America, meet Glenn Greenwald
It is a thrill watching Glenn Greenwald reach the next level of media fame. I have been reading him religiously for years. I “liked” him on Facebook the very first day I joined the social networking site, and I have been stealing his web content for almost a decade and renaming it the Chris Moeller Archives.
After years at Salon.com, Glenn is now committing highly-responsible and impressive acts of journalism at the Guardian in London. Through this employer in England, and from his home in Brazil, he is safe from the reach of most of the tentacles of the United States Department of Justice, but sadly, not from CIA robot bombs. For all we know, Glenn is now a target of such as (reminder:) our government's drone policy is entirely classified and Glenn is now guilty of publishing the unsettling facts about our Surveillance State on Steroids that were leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Surely, President Obama, whose historic presidency has made him the embodied fulfillment not of the dreams of Martin Luther King Jr., but of Dick Cheney, is weighing his strike options carefully. He's our "I Have a Drone" president.
Glenn Greenwald, previously unknown to most Americans, made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows this past week in the wake of his journalistic coup, and if you had the chance to catch any of those interviews, you were probably, like me, reminded unintentionally of those humorous video clips in which child “reporters” interview famous people. One can’t help but fall over laughing at the pretzel-like contortions of the establishment defenders of our now beyond-Orwellian political climate, one in which the citizens at both "far" ends of the spectrum opposing the right of the government to steal your private phone records and electronic address books are labeled extremists.
Even after the administration gets caught in its own web of deceit, it can't muster the decency to stop lying. Instead, officials this past week trotted out a bogus claim about this exact spying program having once aided in the uncovering of a bomb plot in New York City. It was a claim that could be-- and was-- quickly debunked by reporters after only a cursory investigation. The president is trying everything in his power to shift the direction of that ill wind that's now blowing the smell of pig shit towards the farm house. He claims that Congress provided authorization and oversight for these programs, and certainly some friendly members of Congress did, but the claims of Snowden and Senators Mark Udall and Ron Wyden argue that the two lawmakers were lied to by the NSA about the extent of the program. The exposed fraudulence is piling up so fast on our Eavesdropper in Chief that Vladimir Putin can now claim some moral authority on the subject of protecting government whistleblowers. This is like Jerry Sandusky calling you as a sexual deviant.
It's not just the government that's spying either, it's the private corporations that work for them, and in capacities that go beyond even the public posturing of "fighting terrorism." Are we left to speculate on my accusation? No, we are not. The public record already confirms that military contractors, in cooperation with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Bank of America, on separate occasions, attempted to use NSA records to spy on and sabotage activists and political groups that opposed them, as well as unfriendly labor unions and reporters, including Greenwald himself. Thus far, only heightened vigilance on behalf of committed citizens, reporters, and (mostly-) independent news outlets have prevented the success of these lawless, targeted attacks on our information systems by corporate terrorists.
The last decade has not been a good one for the Fourth Amendment. If the protection against unreasonable searches and seizures were an MMA fighter, we would be demanding a technical submission. But that doesn't mean there won't be other battles on the card for the resilient "Fighting Fourth," and it's as crystal clear as those Verizon audio feeds to the new billion-dollar NSA headquarters in Utah that brave citizens of the world like Snowden, Greenwald, Bradley Manning, and Julian Assange are scaring the authoritarians shitless.
posted by CM @ 9:12 PM
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