Daniel Ellsberg: "The American Public is Treated as an Enemy of the State."

[Adele Edisen]

Video Interview: 20:16 minutes long

http://www.youtube.com./watch?v=67Esmi1thUM

Adele

[David Guyatt]

The domestic public are the enemy. They always have been. "Foreign" enemies are less able to influence the political climate than a nation's own citizens.

That's my take anyway.

[Peter Lemkin]

We know who the REAL enemies are!.....and they are relatively few in number, with a slightly larger circle of Praetorian Guards around them. The analysis, IMHO, is complete. Now is time for some action/reaction/change [or perish in this cancerous corporate/financial elite police state fascism. Simple as that........ The People are not the problem, with the caveat that many of them have been lulled/propagandized/bamboozled/lied to/mind controlled/mis-educated into either passivity or seeing black as white; evil as good and others interests as their own.....

[Peter Lemkin]

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Now More Than Ever, Everybody's a Target in the American Surveillance State

By John Whitehead
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[url=http://www.opednews.com]opednews.com

verybody's a target; everybody withcommunication is a target."--A senior intelligence official previously involvedwith the Utah Data Center
Therecent revelation that the National Security Agency (NSA) is collecting thetelephone records of millions of Verizon customers, with the complete blessingof the Obama administration, should come as no surprise to anyone who has beenpaying attention over the past decade.

by ElectronicFrontierFoundation


AsI document in my new book A Government ofWolves: The Emerging American Police State (at Amazon.com),what we are witnessing, in the so-called name of security and efficiency, isthe creation of a new class system comprised of the watched (average Americanssuch as you and me) and the watchers (government bureaucrats, technicians andprivate corporations).
What too many fail to realize, consumed as they are withpartisan politics and blinded by their own political loyalties, is that themassive bureaucracies--now computerized--that administer governmental policytranscend which party occupies the White House.

Thisexplains why the civil liberties abuses carried out by the Bush Administrationhave not been corrected by the Obama Administration. Rather, they have beenexpanded upon. Take, for instance, the warrantless wiretapping programconducted during the Bush years, which resulted in the NSA monitoring theprivate communications of millions of Americans--a program that continuesunabated today, with help from private telecommunications companies such asAT&T. The program recorded 320 million phone calls a day when it firststarted. It is estimated that the NSA has intercepted 15 to 20 trillion communications of Americancitizens since 9/11.

Toour misfortune, the Obama White House has proven to be even worse than the BushWhite House when it comes to invading the privacy rights of Americans. As Yalelaw professor Jack Balkin notes, "We are witnessing the bipartisan normalizationand legitimization of a national-surveillance state. [Obama has] systematicallyadopted policies consistent with the second term of the Bush Administration."Unfortunately, whereas those on the Left raised a hew and cry over the Bushadministration's constant encroachments on Americans' privacy rights, itappears that the political leanings of those on the Left have held greater swaythan their principles. Consequently, the Obama administration has faced muchless criticism for its blatant efforts to reinforce the surveillance state.



Insistingthat terrorists "will come after us if they can and the only thing that we haveto deter this is good intelligence to understand that a plot has been hatchedand to get there before they get to us," Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), whochairs the Senate intelligence committee, is defending the NSA's actions, aswell as the secret court order requiring Verizon to turn over its phone recordsto government agents. It's a tired, overused line that preys on Americans' fearof another terrorist attack and offers phantom promises of security whileensuring neither safety nor greater freedom. Even the vague and unsupportedclaim put forth by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.)that the NSA surveillance program "helped thwart "a significant case' ofterrorism in the United States "within the last few years'" fails to justify aprogram of this magnitude, which makes everyone a target and turns us all intoa nation of suspects.

Clearly,the age of privacy in America is coming to a close. We have moved into a newparadigm in which surveillance technology which renders everyone a suspect isdriving the bureaucratic ship that once was our democratic republic. It willnot be long before no phone call, no email, no Tweet, no web search is safefrom the prying eyes and ears of the government. People going about their dailybusiness will no longer be assured that they are not being spied upon byfederal agents and other government bureaucrats.

Thus,the question looms before us. Canfreedom in the United States continue to flourish and grow in an age when thephysical movements, individual purchases, conversations, and meetings of everycitizen are constantly under surveillance by private companies and governmentagencies?

Whetheror not the surveillance is undertaken for so-called "worthy" (read: politicallyexpedient) reasons such as preventing another terrorist attack, does notsurveillance of all citizens gradually poison the soul of a nation and renderus all data collected in government files? Does not such surveillancecompletely eviscerate our right to be free from unreasonable searches andseizures as guaranteed by our Constitution?

[Magda Hassan]

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[David Guyatt]

We know who the REAL enemies are!.....and they are relatively few in number, with a slightly larger circle of Praetorian Guards around them. The analysis, IMHO, is complete. Now is time for some action/reaction/change [or perish in this cancerous corporate/financial elite police state fascism. Simple as that........ The People are not the problem, with the caveat that many of them have been lulled/propagandized/bamboozled/lied to/mind controlled/mis-educated into either passivity or seeing black as white; evil as good and others interests as their own.....

I was being facetious Pete, but I think the number of those real enemies, although small in comparison to the rest of us, are the most powerful and influential in society. What they say goes. The rest of us are voiceless in comparison simply because no one in power wants to listen.

Ergo, we are the enemy.

To them that is.

[Peter Lemkin]

We know who the REAL enemies are!.....and they are relatively few in number, with a slightly larger circle of Praetorian Guards around them. The analysis, IMHO, is complete. Now is time for some action/reaction/change [or perish in this cancerous corporate/financial elite police state fascism. Simple as that........ The People are not the problem, with the caveat that many of them have been lulled/propagandized/bamboozled/lied to/mind controlled/mis-educated into either passivity or seeing black as white; evil as good and others interests as their own.....

I was being facetious Pete, but I think the number of those real enemies, although small in comparison to the rest of us, are the most powerful and influential in society. What they say goes. The rest of us are voiceless in comparison simply because no one in power wants to listen.

Ergo, we are the enemy.

To them that is.

Dave, you misunderstood my post. It was in NO WAY critical of your post - nor trying to point things in a different light or direction. We agree. We were simply addressing different aspects of the elephant in the darkened room. I'm just fed up and want people to get angry enough to force change. They may be powerful, but they loose their power when the masses rise up as one and revolt. Such things are not limited to the past. If we don't have some such, then a world similar to what Orwell imagined really will come to pass, worldwide, and 'Oceania' will not be much fun to live in.....its nascent version emergent today is certainly not for most and getting less 'livable' fast!!!! Yes, to 'them' we are the enemy; and to us they are...and I believe it is they who are the true enemies, and that that can easily be proven.