoms."
California's senior senator is good at tactical maneuvers that blow media smoke. In late October -- while continuing to defend the NSA's planetary dragnet on emails and phone calls -- Feinstein voiced concern "that certain surveillance activities have been in effect for more than a decade and that the Senate Intelligence Committee wasn't satisfactorily informed." Spinning the myth that congressional oversight of the NSA really exists, she added: "Therefore, our oversight needs to be strengthened and increased."
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