Prudent Spending Quotes
The nation was in the midst of a national scandal when it was revealed that the National Security Agency was wiretapping and hacking into all telephone calls, e-mails, and other files for every single American. Hayden was typical of many in the intelligence agencies who didn’t even recognize that this was excessive as most Americans thought. The disconnect was at the heart of the problem which the nation was debating. Hayden’s argument was that the collecting of everyone’s private communications data was not an excess; what would be an excess is the abuse of how that data was used by the intelligence agencies which he claimed that other than some administrative errors had not taken place. Most people thought that the hacking and wiretapping without a warrant violated the 4th Amendment to the Constitution even if none of the data were kept permanently. However, the NSA was keeping all the meta data—the person, date, person called or e-mailed, the location of the communication sender and receiver, the time, and the length of the communication and analyzing it constantly tracking the networks of who each American communicated with. Hayden and other intelligence officials, including the President, claimed that the government was not reading (or listening to) the actual text of the messages and conversations without a warrant. However, those same officials had denied that they were collecting anything on large numbers of Americans and they deliberately lied about this even to the Congressional oversight committees. It took a major leak to disclose the truth. Many thought that even the claim of the minimum usage might also be a lie. The record demonstrated that intelligence officials had frequently lied to the President so even his statement was in question. Additional leaks also showed that the intelligence agencies had lied to the FISA courts to get warrants. Critics asked if collecting information on every single phone call and e-mail and internet communication was not excessive, what could possibly be excessive.
Kerry was criticizing the tendency of his fellow politicians to campaign making promises for programs or reforms that would cost money and rarely indicate where the money would come from and not willing to say what programs would be eliminated to pay for the current campaign promices.
