We were ‘actively misled’

Ron Wyden has been trying to warn us all along:

While some Senators are insisting that we need to keep going with NSA surveillance and just trust them that the NSA and FBI aren’t abusing the law and the information they have access to, others are pointing out that it’s a lot of hogwash. Senator Ron Wyden, who has been leading the charge against these programs for years (and was mostly ignored for that effort), gave a great speech describing how defenders of the program are directly choosing to mislead the American public. A key point, though it comes late in the speech, is the following:

The public was not just kept in the dark about the Patriot Act and other secret authorities. The public was actively misled.

Most of the speech is detailing exactly how that happened, and the distortions defenders of the program try to tell the American people and why they’re wrong. We’ll highlight a few, but reading or watching the whole speech is worthwhile.

He notes that he warned, quite specifically (and publicly) that when the American public found out how the laws were being interpreted, they would be surprised. That, clearly, proved accurate:

When the Patriot Act was last reauthorized, I stood on the floor of the United States Senate and said “I want to deliver a warning this afternoon. When the American people find out how their government has interpreted the Patriot Act, they are going to be stunned and they are going to be angry.” From my position on the Senate Intelligence Committee, I had seen government activities conducted under the umbrella of the Patriot Act that I knew would astonish most Americans.

Furthermore, he points out that officials chose to directly mislead the American public.

If that is not enough to give you pause, then consider that not only were the existence of and the legal justification for these programs kept completely secret from the American people, senior officials from across the government were making statements to the public about domestic surveillance that were clearly misleading and at times simply false.