“I think that there’s a group of people, younger people who are not fighting the war, who are libertarians mostly, who feel like the government is the problem.”

— Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), quoted by Time, on the NSA surveillance programs he helped write into law.

A new Time poll finds that 42% of Americans say there is little difference between President Obama and former President George W. Bush in being careful about protecting Americans’ privacy.

“Some members of the Congress say that getting straight answers from intelligence agencies about top-secret surveillance is like playing the game ’20 Questions,’ where answers come only if a questioner knows exactly what to ask,” Reuters reports.

“They say quality of closed briefings depends largely on who conducts the sessions and whether members go in with a working knowledge of programs and pointed questions.”

“The head of the National Security Agency defended his agency’s broad electronic surveillance programs Wednesday, saying that they have helped thwart dozens of terrorist attacks and that their recent public disclosure has done ‘great harm’ to the nation’s security,” the Washington Post reports.

A new Reuters/Ipsos poll shows that nearly half of all Americans say the U.S. government’s broad surveillance tactics are acceptable within limits and also found widespread concern about the methods that were revealed last week.

The poll also found that “few were completely untroubled by the news that the National Security Agency has been secretly monitoring telephone and Internet activity of millions of Americans. More than one in three of those surveyed said the activity was completely unacceptable. Others sought a middle ground, saying the government needed to balance national security with personal privacy and explain why the activity was necessary.”

“I’m worried about somebody in our government might kill him with a cruise missile or a drone missile.”

— Former Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), quoted by the Huffington Post, on the safety of NSA leaker Edward Snowden.

New York Times: “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…. 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.”

Meanwhile, the Huffington Post notes Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) chastised lawmakers who claimed they were in the dark about the programs: “For senators to complain that ‘I didn’t know this was happening,’ we’ve had many, many meetings that have been both classified and unclassified that members have been invited to.”

Wonk Wire: Can we trust the NSA with our secrets?

“U.S. intelligence operatives covertly sabotaged a prominent al-Qaeda online magazine last month in an apparent attempt to sow confusion among the group’s followers,” the Washington Post reports.

“The operation succeeded, at least temporarily, in thwarting publication of the latest issue of Inspire, the English-language magazine distributed by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. When it appeared online, the text on the second page was garbled and the following 20 pages were blank. The sabotaged version was quickly removed from the online forum that hosted it, said independent analysts who track Islamist militant Web sites.”

John Avlon notes that what connects the unruly and still-evolving scandals distracting the White House — ranging from the IRS to AP to Verizon — “is a portrait of an increasingly out-of-control federal bureaucracy that moves with an unaccountable borg-mind of its own. “

“This is the leviathan that libertarians and conservatives have warned about in sometimes overheated, hyperpartisan terms. The problem predates President Obama–government has been growing more or less consistently since the founding of the Republic, but especially since the New Deal, outpacing the growth of population. Now the complexities and temptations that come with new technology have hatched scandals that move almost on autopilot: leak investigations are announced and the gears of secret government churn on their own, often under the constitutional imperative of national security, sometimes leading to conditions contrary to the chief executive’s wishes and vision.”

Pew Research: “A majority of Americans – 56% – say the National Security Agency’s (NSA) program tracking the telephone records of millions of Americans is an acceptable way for the government to investigate terrorism, though a substantial minority – 41% – say it is unacceptable. And while the public is more evenly divided over the government’s monitoring of email and other online activities to prevent possible terrorism, these views are largely unchanged since 2002, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.”

“I don’t look at this as being a whistleblower. I think it’s an act of treason.”

— Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA), quoted by The Hill, on the man who leaked information on National Security Agency surveillance programs.

Wall Street Journal: “The National Security Agency leaks by Edward Snowden reveal a vulnerability in U.S. intelligence since 9/11, triggered by a surge of information collected on people around the world and the proliferation of private government contractors to store, sift and manage it.”

“Thousands of workers employed by government contractors sit side by side with federal workers and hold security clearances that provide access to intelligence databases. The result is a system so enmeshed that government and contract workers are often indistinguishable.”

President Obama’s chief defense of his administration’s wide-ranging data-gathering programs was that Congress authorized them, with “every member” well aware of the details, Politico reports.

But many members of Congress — Democrats and Republicans alike — insist this is not true.

“Congressional leadership and intelligence committees had access to information about the programs, he said — but the ‘average member’ of Congress likely wouldn’t have been aware of the breadth of the telephone and Internet surveillance.”

“The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton,” The Guardian reports.

“Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors… From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity.”

Said Snowden: “I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said he would examine ways to block the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs before the Supreme Court, The Hill reports.

Said Paul: “I’m going to be seeing if I can challenge this at the Supreme Court level. I’m going to be asking all the internet providers and all of the phone companies: Ask your customers to join me in a class action lawsuit. If we get 10 million Americans saying we don’t want our phone records looked at then maybe someone will wake up and something will change in Washington.”

President Obama “offered a robust defense of the government surveillance programs revealed this week, and sought to reassure the public that his administration has not become a Big Brother with eyes and ears throughout the world of online communications,” the New York Times reports.

Obama “acknowledged that the public may be uncomfortable with the broad reach of the formerly secret programs, but he said he believed the government had struck the right balance between the need to fight terrorism and the need to protect privacy.”

National Journal: “The latest surveillance program in the news is the most intrusive, and investigating who leaked it will be a stiff test of administration restraint.”

New York Times: “Whatever his ambivalence about what President George W. Bush called a global war, Mr. Obama has used some of the same aggressive powers in the name of guarding national security even, in the view of critics, at the expense of civil liberties. Rather than dismantling Mr. Bush’s approach to national security, Mr. Obama has to some extent validated it and put it on a more sustainable footing.”

Ron Fournier: “Welcome to the era of Bush-Obama, a
16-year span of U.S. history that will be remembered for an
unprecedented erosion of civil liberties and a disregard for
transparency.”

“The federal government has been secretly collecting information on foreigners overseas for nearly six years from the nation’s largest Internet companies like Google, Facebook and, most recently, Apple, in search of national security threats,” the New York Times reports.

“The confirmation of the classified program came just hours after government officials acknowledged a separate seven-year effort to sweep up records of telephone calls inside the United States. Together, the unfolding revelations opened a window into the growth of government surveillance that began under the Bush administration after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has clearly been embraced and even expanded under the Obama administration.”

“Government officials defended the two surveillance initiatives as authorized under law, known to Congress and necessary to guard the country against terrorist threats.”