Two years ago today, the US intelligence world was shaken when the truth about their activities in the United States and around the world came into public view. It was a momentous event that is having major implications for how the intelligence community operates and for US foreign policy which seeks to dominate the globe. We immediately sided with Edward Snowden for his heroic work. I now serve on the advisory board of the Courage Foundation which has taken up the cause of Snowden and other whistleblowers.
Thanks to Wikileaks we know a lot more about the way the US government’s national security appartus operates. Not only did it publish Snowden’s leaks, it also published the very important leaks of Chelsea Manning, who is now in her fifth year of confinement. Manning’s leaks shined the light of truth on the way the US military operates on a day-to-day basis in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay as well as how the State Department operates on a daily basis throughout the world. I also serve on the steering committee of the Chelsea Manning Support Network because whistleblowing around national security issues is of utmost importance. Too often the US is lied into war and greater transparency is a key to preventing illegal and unnecessary wars.
While the US calls its military department the Department of Defense, it is really an offensive military that works with the very large US intelligence apparatus and with the State Department as well as with misnamed groups like the US Agency for International Development and the National Endowment of Democracy to foment unrest and replace governments around the world so they will do the bidding of the United States. This is either not covered in the corporate mass media or misrepresented as in the case of Ukraine with deep propaganda that turns reality on its head.
The truth is essential to understanding what is happening around us and the US role in the world. The heroic whistleblowing of Manning and Snowden aided by Assange continues to reverberate and their impact is ongoing.
The brief article below by Edward Snowden was written for ACLU Action. You can read more from Snowden at:
Reddit: Just days left to kill mass surveillance under Section 215 of the Patriot Act.
New York Times: Edward Snowden: The World Says No to Surveillance
KZ
Simple Truths can Change the World
Two years ago today, in a Hong Kong hotel room, three journalists and I waited nervously to see how the world would react to the revelation that the National Security Agency had been collecting records of nearly every phone call in the United States.
Though we have come a long way, the right to privacy remains under attack.
Last month, the NSA’s invasive call-tracking program was declared unlawful by a federal appeals court in ACLU v. Clapper, and it was disowned by Congress. And, after a White House investigation found that the program never stopped a single terrorist attack, even President Obama ordered it terminated.
This is because of you. This is the power of an informed public.
Ending mass surveillance of private phone calls under the Patriot Act is a historic victory for the rights of every citizen. Yet while we have reformed this one program, many others remain.
We need to push back and challenge the lawmakers who defend these programs. We need to make it clear that a vote in favor of mass surveillance is a vote in favor of illegal and ineffective violations of the right to privacy for all Americans.
As I said on Reddit last month, arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
We can’t take the right to privacy for granted, just like we can’t take the right to free speech for granted. We can’t let these invasions of our rights stand.
While we worked away in that hotel room in Hong Kong, there were moments when we worried we might have put our lives at risk for nothing – that the public would react with apathy to the publication of evidence that revealed that democratic governments had been collecting and storing billions of intimate records of innocent people.
Never have I been so grateful to have been so wrong.