The problem is: if you do this, you should no longer be allowed to vote. Because democracy can only survive if the feedback cycle is encouraged, not sabotaged:
(Good|bad) news => critical thinking by the citizen => citizen votes accordingly => corruption (and other problems) are corrected.
If you stop reading news, you stop being a responsible citizen.
If you feel bad about the news, there's 1 thing you should do: Channel the anger and produce positive action. It will make you feel good and problems will vanish. That is how this works.
That may be true if you're the kind of person who never stands up to anybody. If you never voice disagreement or opposition, then you can be that 100% transparent citizen.
But it's difficult or impossible to reverse this, once you've gone down that path.
And as soon as you'll feel like saying something critical, you can very easily be manipulated to remain silent, because the other party will know all your weaknesses. It will know where to attack you efficiently. (And if you take a look at our dumb and immature culture, you will notice that we still think it's ok to judge people, btw. all based on the illusion of "free will").
And then we would end up with the tyranny of the genuinely ascetic, the puritanical and those that lie so well they can mask everything from everyone (sociopaths).
This story is about New Zealand, but I'm sure we agree on which government exerts the pressure that these police state tactics are about to become the new (and apparently accepted) "normal".
I really hate to see the US going down that path, it would have had so much potential to exert positive pressure, to make the World a better place.
> I always get this impression that the first day in office of a new president some guy in a black suit comes into the oval office...
If you remember that one of the pre-Snowden whistleblowers stated in an interview that Obama was among the people under targeted surveillance, then you know that all future Presidents (and some past ones probably too) are nothing more than puppets being manipulated by the real powers (which we don't see). So it's really no surprise that "promises will always be broken" - unless we understand that very profound changes in our systems are the only real solution, long-term.
OK, so let's see how this applies to Obama specifically. The argument, so far as I understand it, goes like this.
1. Before Obama was president, his phone was tapped.
2. He must have said, or been party to, some incriminating things, because that happens to basically everyone.
3. Therefore, he could be blackmailed.
4. Therefore, he has been blackmailed.
5. Therefore, he is now doing exactly what whoever blackmailed him wants.
I have no trouble believing #1.
#2 is doubtless true for some senses of "incriminating". I think he admitted (it's ridiculous for this to be an admission, but never mind) that he smoked some cannabis as a student. He went to a church whose leader said some kinda dumb things. He must surely have said some kinda dumb things. But ... the subset of these "incriminating" things that got out during his election campaign wasn't enough to lose him the primary or the presidential election. There'd need to be something quite a lot worse to provide enough blackmail material to (e.g.) kick him out of the job or put him in prison. Richlieu notwithstanding, six randomly chosen lines do not generally suffice to hang someone in the present-day USA.
Now, of course it's possible that he really did do something bad enough to provide real blackmail leverage. But I wouldn't want to bet on it.
#3 might follow if #2 were right for a sufficiently serious sense of "incriminating". But (see above) I don't think it is.
#4 wouldn't follow from #3 in any case. It does, astonishingly, sometimes happen that people who could be blackmailed aren't. Blackmail is a high-risk strategy; if you try it and your victim isn't playing, it can get awfully embarrassing for the would-be blackmailer. And it's not as if the President of the United States of America lacks the resources to make things difficult for someone trying to blackmail him.
(He might lack the resources if he were somehow being blackmailed by the entirety of his staff, or an all-powerful conspiracy that could frustrate everything he might try to do to expose them. But that would require a size and scale of conspiracy that (a) is improbable a priori, (b) is more improbable given that no insider has ever felt guilty enough to blow it open, and (c) hasn't had all the people claiming such conspiracies mysteriously silenced.)
#5 doesn't follow from #4. Push a blackmailee too hard and they'll stop cooperating.
So: I still don't see how "is a puppet" is supposed to follow from "has been under surveillance". Too many gaps.
I assume the worry is they'll do what J. Edgar Hoover did and amass secret dossiers they can use for blackmail (or to tip off the press to get rid of) their political opponents.
Even if the president himself is a saint with nothing to hide or blackmail him over, he has many friends and allies.
With that said, any control would have to be limited enough that those controlled went along with it instead of fighting it - a relationship of complete puppetry would be difficult, as they might decide to go down and take you with them.
> Sheriff Bud York suggested, according to the Post-Star, the local newspaper, that “in an era of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil and mass killings in schools, police agencies need to be ready for whatever comes their way...
And in reality, they're just preparing for social unrest that seem more likely by the day.
> the NSA and its British counterpart defeat encryption technologies by working with chipmakers to insert backdoors, or cryptographic weaknesses, in their products.
I had already started to forget about that...
From that other report (september):
> They reveal a highly classified program codenamed Bullrun, which according to the reports relied on a combination of "supercomputers, technical trickery, court orders, and behind-the-scenes persuasion" to undermine basic staples of Internet privacy, including virtual private networks (VPNs) and the widely used secure sockets layer (SSL) and transport layer security (TLS) protocols.
The problem is: if you do this, you should no longer be allowed to vote. Because democracy can only survive if the feedback cycle is encouraged, not sabotaged:
(Good|bad) news => critical thinking by the citizen => citizen votes accordingly => corruption (and other problems) are corrected.
If you stop reading news, you stop being a responsible citizen.
If you feel bad about the news, there's 1 thing you should do: Channel the anger and produce positive action. It will make you feel good and problems will vanish. That is how this works.