Dick Cheney and George W Bush were widely condemned by Democrats for their baseless fear-mongering to pressure members of Congress into passing expansive surveillance laws that infringed on American’s civil liberties. Unfortunately, with parts of their Patriot Act set to expire on Monday, the Obama administration is playing the very same game that its own party once decried hyperbolic and dishonest – even after a Justice Department report released last week concluded that the expiring section used to collect Americans’ phone records in bulk has never been vital to national security.
See if you can tell the difference between the Obama administration’s statements about the renewal of the Patriot Act and those from the Bush administration when they wanted Congress to renew some of the controversial mass surveillance authorities they passed after 9/11.
