b. traven

When will we learn that the shell game is the only game Obama knows well?  He wants us to believe that allowing a private company to collect all of our private conversations, and saving them for later access by the government, is not abridging our Fourth Amendment rights to privacy.  He hopes we will not see that, from the perspective of the Fourth Amendment, the two shells – current policy or what he is offering now – are exactly the same.  To call this “reform” is an insult to intelligence.  “Privacy” is just that and that alone. Privacy means that our private communication is not under anyone else’s shell, only our own.

And he is a constitutional lawyer.  I just wonder whose constitution?

Updated (1/18):

OK. I understand that many of you may not remember the days when the “old shell game” was a popular street scam. Sort of like Three-card Monte, another street scam. I’ll explain for those not familiar. Someone would set up a small table on the sidewalk in New York and put three walnut shells or cups on the table which was often covered with a green velvet cloth. He would ostensibly put a pea under one of them and then quickly shuffle the position of the shells leaving them in a different alignment than when he started. He would then lay out a dollar or more bill and someone in the audience would bet they could pick the shell with the pea in it and win the bet. After the bet was made the bettor picked up the shell they bet on and it never had the pea so he lost his dollar. The scammer would pick up another shell to show the pea and thus plead honesty. There was always a shill in the crowd who would bet and win, but of course he was in on the scam since the pea really wasn’t under any shell and the scammer had palmed it before and just as unnoticed inserted it in the show at the end.

Your right to privacy is the pea and it isn’t under any of Obama’s NSA “reform” plans.

Obama is the scammer and the shills are the NSA, military, and congressional supporters of the scam.