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President George W. Bush today signed into law...

President George W. Bush signed into law comprehensive legislation sponsored by Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), and Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) to help prevent terrorists from entering the United States through loopholes in our immigration and visa system. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If there was any doubt before, Dianne Feinstein made it clear her position of authority is due entirely to be propped up by a political party’s need to fill a seat, rather than intelligence or even a basic understanding of the world around her. Let’s look at a few of her recent statements defending the NSA:

While claiming to “see enough of the threat stream to know” about threats behind the scenes, her example was a warning about potential shoe bombs on flights bound for the United States.

What’s wrong with this picture? Let me count a few ways …

  1. If a bomb goes off during flight, what is the point, or target? If someone threatened to blow up the plan to take control, after what happened in 9-11, they would get their butt handed to them from passengers knowing they would die anyway (see the last point). Hijacking is pretty much impossible now.
  2. Taking down a plan randomly doesn’t help anyone’s cause either symbolically or in terms of easily claiming credit. This has never been a tactic and there’s no reason to believe it will become one.
  3. A threat originating in another country being discovered announces the scope of our intelligence, meaning tapping communications in other soverign lands, which we are already in deep water over, such justifications notwithstanding. (Being from a non-American airport, the TSA would be un-involved and irrelevant, so would we would be unable to deal with it without calling on countries in which we are spying … which brings us to the next point.)
  4. The last shoe bomber acted alone. There was no correspondence that NSA could have tracked, meaning it would not have been prevented, not a siilar one prevented in the future by these means. (And for the record, the plot was missed by the TSA and foiled by citizen passengers.)

It is reasonable to assume she made it up on the cuff without forethought, intelligence (personal), or neither. It’s an unverifiable plastic carrot on the stick of governmental over-reach.

And she seems dumbfounded by “intrusion” into our lives from commercial entities, saying her daughter emailed a contractor for a plumbing job and then received messages from other contractors. Either this was automated and her daughter was merely a potential customer blip, or this is a case where contractors are sharing information with their competitors. It’s another story that doesn’t add up unless she completely misunderstood or misrepresented the situation.

Lastly, in defense of the NSA and denying their potential abuse of power, she describes them as “professionals”, and limited in number  to who has access to the data (22 people, really?). It is simply not rational (or perhaps devious) to keep pushing the assumption this data is not and will not be used wrongfully. It was already collected unconstitutionally without the knowledge of The People, or even CONGRESS, before [[Edward Snowden]]. It is already known fact the IRS targeted groups based on political ideology. And [[General Petraeus]] was shamed over an affair, the discovery being through emails. There’s plenty more incidences and common sense and history in general to add to the equation, but that would be overkill.

When she said, “What keeps me up at night, candidly, is another attack against the United States” I can only respond that what keeps AMERICA up at night is not another attack, but people like her in positions of power.

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