(Interview with Glenn Greenwald in Brazil*)
(Editor interpolations and summing-up by Omar K Neusser)
”Essentially what these documents show,… is that the United States government has created a system – in virtual complete secrecy – that has as its objective the elimination of privacy around the world. [This is something] which is not an exaggeration, it’s not being dramatic, that is its truly institutional objective. Their goal, that they wake up everyday to fulfill, is to ensure that all forms of human electronic communication … is collected by the NSA, and then stored, monitored and analysed. …
Ultimately that is the real revelation of these documents.
[Snowden is very reliable as a source -and has become the most wanted man on the planet…]
[This criticism of our reporting supposedly helping terrorists to evade prosecution] ”makes no sense, because terrorists have known for many years that the US and UK governments do everything they can possibly do to monitor their telephone calls and emails. What we revealed to the world, that they didn’t already know, is that the vast vogue of this surveillance system is devoted not toward terrorists, but toward ordinary, innocent people. And it is being done for economic espionage. And its being done for questions of political power, and not national security.
[Concerning the criticism that publishing these classified documents would damage national security and ultimately put lives at risk]:
[Then anyone should point to a single published document that it would any way jeopardize lives.] This is just a cliché that governments and their apologists start yelling, whenever you report things that they don’t want to be reported.
”The governments around the world will misuse their secrecy power to conceal information, not because publishing it would harm national security, but because publishing it would embarrassing to them.
We’ve been aggressive and will continue to be aggressive in making sure that people around the world know what their democraticly elected governments are doing in the dark.
The Inevitabe Abuse oF Power
”Journalism is about holding people in power accountable based on the widespread recognition that those who exercise political power in the dark, in secret, will not sometimes or usually but inevitably abuse that power. And the role of a journalist is to expose that which people in power are attempting to conceal that the citizens of that country should know, so that we can have an informed and healthy democracy.”
”Then once I did get the documents … I realized that … we really do live in a kind of a surveillance state and he was quite right to be that worried.”
”Once I saw the … full first set of the archive that he provided, the thousands and thousands of top-secret documents, that’s when I knew that this was the most significant leak in national security history,”
*Source: Uppdrag granskning, Swedish TV, dec 2013
US government Against First Amendment oF US Constitution
“Disclosure of this still-classified information regarding the scope and operational details of N.S.A. intelligence activities implicated by plaintiffs’ allegations could be expected to cause extremely grave damage to the national security of the United States,” wrote the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr.”
“So, he said, he was continuing to assert the state secrets privilege, which allows the government to seek to block information from being used in court even if that means the case must be dismissed. The Justice Department wants the judge to dismiss the matter without ruling on whether the programs violated the First or Fourth Amendment.”
[The rule of law is being rapidly eroded.
[There is nothing much transparent about an administration that claims it is the “most transparent” ever.]
From: townhall.com – http://bit.ly/19ITy6E quoting the New York Times.
See also TED.com talk:
Mikko Hypponen How the NSA betrayed the world’s trust
and:
NYT: A Powerful Rebuke of Mass Surveillance
.-.
mahiyyablog 