Let's be clear as we examine these issues closely: The lies that authorities have been telling us are not small lies or inadvertently misleading comments. These are Big Lies told by those at our society's very highest levels of authority. These are the people who make public policy, who order soldiers into war and decide whether people will be killed by missiles shot from drones. These particular lies have been used to justify the most important and consequential policies of our times, including the deaths of hundreds of thousands in these wars, the justification for and use of torture, for the evisceration of fundamental civil liberties, and the spending of trillions of dollars to, among other things, commit war crimes.
The people who have been telling these lies repeatedly and before the nation are the people who make the most important decisions possible for our welfare as a whole, or lack thereof. These are our political leaders. These are the kind of lies that are quantum leaps more consequential than any lies or deeds that anyone tells or commits on an everyday basis in their everyday lives.
I have been publishing for several years exposes and analyses about the fact that the NSA and other agencies of the U.S. government have been spying on all of our electronic communications. In one example, see this beginning to an article with my co-author that we published at the journal State of Nature in Autumn of 2012:
"Ubiquitous warrantless governmental surveillance of the populace, coupled with an increase in the level of governmental secrecy, is commonly perceived to be one of the state's responses to post-9/11 realities. This is, however, only a half-truth. The cluster of policies that includes staggering levels of state surveillance, the treating of the whole populace as suspects, and the suppression of popular dissent, are in fact a logical outcome of the rise of neoliberal regimes in the world generally and in the U.S. specifically.
"In nearly every single country in the world today, neoliberal policies dominate. In the U.S., both the Republican and Democratic Parties embrace neoliberalism.
"It is hard to believe that secrecy and surveillance could be more extreme today than George W. Bush's regime. Bush's constitutional abuses of civil liberty under the fig leaf of improving national security are well documented. His transgressions include, but are not limited to, the unprecedented expansion of the surveillance state with Orwellian-named programs such as Carnivore, MATRIX, Talon, Eagle Eyes and Total Information Awareness (Bowley, 2006).[1]
"But neoliberalism has trumped the conventional wisdom regarding the differences between Democrats and Republicans. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the realm of state secrecy and surveillance, both symptoms of the repression of the public, a hallmark of all neoliberal regimes."
There are a handful of others who have been doing similarly. James Bramford, for example, wrote this bombshell of an article in March 15, 2012 at Wired magazine, "The NSA is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)." In it he declares:
"Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails--parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital 'pocket litter.' It is, in some measure, the realization of the 'total information awareness' program created during the first term of the Bush administration--an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans' privacy.
"But 'this is more than just a data center,' says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle--financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications--will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: 'Everybody's a target; everybody with communication is a target.'"
Many, many others in the intelligence world, by the way, have used this last phrase: "Everybody's a suspect. Everybody's a target." This is how public order policies (POP), the new model for governance, operate: treat everyone as a suspect. POP date from the late 1970s in Europe and have since spread around the world. POP are another way of describing neoliberal regimes' policies for governance. [1] That is why Snowden's revelations are only the most recent confirmation of what a few of us have been saying for years.
Why haven't those of us who have been writing about this ubiquitous warrantless surveillance been called "treasonous"?
If the answer to that question is that it is one thing when a professor, journalists, activists, and experts on intelligence say it, and another thing when an insider says it, then the difference is not the content of what is being revealed. The difference is how believable these revelations are to others among the public. Note that I said the public, not the "terrorists." This will become clear why in a few moments.
If believability is the major difference, I have two questions.
First, "How can it be treason to tell the American people the truth?"
And second, "Do you really think that the terrorists you fear are so stupid that they only rely on what official governmental pronouncements have been about what the U.S. government is doing?"
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