Our out-of-control national security apparatus wants to destroy privacy everywhere. Obama threatens journalists investigating it. Extrapolate this trend ten years into the future and, unless we work now to dismantle this monster, we will have something quite like Big Brother. NSA surveillance is just the tip of the iceberg. All of this is done in complete secrecy with no accountability except to secret courts and compliant members of Congress. Their budgets pass without question. Our deranged surveillance apparatus is a government within a government and it’s become a monster. And it goes without saying that when you have massive sums of money and no oversight, the possibilities for corruption become obvious.
“There is a massive apparatus within the United States government that with complete secrecy has been building this enormous structure that has only one goal. And that is to destroy privacy and anonymity not just in the United States but around the world.”
“It’s well past time that we have a debate about whether that’s the kind of country and world in which we want to live,” Greenwald said on CNN. “We haven’t had that debate because it’s all done in secrecy and the Obama administration has been very aggressive about bullying and threatening anybody who thinks about exposing it or writing about it or even doing journalism about it. It’s well past time that that come to an end.”
“People like Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss can have press conferences threatening people for bringing light to what it is they’re doing, but the only people who are going to be investigated are them,” Greenwald said in response.
“It’s well past time that these threats start to be treated with the contempt that they deserve.”