Shocking stuff. I don't think it's an exaggeration at this point to say that politicians are afraid of opposing an organization that knows their, and everyone else's, secrets. And so they continue operate as they like.
More likely they are hesitant to rock the boat because intelligence spending is _big_ business. There are billions of dollars of contracts at stake so even if you caught people on video clubbing baby seals there is going to be strong pressure to not kill that cash cow.
It's almost certainly more complicated than this. The NSA is scary, but it's also not a revenue producing part of the government, and therefore it must justify its existence in the budget every year. Lawmakers therefore must be doing some sort of cost/benefit analysis and have determined (perhaps by looking at the NSA's secret output) that the cost is worth it.
tl;dr: If Congress wanted to chastise the NSA, all they have to do is not fund it.
This is exactly backwards. No politician cares about revenue-producing parts of the government; those things take care of themselves. They care about the really spendy parts, preferably those that spend all that money in a few big opaque unauditable chunks. Like the military, or espionage. That way, they know they'll have the leverage they need to make sure large chunks of those chunks eventually get back to them or their PACs.
That's [another, besides GP's] reason why Congress would never choose to chastise NSA.
If what you're saying is true, then it is (dis)provable. There must be ample evidence of what you're talking about, as the votes themselves are public, and resource allocation by geography is (probably) also public information.
I would argue that if you cannot prove it, then you should consider whether or not the assertion is coming more from a negative, cynical sentiment than from any real fact.
These people are unaccountable ghosts; there's nothing to stop them from masquerading as anything from "retail" to "misc manufacturing" to "pharma". But back to your theory. What about "revenue producing" parts of the government (which is what, the IRS?) would cause them to loom larger in a politician's thinking than the sums of money recorded on the linked page?
Really? While you can argue that the bill might not do as much as you want towards cutting back the surveillance available, 1/3 of the sitting Congresspeople cosponsored a bill to reduce the abilities of FISA/FISC [1]. It has significantly more sponsors than things than the recent SSA ammendment (116) [2] and "Life at Conception Act" (132) [3].
Sure, its not a "Defund the NSA" bill, but it is an effort to curtail some of the most objected to content from the Snowden stuff, and a pretty large number of politicians supported it, presumably without repercussions.
You can't tell from a sponsorship like that whether or not the NSA pressures politicians, for several reasons.
1. the NSA has no reason to fight a bill at all unless there's a risk it will pass. Even then, their first choice would likely be to try to put selective pressure on enough people to just barely stop it. Why? Because the appearance of such freedom to oppose them provides ammunition for their supporters against the worst claims made about them, and limits the whispers about NSA interference. They presumably also realise that a lot of people voting for such a bill don't really care, and will forget about the issue soon enough, while pressure might make people care. Deeply.
2. Even if it had passed, the article and others demonstrates that the NSA have in the past shown willingness to do everything from blatantly ignoring the law, to have executive orders passed to legalise activities Congress have not approved of, so there is little incentive to apply broad, gross pressure even when facing the threat of bills targeting them.
3. Timing. They may very well believe that accepting curtailment in the short term given the post-Snowden climate is a better way of riding out the storm. Easier to apply "gentle pressure" once the storm has passed, to quietly expand their legal headroom again.
This means I also think koops is somewhat wrong: Most politicians probably don't fear the NSA all that much, because the NSA have had no reason to make the politicians fear them. They're not backed up against the wall, facing the threat of legal action or being shut down. Broadly applied fear is dangerous because it risks creating broad opposition of people who are united in fear of what has made itself a common enemy.
Even if fear becomes their only weapon, NSA only needs to make the right politicians fear them to stop bills, or get executive orders passed. Whether they have, or if they're simply so confident in their effective immunity against actually following decisions from Congress is another matter.
>In addition, calling the crimes “an international cause célèbre involving fundamental constitutional rights of United States citizens,” the task force pointed to the likelihood that the NSA would put political pressure on anyone who dared to testify against it. What’s more, the report added, defense attorneys for senior NSA officials would likely subpoena “every tenuously involved government official and former official” to establish that the illegal operations had been authorized from on high. “While the high office of prospective defense witnesses should not enter into the prosecutive decision,” the report noted, “the confusion, obfuscation, and surprise testimony which might result cannot be ignored.”
