''Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?''

[Octafish]

18. Edward Snowden’s Brave Choice

The mainstream media’s assault on Edward Snowden’s character has begun, with columns in outlets like the Washington Post and The New Yorker calling him “narcissistic” and reckless. But his brave disclosures highlight how out of control the U.S. surveillance state is and how it threatens democracy.

By Christopher H. Pyle
ConsortiumNews.com, June 13, 2013

Edward Snowden is not a traitor. Nor is he a hero, at least not yet. But he probably will be martyred by an Establishment that cannot abide critics.

Both House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein, D-California, have called him a traitor, which only shows how ignorant they are. Under the U.S. Constitution (and the Espionage Act of 1917), it is not enough for a leaker to do something that might arguable “aid or comfort” an enemy; the leaker must also have the intent, by his disclosures, to betray the United States. No proof exists the Mr. Snowden had either motive.

SNIP...

But Congress probably won’t investigate, because Booz Allen has hired Mike McConnell, the former NSA (and National Intelligence) director, as its vice chairman.

Since 9/11, private corporations have greatly expanded the intelligence community. Seventy percent of the community’s budget now goes to private contractors. So members of Congress, reporters, and suspected leakers are not just vulnerable to government surveillance; they are vulnerable to corporate reprisals, should their investigations or disclosures pose a threat to companies in the intelligence business. These surveillance powers can be used not only to protect secret agencies from criticism; they can be used, as General Motors once used them, to try to discredit critics like Ralph Nader.

Many people believe that they have nothing to fear from government/corporate surveillance because they have nothing to hide. But every bureaucracy is a solution in search of a problem, and if it can’t find a problem to fit its solution, they will redefine the problem. In the 1960s, the surveillance bureaucracies redefined anti-war and civil rights protests as communist enterprises; today the same bureaucracies redefine anti-war Quakers, environmentalists, and animal rights activists as “terrorists.” So political activists, no matter how benign, have good reasons to fear these bureaucracies.

Again, most Americans do not worry because they are not political activists, reporters, investigating legislators, or crusading attorneys general like Eliot Spitzer. Most Americans are like the Germans who did not fear the secret police because they were not Jews. But all Americans depend on reporters, leakers and crusading legislators to keep government agencies and private corporations under control. So they should worry about government secrecy, the militarization of surveillance, the privatization of intelligence, and the role of corporate money in elections.

Snowden has revealed just enough to show how pervasive this spying is. Will we pay attention, or will we be distracted by irrelevant attacks upon his character? Given all he has sacrificed to let us know what is happening inside our secret government, don’t we owe it to him to pay attention?

Professor Christopher H. Pyle teaches constitutional law and civil liberties at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. He is the author of Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics, Getting Away With Torture, and The Constitution under Siege (with Richard Pious). In 1970, he disclosed the military’s spying on civilian politics and worked for three congressional committees to end it, including Sen. Frank Church’s Select Committee on Intelligence.

CONTINUED...

http://consortiumnews.com/2013/06/13/edward-snowdens-brave-choice/