Paul Craig Roberts
Prison Planet.com
June 12, 2013
It has been public information for a decade that the US government
secretly, illegally, and unconstitutionally spies on its citizens.
Congress and the federal courts have done nothing about this extreme
violation of the US Constitution and statutory law, and the insouciant
US public seems unperturbed.
In 2004 a whistleblower informed the New York Times that the National
Security Agency (NSA) was violating the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA) by ignoring the FISA court and spying on
Americans without obtaining the necessary warrants. The corrupt New York
Times put the interests of the US government ahead of those of the
American public and sat on the story for one year until George W. Bush
was safely reelected.
By the time the New York Times published the story of the illegal
spying one year later, the law-breaking government had had time to
mitigate the offense with ex post facto law or executive orders and
explain away its law-breaking as being in the country’s interest.
Last year William Binney, who was in charge of NSA’s global digital
data gathering program revealed that NSA had everyone in the US under
total surveillance. Every email, Internet site visited and phone call is
captured and stored. In 2012 Binney received the Callaway Award for
Civic Courage, an annual award given to those who champion
constitutional rights at risk to their professional and personal lives.
There have been a number of whistleblowers. For example, in 2006 Mark
Klein revealed that AT&T had a secret room in its San Francisco
office that NSA used to collect Internet and phone-call data from US
citizens who were under no suspicion.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/interviews/klein.html
The presstitute media handled these stories in ways that protected
the government’s lawlessness from scrutiny and public outrage. The usual
spin was that the public needs to be safe from terrorists, and safety
is what the government is providing.
The latest whistle blower, Edward Snowden, has sought refuge in Hong
Kong, which has a better record of protecting free speech than the US
government. Snowden did not trust any US news source and took the story
to the British newspaper, the Guardian.
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