From the Hill:
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) on Friday disputed a claim President Obama made at a press conference only moments earlier, when the president said that every member of Congress had been briefed on the National Security Agency’s (NSA) domestic phone surveillance program.
Merkley said only select members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees had been briefed on the program, and that he was only aware of it because he obtained “special permission” to review the pertinent documents after hearing about it second-hand.
“I knew about the program because I specifically sought it out,” Merkley said on MSNBC. “It’s not something that’s briefed outside the Intelligence Committee. I had to get special permission to find out about the program. It raised concerns for me. … When I saw what was being done, I felt it was so out of sync with the plain language of the law and that it merited full public examination, and that’s why I called for the declassification.”
At a press conference on Friday, Obama said that every member of Congress had been briefed on the phone monitoring program. The president argued that the policy, which was implemented in 2007, struck the “right balance” between privacy and national security, and that it had been helpful in thwarting terrorist attacks.
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| Not pleased |
The ethics of PRISM can be put in terms of lying, as evinced by Robert Clapper, Director of Intelligence at the NSA, before Congress. Kant’s critique of lying can shed light on whether Clapper should have lied. If he should not have, what are the implications for the republic from the compromised democratic accountability? See "The NSA Goes to Congress: Kant on Lying as Unethical" http://www.thewordenreport.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-nsa-goes-to-congress-on-ethics-of.html
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