WHY CAN'T FEINSTEIN SEE THE PATTERN?

Sen. Dianne Feinstein heads the Senate Intelligence Committee and seems determined to give the NSA a merely cosmetic restriction on spying. We already know that the NSA lies to FISC judges, eavesdrops on personal communications with impunity, gives Israel raw, unfiltered data, and isn't deterred by obvious FAILs.   In the past, the NSA also spied on Martin Luther King and Sen. Frank Church, another clear violation of the 4th Amendment.  It's not just the NSA, of course, because we know that the CIA also spied on Americans.  Here is just one example: (h/t Susie Madrak)

But now it’s no longer a “conspiracy theory” or “paranoia”:

For years, the Central Intelligence Agency denied it had a secret file on MIT professor and famed dissident Noam Chomsky. But a new government disclosure obtained by The Cable reveals for the first time that the agency did in fact gather records on the anti-war iconoclast during his heyday in the 1970s.

The disclosure also reveals that Chomsky’s entire CIA file was scrubbed from Langley’s archives, raising questions as to when the file was destroyed and under what authority.

The breakthrough in the search for Chomsky’s CIA file comes in the form of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. For years, FOIA requests to the CIA garnered the same denial: “We did not locate any records responsive to your request.” The denials were never entirely credible, given Chomsky’s brazen anti-war activism in the 60s and 70s — and the CIA’s well-documented track record of domestic espionage in the Vietnam era. But the CIA kept denying, and many took the agency at its word.

Now, a public records request by FOIA attorney Kel McClanahan reveals a memo between the CIA and the FBI that confirms the existence of a CIA file on Chomsky.

UPDATE: Wired Magazine has a document that shows when NSA agents break the rules or the law, they almost never suffer adverse consequences.