Just when we thought the absurdity that marks every single day of Obama’s reign could not possibly be surpassed, we learned that 4 hours (3 hours and 47 minutes to be precise) after the US president vowed to sign a new law banning bulk data collection by the NSA (named, for purely grotesque reasons, the “USA Freedom Act“), the Obama administration asked the secret Fisa surveillance court to ignore a federal court that found bulk surveillance illegal and to once again grant the National Security Agency the power to collect the phone records of millions of Americans for six months.
Or, as the Guardian’s Spencer Ackerman, who spotted this glaring page out of Josef Stalin’s playbook, summarized it:
June 2, 6:03pm: Obama says he’ll sign law banning bulk collection.
June 2 9:50pm: DOJ asks secret court for 180 more days of bulk collection
— Spencer Ackerman (@attackerman) June 8, 2015
According to Ackerman, this latest travesty by the administration “suggests that the administration may not necessarily comply with any potential court order demanding that the collection stop.”
