The Snowden leaks are not revelation; they’re merely confirmation. For years there have been reports and allegations in the alternative media and even mainstream sources about indiscriminate spying on Americans and wholesale digital data collection by U.S. intelligence agencies. It’s been an open secret. The Utah Data Center, built under the auspices of head snoop Barack Obama, is no theme park.
William Binney, NSA whistleblower, has long publicly warned about the government’s flagrant abridgment of privacy and offered mind-boggling estimates of the abuse. Binney has said he quit the NSA in 2001 after nearly 40 years because he could no longer countenance their violations of the Fourth Amendment.
Sources like Wired magazine, Infowars, WND, Drudge, the British press, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU and others have for a long while reported and warned of severe abridgments of privacy by a federal government that has morphed into a universal spy network focused in large measure on the digital lives of innocent American citizens not suspected of any crime.
For guidance, America should look to Europe as a model for data and privacy protections. The EU has strictly enforced privacy laws. For example, credit card purchases, financial data, medical and telephone records are locked away from prying eyes except by permission of the account holder. An indiscriminate data vacuum manned by government could not operate there. Europeans have close personal memories of the horrors of Hitler’s Third Reich. Americans, an ocean apart, don’t share such memories, and, as a result, the Third Reich is being revisited here.
Jacob Stein
