| | Columnist: Bush's 'shadow sympathizers' may haunt Obama
 President-elect Barack Obama has promised to dial back some of the more egregious abuses of privacy rights and executive power instituted over the last eight years, but worries are emerging that President Bush's byzantine power-grabbing schemes may simply be too dense for Obama to fully penetrate.
Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff, a prodigious voice in favor of expanding civil liberties, notes that what Obama doesn't know may hamper his ability to bring about reform. The federal bureaucracy -- particularly its national security arms -- is filled with "shadow sympathizers" who appreciate the expansive power Bush gave them and may be unwilling to give it up, Hentoff writes.
How many of those shadow sympathizers will remain deep in the CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security—and, as I shall later emphasize, in the omnivorous National Security Agency, with its creatively designed submarine that, on the bottom of the ocean floor, will be tapping into foreign cables carrying overseas communications, including those of Americans? Obama's campaign platform certainly offered more for civil libertarians to be optimistic about than his Republican opponent, John McCain, but he hardly marketed himself as a privacy stalwart who would put civil liberties reform among his top issues.
Indeed, during a debate in Congress over the summer, Obama reversed his promise to filibuster a much-criticized update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for the sake of pragmatic political expediency, and some privacy advocates remain skeptical at how deep his commitment to reform truly runs.
"In view of the sweeping spying powers that this [FISA] law, championed by George W. Bush, provides the NSA," Hentoff writes, "will President Obama be a dependable restorer of at least some of our privacy rights?"
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