Combating the Surveillance State (audio)

Glenn Greenwald, Esq. (Salon.com), AlternativeRadio.org (Program #GREG002, 2012)

Spying, snooping, prying, eavesdropping, using a mobile cell phone, call it what you want. The government is doing it on a scale never before seen. Massive corporations are doing a lot to help. Meanwhile, the same government and corporations are more secretive and un-transparent than ever.

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Sophisticated new technologies allow for more intrusions into our private lives. Beyond omnipresent smart phones and cell towers remotely tracking/geo-locating, recording, and even predicting all activities, there are increasingly more cameras filming, deep data-mining, nano-second biometric identifying on innocent Americans. Nevertheless, drone aircraft are aiming at them from American skies.

 

The invasive monitoring of public space and the simultaneous erosion of our rights has been largely a bi-partisan affair, from Bush/Cheney to Obama/Biden. State surveillance power, undermining basic freedoms in the name of protecting them, is growing relentlessly.

 

The swelling domestic databases of the NSA (the little-known "National Security Administration," an American Gestapo/Stasi) and the FBI may contain our personal information.

  

And this burgeoning Orwellian apparatus has become a cash cow for corporations providing what are called security services. Comedian Stephen Colbert sarcastically observes, "There are bound to be casualties in the never-ending war on terror and one of them just happens to be the U.S. Constitution."

Glenn Greenwald is a lawyer and the author of How Would a Patriot Act? and Great American Hypocrites. He is the recipient of the Izzy Award from the Park Center for Independent Media for his "pathbreaking journalistic courage and persistence in confronting conventional wisdom, official deception, and controversial issues." He also received an Online Journalism Award for Best Commentary for his coverage of U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning. Greenwald is a columnist and blogger at Salon.com and his articles appear in various newspapers and magazines.