Why can’t Obama promise us he isn’t reading our e-mails?

Image by pt via Flickr

The Wall Street Journal followed up on the Washington Times’s reporting that Iran had expanded its digital surveillance capabilities to a previously unforeseen degree. And dropped into the story was this delightful nugget about America’s non-denial denial of what it’s currently up to:

Human-rights groups have criticized the selling of such equipment to Iran and other regimes considered repressive, as it can be used to crack down on dissent, as evidenced in the Iran crisis.

But countries with repressive governments aren’t the only ones interested in such technology. Britain has a list of blocked sites, and the German government is considering similar measures. In the U.S., the National Security Agency has such capability, which was employed as part of the Bush administration’s “Terrorist Surveillance Program.” A White House official wouldn’t comment on if or how this is being used under the Obama administration.

via Iran’s Web Spying Aided By Western Technology – WSJ.com.

I’m sorry; I thought we had moved past the ‘Terrorist Surveillance Program.’ In his speech on cyber security a few weeks back, President Obama made a big deal about how terrible it was that his campaign’s computers had been hacked. It just seems like after eight years of President Bush, including an incident where almost all the senior level officials in the Justice Department almost resigned because the White House was attempting to ram heightened surveillance of Americans’ electronic communications down their throats, it’d be pretty easy for President Obama to offer up some assurances that our civil liberties were being protected.

I really can’t fathoms this. Why is it so hard for President Obama’s White House to state, without blinking, the following?

The United States of America does not spy on its own citizens who engage in lawful communications. The United States does not use deep-packet inspections or other comparable surveillance of electronic communications that are found in countries like Iran and China against its own citizens. Whenever such forms of surveillance are used, they are subject to applicable laws that protect the constitutional rights of American citizens.

Apparently it’s too sticky for White House spokesman Robert Gibbs to bang that out. Something remains rotten in our intelligence community’s surveillance programs. The gurus of intelligence-community surveillance program reporting, Eric Lichtblau and James Risen at the Times, noted this in a report just last week:

But after closed-door hearings by three Congressional panels, some lawmakers are asking what the tolerable limits are for such incidental collection and whether the privacy of Americans is being adequately protected.

“For the Hill, the issue is a sense of scale, about how much domestic e-mail collection is acceptable,” a former intelligence official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because N.S.A. operations are classified. “It’s a question of how many mistakes they can allow.”

There are moments when I want to give Obama the benefit of the doubt and agree that he’s still trying to warehouse all the ghouls and ghosts that the Bush White House freed from the intelligence community’s Pandora’s Box. But when it can’t answer a simple question, “Are you spying on Americans’ e-mails like Iran spies on Iranians’ e-mails?” my patience starts to wear thin.