Amnesty International: USA must not hunt down or prosecute whistleblower Edward Snowden

[JDPriestly]

63. It has stifled your free speech and the free speech of every person

in the country.

Have you read the book, "They thought they were free?"

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

When a government begins a surveillance plan it always seems benign, harmless. But ask anyone who lived or traveled in Eastern Europe when it was communist or in the USSR or who lived through the NAZI era in an occupied country what it was like.

I know someone who was a small child in NAZI Germany. Before the end of WWII, the adults around him all praised the Fuhrer and listened reverently to his speeches on the radio.

The very day the war ended, all the adults who had been so awed by Hitler were celebrating: "Finally, he's gone that &$%@&%$."

The day will come when you watch what you say because someone might hear you. You don't feel it now, but inevitably as sure as the sun will come up tomorrow, that day when you are no longer free will come.

For some it is already here. For the Walmart employees who were thinking of organizing a union and have been fired.

If you work for a boss who disagrees with your political views, you can lose your job. This kind of surveillance permits bosses to find out about the internet and phone activities of their employees.

It interested me that one of the whistleblowers stated that the surveillance he did which targeted a lot of individuals required him to pull up the records on a lot of lawyers and law firms. Why do you suppose that was? Apparently specific political figures were also targeted. That chills our most basic political functions. The sitting president can obtain intelligence information on the pizza orders of someone running against him -- or far more problematic details of the life of his opponent. That destroys the balance within our separation of powers.

The entire scheme of this surveillance within the US (and I am talking about the metadata and nothing beyond that in this post) is utterly incompatible with our Constitution.