Hillary Clinton Flaunts Her Surveillance State Baggage

>Who is the true patriot, Hillary Clinton or Edward Snowden? The question comes up because Clinton has gone all out in attacking Snowden as a means of burnishing her hawkish credentials, eliciting Glenn Greenwald's comment that she is "like a neocon, practically."

On Friday in England, Clinton boasted that two years ago she had favored a proposal by a top British general to train 100,000 "moderate" rebels to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria, but President Obama had turned her down. The American Thatcher? In that same interview with The Guardian she also managed to get in yet another shot against Snowden for taking refuge in Russia "apparently under Putin's protection," unless, she taunted, "he wishes to return knowing he would be held accountable."

Accountable for telling the truth that Clinton concealed during her tenure as secretary of state in the Obama administration? Did she approve of the systematic spying on the American people as well as on others around the world, including the leaders of Germany and Brazil, or did she first learn of all this from the Snowden revelations?

On Saturday, a carefully vetted four-month investigation by The Washington Post based on material made available by Snowden revealed that while Clinton was in the government, the NSA had collected a vast trove of often intimate Internet correspondence and photos of innocent Americans, including many users of Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other leading Internet companies. The Post reported many files "described as useless by the [NSA] analysts but nonetheless retained ... have a voyeuristic quality. They tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes."

The Post concluded after four months of reviewing the documents and checking with government agencies that the material supplied by Snowden was invaluable in evaluating the NSA program: "No government oversight body, including the Justice Department, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, intelligence committees in Congress or the President's Privacy and Civil Oversight Board, has delved into a comparably large sample of what the NSA actually collects -- not only from its targets but from people who may cross a target's path."

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