Glenn Greenwald Calls Obama's NSA Speech A Publicity Stunt

[JDPriestly]

75. In your first post, baldguy, you argued that those who are opposed to the NSA mass surveillance

are Obama-haters, specifically Obama-haters. Now in post no. 42, you admit that Obama is not the president who is responsible for the invasions of privacy by the NSA, but rather that the abuses by the NSA and intelligence community are due to 60 years of intelligence policy and the Republicans.

The fact is that we are here and regardless of who is responsible for the demolition of the Fourth Amendment and other freedoms we are guaranteed under the Bill of Rights, we need to restrict our law enforcement agencies so that their activities very clearly are as limited as the Constitution provides that they should be.

I think that a lot of Americans are too trusting of our security and law enforcement apparatus. The fact is that the people in our intelligence and law enforcement agencies are human beings and public servants. We should be watching what they do. They should not be peering into the personal lives of law-abiding citizens. They, not we, are destroying the Constitution.

In this age, in this internet age, this age of long distance phone calls and teleconferences on everything from PTA meetings about kids' summer camp opportunities to big business deals, the Fourth Amendment needs to be interpreted to guarantee us the same privacy in our relationships with others in our society that it gave the Founding Fathers.

When the government snoops on the metadata about or phone calls or peers into the membership list of a political club that one of us has in our document database, it is looking into our private papers. It has no right to do that. And that is what it is doing. For example if I have a list of contacts, people to whom I have sent an e-mail on behalf of my Democratic club and the government collects the names and web addresses of everyone with whom I communicate on that list, it is essentially depriving me of privacy in my use of my right to free speech.

I could go on and on with examples that might help you understand just how very dangerous this mass surveillance and the collection of the metadata is to any semblance of democracy in our country. But I hope you can figure out for yourself based on what I have just written how horrible the mass surveillance collection of metadata is.

Place yourself in the position of the president of a local political organization whose e-mail list names all the members of the organization. All of those people could be subjected to unwanted attention from a guy like Chris Christie if he disagrees with your political point of view. I am not accusing him of doing that, but he is the sort of person who would abuse access to such a list. And it is possible that a person like him could obtain information from the NSA through various means. Please reconsider your opinions on this issue.