General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Re: Attacks on Snowden, Greenwald. How the fuck do people like that sleep at night? [View all]JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)When the government violates our right to privacy for no good reason, we have a right to know that they are violating it.
The right to privacy is fundamental and prevails over the government's right to obtain information about us.
The Constitution repeatedly protects our right to privacy and our right to be free from government investigation, trial and punishment.
The government may keep secrets. No one questions that.
But the government may not keep the secret that it is violating our constitutional rights. The surveillance violates our constitutional right to privacy and to be innocent until proven guilty. It violates our right to a free press. It violates our right to freedom of association. It violates our right to freedom of religion. It violates are right to personal freedom. It violates our right to just compensation for property that our government wishes to take from us. (Our writings, our conversations are also our property, not that of the government.)
The government may not keep secrets that violate our constitutional rights of which privacy is one. I repeat the government can keep secrets but not the secret that it is violating our constitutional rights.
When the government violates our rights and then keeps that violation a secret, we call that corruption. That is in itself a violation of the intention of the Constitution.
Our government, as it is, is mired in collusion and corruption.
I know that it is difficult to understand that our government could do something that is fundamentally criminal. But obtaining our private information without a warrant is a violation of our rights that suggests criminal conduct.
Why does the government want all that information?
Does it?
Or is the entire scheme just a way for some corrupt companies that can sell this equipment to our government to make money?
Beyond the fact that the surveillance violates the Constitution, we have to ask ourselves why in the world the government collects data on our phone and internet communications when most of them are of utterly no interest to anyone outside our families and close friends.
This program is a scam. It costs a lot of money. Think of how many people are employed cataloging and running the information they collect through giant computers. Think of the expense. If we spent that money on really good day care and education for our children, we might be able to save a little money that we now spend on our prisons. Neglected, abused, uneducated, bored children become drug addicts and criminals.
There are so many reasons to end this surveillance program.
I wrote this last night and plan to post it as the header for a new thread. I don't know whether you saw it.
I would like to mention that the NSA surveillance poses a serious danger to freedom of the press. We have seen with the Risen story that our free press -- or what remains of our free press -- is under attack.
The Risen case concerns an alleged breach of the secrecy concerning some past CIA action.
But the freedom of the press does not protect just our right to know about what our federal government and agencies like the CIA and our military may have done.
Freedom of the press also protects our right to know what state and local governments including our police forces do.
The NSA programs that Snowden disclosed permit the NSA and thus our government to know the sources of news stories at all levels. In the wrong hands, the NSA information could thwart citizen efforts to enforce the laws that permit us to have clean government, any clean government. The NSA programs, the all-encompassing knowledge about who talks to whom that the NSA programs provide to our government could and probably do shield the corruption of power at all levels of our government.
How could that happen? The NSA spying apparatus would make it dangerous for whistleblowers to come forward and to talk to the press. Just the existence of the NSA programs and the NSA's overly broad authority to collect data on the communications of everyone in the world inhibits the collection of news about corruption and crime on the part of the powerful, those in and out of government.
So, that is the way that the NSA programs violate freedom of the press. They inhibit the ability of the press to collect information from witnesses to wrongdoing. They protect corruption among other things. The excuses for the NSA's violations of our rights sound noble, terrorism, drug crimes, but they are simply a power grab. Pure and simple, the NSA wants and gets power over the lives of our political representatives, over contacts with the press and over us.
Thank you for asking your question and for reading my posts on this issue. I have lived in several European countries and used to travel in Eastern Europe during the Communist era. My life experience moves me to oppose this surveillance program. I have seen first-hand how easily surveillance harms societies. I do not want to see my country go the route of East Germany or Poland, for example.