US Secrets—And Lies—Unravel In NSA Leaks - MSNBC [View all]

[WillyT]

US secrets—and lies—unravel in NSA leaks
Adam Serwer - MSNBC
9:32 AM on 08/04/2013

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Eight weeks ago a series of explosive leaks blew the hinges off the closet containing the National Security Agency’s skeletons.

“This is more than we’ve learned in the last 35 years,” says Michelle Richardson of the ACLU.

The man behind the leaks, 30-year-old former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, said he couldn’t “in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy” after he exposed the scope of government surveillance programs to The Guardian and The Washington Post. Snowden’s leaks confirmed what civil liberties groups have feared for years: That beneath political rhetoric about the rule of law and respect for fundamental liberties, the U.S. government was indiscriminately gathering information on American citizens under authorities originally meant to protect the country from terrorism.

Snowden has been called a hero by some and a traitor by others, but one thing is clear: Because of evasions by government officials who tried to keep the nature of these surveillance programs secret, the public would never have known about the breadth of government spying had it not been for Snowden’s leaks, which have dramatically shifted the politics of surveillance in the U.S. Congress.

“<Snowden>‘s disclosures have changed the course of human history,” Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky told Democracy Now. “His initial disclosures were a service to our country because now we’re having this conversation—and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

Before Snowden’s leaks, reauthorizations of laws like the Patriot Act or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act were mere occasions for Cassandras in Congress to espouse vague prophesies about the eroding of American freedoms. Legislation was crafted in such opaque terms that the government could collect information on Americans as long as it wasn’t “targeting them,” or when one end of the communication was presumed to be outside the country. Legislators used that linguistic distinction to publicly insist no information was being gathered on Americans at all.

Though President Obama had said the choice between security and liberty was a false one, once in office it was clear he had taken sides. Democrats went along with him, leaving Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold, once the Patriot Act’s biggest critic in Congress, mocking the Senate Judiciary Committee as “the prosecutor’s committee.”

By 2011 however, Feingold was gone...

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More: http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/08/04/us-secrets-and-lies-unravel-in-nsa-leaks/