Primary Sources: It’s Hard to Do PR for Warrantless Surveillance

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Bush%20phone.jpgThe White House certainly doesn’t make suing George W. Bush a cakewalk. A lawyer challenging Bush’s warrantless surveillance program darkly recounted on Salon the extreme lengths the government went to to ensure watertight secrecy in the case.

The Salon article is well worth reading, as this NSA oddity I unearthed recently while fact-checking.

The National Security Agency, apparently feeling the heat from a citizenry up in arms over their wiretapping program, released a factsheet in 2006 to clear some things up with the American public. The actual title:

“The NSA Program to Detect and Prevent Terrorist Attacks: Myth v Reality.”

Some examples of those myths:

Myth:

“The NSA program is illegal.”

Reality:

“It has long been recognized that the President has inherent authority to conduct warrantless surveillance to gather foreign intelligence even in peacetime.”

Myth:

“The NSA program is a domestic eavesdropping program used to spy on innocent Americans.”

Reality:

“The NSA program is narrowly focused, aimed only at international calls and targeted at al Qaeda and related groups. Safeguards are in place to protect the civil liberties of ordinary Americans.”

And so on.

Now that Congress has handed the big telecoms a free pass for enabling government eavesdropping, can they at least throw us a safeguard to protect ordinary Americans?

Photo courtesy of whitehouse.gov.

—Nichole Wong

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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