About Glenn Greenwald's Speech

Glenn Greenwald tells his audience (in the video I posted here) that there are more documents yet to be written about in his series of Guardian articles on the Edward Snowden leaks, one of which talks of a billion cell phone calls captured.

He also says that from his and Edward Snowden’s point of view, the unacceptable is not that the government is collecting massive amounts of information on its own citizens, but that it is doing so in secret. In fact, I think that’s where the government made its mistake. I think they should have been open about it, because I don’t think enough Americans object, as long as the NSA will tell them that it’s keeping them safe from Muslim terrorists. And now that it is known, if anything comes of it, I think it will be that either 1) the American people will sanction it, or 2) the issue will go to courts which will call it unconstitutional, Congress will have to strike some of it (not all) and make stricter rules about what can and cannot be collected, and the whole thing will go even further underground. But it won’t stop.

Some years ago, when Congress “put an end” to the Total Information Awareness program, I scoffed at the idea that it would stop functioning, and people called me paranoid. As Stephen Colbert has said about the PRISM leaks, the good news is, I’m not. The most serious threat to the American people is from their supposed guardians to whom they give up their rights in exchange for a phantom security. Sometimes I read posts and articles where the author laments that with one thing or another, we may be lost. We were lost before 9/11. It just took that day to show us.