NSA Mass Spying — Nothing Has Changed Since the Snowden Revelations: 'Can the Surveillance State Be Stopped?'

American officials won't confront NSA's domestic spying because they're afraid it
might have information about their own illegal doings. (Illustration by EFF)

Despite the public furor over NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about U.S. government surveillance, the process rolls on unabated with few prospects of significant reform.




By Danny Schechter
With the publication of Glenn Greenwald’s new book on Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency, the state surveillance issue is back in full force, as if it ever went a way.

Purloined formerly top-secret NSA documents are now there for the downloading, even as the calls for truth and privacy buttressed by irrefutable information, has run up against the institutional armor of the surveillance state that has little respect for public opinion or calls for “reform.”

Every day, there are new stories showing duplicity in high places and revealing the existence of new tracking technologies and forced and voluntary collusion between the secret agency and its many “partners” in the private sector. PBS “Frontline” is out with one more exposé.

Just as the publication of the Pentagon Papers in l971 did not end the Vietnam War, the leaks from a world of questionable “intelligence” gathering have only made our spymasters more determined. There were more years of carnage after Daniel Ellsberg dropped the hidden history of our intervention in Vietnam showing how officials knew the truth even as they fed the public a litany of lies to keep a profitable if murderous enterprise going.

The charade was finally ended by the Vietnamese liberation army 39 years ago, but the NSA and its handsomely financed partners in the self-styled “Intelligence Community” will go on and on until someone stops them and their spying, and that someone is hard to identify given the way the agencies seem to have the goods on the government as well as the rest of us.

There is no American liberation army with the clout to shut them down.

I spoke with retired CIA veteran Ray McGovern for a TV series I am producing about how government spying intimidates people in government. He told me:

“Everybody is afraid. It’s not just the journalists, it’s people like Barack Obama, it’s people like Dianne Feinstein – think about what the NSA has on Dianne Feinstein and her husband who has made billions from defense and post office and all kinds of nice cozy contracts, okay? This goes back to J. Edgar Hoover…”

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