Obama, NSA PRISM Spying Okay By Democrats, Just Not Under Bush

Obama and the NSA spying on us is now okay by Democrats…but that was not the case under President Bush.

As previously reported by The Inquisitr, the NSA PRISM spy program works by collecting information about and from US citizens. Polls show the NSA phone tracking is acceptable to 56 percent of Americans.

NSA’s PRISM platform collects various forms of data including emails, file transfer records, voice and video chats, and more from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and other companies. The Bush administration argued that data centers are just “facilities” capable of transferring data for international terrorists. But NSA PRISM uniformly collects data instead of targeting terrorist suspects with a warrant. The Obama administration was quick to continue the work started under the Bush White House.

In short, the NSA PRISM spying program collects information all of us, resembling a police state, which explains the sudden surge sales of Orwell’s 1984 after the NSA leaker went public. But despite all the controversy, President Obama defends the NSA PRISM spying.

Back in January of 2006, when the world first learned of the Bush administration’s NSA spying program, 65 percent of Americans supported it. Now that number has dropped down to 62 percent.

The NSA phone tracking is apparently not a partisan issue. But support polls for NSA spying on Americans apparently changes depending on what political party is in the Presidential office.

In 2006, 61 percent of Democrats opposed the NSA spying program, while 75 percent of Republicans supported it. The NSA monitoring emails had 53 percent of Republicans supporting it, while 51 percent of Democrats opposed.

Now in 2013, 52 percent of Republicans support Obama’s NSA PRISM spying program, while Democrats support it even more at 64 percent. When it comes to the NSA email monitoring the partisan flip-flop becomes quite clear, since Democrats who previously opposed it under Bush now greatly support it under President Obama.

Some of that change in support levels might be due to changes to the NSA spying programs. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 2008, which Senator Obama voted for, empowered the NSA to do more things than was previously allowed under President Bush’s special authorization.

Even President Obama himself has flip-flopped on the NSA spying program. Back in 2006 Obama stated:

“President Bush is not above the law. No President is above the law. … Americans fought a Revolution in part over the right to be free from unreasonable searches–to ensure that our Government could not come knocking in the middle of the night for no reason. We need to find a way forward to make sure we can stop terrorists while protecting the privacy and liberty of innocent Americans. We have to find a way to give the President the power he needs to protect us, while making sure he does not abuse that power. It is possible to do that. We have done it before. We could do it again.”

Do you think Obama and the NSA PRISM spying programs should be free of political partisanship?