There is a depressing statistical comparison that should shame all of
us who voted twice for Barack Obama’s ascent to the White House. Our
man, a former constitutional law professor who pledged to reverse the
Bush administration’s abuses of national security concerns, has charged
seven government whistle-blowers, including Edward J. Snowden, with
violating the Espionage Act. That’s more than double the combined three
charged with leaking classified information by all previous presidents,
George W. Bush included.
The defense of his unprecedented prosecution of those who dare tell
us the truth is that we live in particularly dangerous times, an
obviously absurd notion given the civil wars, foreign threats and other
sources of mayhem periodically experienced by most of the world’s
nations. At its best, the “metadata” aggregation, including the logs of
all email traffic and telephone calls, is a paranoid assault on our
right to personal space enshrined in the Fourth Amendment. At worst it
is an out of control grab for worldwide power over the new information
age.
As a New York Times account Sunday suggests, “A close reading of Mr.
Snowden’s documents shows the extent to which the eavesdropping agency
now has two new roles: It is a data cruncher, with an appetite to sweep
up, and hold for years, a staggering variety of information. And it is
an intelligence force armed with cyberweapons, assigned not just to
monitor foreign computers but also, if necessary, to attack.”
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A surveillance power run amok? The latest disclosures from Snowden’s
leaks published in the German magazine Der Spiegel on Sunday turn out to
have nothing to do with national security and everything to do with a
compulsive and unseemly snooping not only into the lives of ordinary
citizens throughout the world but also into the diplomatic
correspondence, including trade and other negotiating strategies, of
some of our closest allie
How inconvenient to the outraged innocence of the National Security
Agency and its private for-profit counterpart Booz Allen Hamilton to
find the names of France, Italy, Japan and Mexico among the 38 embassies
and missions bugged at will by our electronic spooks, along with the
Washington and Brussels office of the European Union. The code-named
Dropmire bugging of the encrypted fax machine at the EU and other
invasions of the organization’s private data were, as The Guardian
summarized Sunday the content of the leaked documents, “to gather inside
knowledge of policy disagreements on global issues and other rifts
between member states.”
Germany is one of those member states, prompting that nation’s
justice minister to declare Sunday: “If the media reports are correct,
this brings to memory actions among enemies during the Cold War. … If it
is true that EU representations in Brussels and Washington were indeed
tapped by the American secret service, it can hardly be explained with
the argument of fighting terrorism.”
This was a sentiment echoed by French President Francois Hollande on
Monday: “We demand that this stop immediately. … There’s enough evidence
for us to ask for an explanation.” And French technology minister Fleur
Pellerin was so impressed with the significance of the information
leaked by Snowden that she entertained the idea of an international
whistle-blower protection for individuals who leak information exposing
what they believe is illegal activity. “There is no international
statute that allows for the protection of these people if necessary,”
Pellerin said Monday. “I think it is a good occasion to get into the
subject, which is a gray area of international law.”
Republished with permission from: AlterNet
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