America 2.0: The Latest

• Democratic Senator Al Franken says he "was very well aware of" the NSA's surveillance program, but don't worry: "I can assure you, this is not about spying on the American people. I have a high level of confidence that this is used to protect us and I know that it has been successful in preventing terrorism."

• Democratic Representative Steny Hoyer says this is not equivalent to what the Bush administration was doing: "The difference between this program and the Bush program [is that] the Bush program was not sanctioned by law; this is pursuant to law. I think that's a very important distinction that some people don't draw, but they ought to draw."

That is true. The Obama administration's surveillance programs have warrants that the Bush administration did not have. That said, the legality (or lack thereof) of Bush's warrantless wiretapping program was only one aspect of the constellation of objections to it.

• Relatedly: Democratic Senator Dick Durbin says the FISA declassification bill is dead on arrival. The bill, sponsored by Democratic Senators from Oregon Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, would "require the attorney general to declassify significant opinions made by courts operating under the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)." It's essentially a transparency bill, and it has bipartisan support. But Durbin does not expect it to pass, and, even if it passes through Congress and arrives on the President's desk for signature, "they are going to eventually turn us down," says Durbin. "They are [just] going to say no."

Transparency (or the lack thereof) was one of the other primary objections to Bush's warrantless wiretapping program.

• Republican Senator Lindsay Graham says: "If I thought censoring the mail was necessary [for national security], I would suggest it, but I don't think it is."

• Republican Representative Peter King says that journalists who report on leaks should be punished: "Actually, if they willingly knew that this was classified information, I think action should be taken, especially on something of this magnitude. I know that the whole issue of leaks has been gone into over the last month. I think something on this magnitude, there is an obligation, both moral but also legal, I believe, against a reporter disclosing something which would so severely compromise national security. As a practical matter, I guess it happened in the past several years, a number of reporters who have been prosecuted under it, so the answer is yes to your question."

Welcome to America 2.0, where the government legally submits the entire population to surveillance dragnets and journalists who report on it should go to jail!

• And where the President meets with select journalists in secret, off-the-record meetings.

• NSA Disclosures Put Awkward Light on Previous Denials: "For years, intelligence officials have tried to debunk what they called a popular myth about the National Security Agency: that its electronic net routinely sweeps up information about millions of Americans. In speeches and Congressional testimony, they have suggested that the agency's immense power is focused exclusively on terrorists and other foreign targets, and that it does not invade Americans' privacy. But since the disclosures last week showing that the agency does indeed routinely collect data on the phone calls of millions of Americans, Obama administration officials have struggled to explain what now appear to have been misleading past statements."

Whoops.

Basically, what we're meant to take away from all of this is that, yes, our information is being collected and analyzed, but only so they can look for Bad Guys. So ha ha don't worry your pretty little heads about it, because we're not using the information to come after YOU. At the moment. Unless you're a Bad Guy. Are you a Bad Guy? Well, we'll be the judge of that.

I'm being flip, but the problem is, at its root, that the way the data is reportedly being used (and we've just got to trust them on how it's being used, and that it's not being abused) is supposed to act as retroactive justification for the data being collected in the first place, instead of having a conversation in the first place about whether this is a strategy that is: 1. effective; 2. necessary; 3. constitutional; 4. something we actually want to do, even if it is all of the above.

I don't know about anyone else, but I for one am getting really fucking tired of national security strategies that encroach on privacy rights being defended with bullshit sloganeering about people who hate us for our freedom, even as that freedom is being eroded in pursuit of some alleged safety. This is garbage thinking. The very nature of the country is being changed in pursuit of protecting "our way of life," without a trace of fucking irony.

And Maude knows I'm not a fierce defender of tradition, but when I say this country needs to change, this ain't what I mean.

• The ACLU has filed a lawsuit challenging NSA phone surveillance: "In the wake of the past week's revelations about the NSA's unprecedented mass surveillance of phone calls, today the ACLU filed a lawsuit charging that the program violates Americans' constitutional rights of free speech, association, and privacy."

• In related news: "The FBI has dramatically increased its use of a controversial provision of the Patriot Act to secretly obtain a vast store of business records of U.S. citizens under President Barack Obama, according to recent Justice Department reports to Congress. The bureau filed 212 requests for such data to a national security court last year—a 1,000-percent increase from the number of such requests four years earlier, the reports show."

Neat!