May 29, 2014
With heart-pounding suspense, John le
Carre-like intrigue and Jeffersonian fidelity to the principles of human
freedom, Glenn Greenwald has just published “No Place to Hide.” The book, which
reads like a thriller, is Greenwald’s story of his nonstop two weeks of work in
May and June of 2013 in Hong Kong with former CIA agent and NSA
contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden. Greenwald was the point person
who coordinated the public release of the 1.7 million pages of NSA documents
that Snowden took with him in order to prove definitively that the federal
government is spying on all of us all the time.
The revelations constituted for
Greenwald the scoop of the century; for Snowden, the exposure of massive
government violations of basic constitutional principles by his former bosses;
for the NSA and the Bush and Obama administrations, the revelation of criminal
wrongdoing orchestrated by two presidents themselves; and for the American
public, a painful realization that the Constitution is only as valuable a
restraint on the government as is the fidelity to uphold it of those in whose
hands we have reposed it for safekeeping. As Greenwald makes clear, it is not
in good hands.
“No Place to Hide” not only tells of
Snowden’s initially frustrating and anonymous efforts to reach out to Greenwald
and the others; it not only carefully explains the insatiable appetite of the
NSA to learn everything about everyone (“Collect it all” was a continuously
posted NSA motto); it is also a morality tale about the personal courage
required of Snowden and Greenwald and his colleagues to expose government
wrongdoing and the risk to their lives, liberties and properties in doing so.
In the midst of one of their endless
Hong Kong hotel meetings, Snowden told the journalists that the local CIA
station employed agents trained to kill; and it was just a few blocks away.
Then The Guardian’s lawyers informed Greenwald that the Bush and Obama
administrations had not hesitated to use the Espionage Act of 1917 — a World
War I-era relic, still on the books, employed to chill, stifle, suppress and
ultimately punish free speech — to attempt to lock up journalists even when
they revealed the truth. At this point in my reading the book on Memorial Day,
I noticed that my pulse was racing, even though I obviously knew the outcome.
The road to the outcome began about a
year ago when Greenwald received email messages from an anonymous yet
persistent and intellectually intriguing source. The source demonstrated such a
superb command of the Internet, such a patient understanding of Greenwald’s
need for a basic education in the craft of digital spying, such a Jeffersonian
understanding of the constitutional role of government in our lives, and so
enticed Greenwald and his editors at The Guardian that, sight unseen, they
traveled to Hong Kong to see whether the source possessed the documentary
evidence he claimed to have of the most massive and sophisticated American
government spying upon innocents in our history. He did.
Greenwald skillfully uses NSA documents
to demonstrate that the highest government officials to discuss this spying in
public — President Bush, President Obama, Bush Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former NSA boss Gen.
Keith Alexander — all lied to the American public, (in the case of Clapper and
Alexander, they probably did so criminally, as they were testifying to
Congress), and they engaged in a conspiracy to violate the constitutionally
protected rights to privacy of every American. After initially denying all
this, then disparaging Snowden, then questioning his loyalty, then questioning
his sanity, the government reluctantly admitted to all that Snowden revealed.
How could it not? Snowden’s revelations consist entirely of the NSA’s own
documents, many of which are reproduced in Greenwald’s book.
The government has argued that when it
engages in all this spying, it is looking for a needle in a haystack. It claims
it can only keep us safe if it knows all and sees all. Yet, such an argument
cannot be made with intellectual honesty by anyone who has sworn to uphold the
Constitution.
The Constitution was written to keep
the government off of the people’s backs. The Constitution protects the right
to be left alone and the right to be different. The Constitution presupposes
the existence of natural rights and areas of human endeavor that are insulated
from government knowledge and immune to government regulation, except in the
most carefully prescribed circumstances. Those circumstances require that
probable cause of crime be possessed by the government about identifiable
persons and demonstrated to a neutral judge before the government may engage in
any surveillance of that person — and all those NSA conspirators and all their
judicial facilitators know this.
And what has Congress done in response
to all this indiscriminate spying — spying that we now know is done upon
members of Congress themselves? The Senate has done nothing, yet. The House
passed legislation last week called the USA Freedom Act. This deceptively
entitled nonsense so muddies the legal waters with ambiguous language that if enacted
into law, the bill actually would strengthen the ability of the NSA to spy on
all of us all the time. Is it any surprise that Obama and the NSA leadership
support these so-called reforms?
The duty of government is to keep us
free and to keep our freedoms safe. If it fails to protect freedom, it should
be replaced. If it continues to spy on all of us all the time, then Greenwald’s
title — taken from a warning issued by the late Sen. Frank Church in the
pre-Internet era — will have come to pass. We will have no place to hide and no
freedoms left to exercise without the government’s approval.
Reprinted
with the author’s permission.
Andrew P. Napolitano [send
him mail], a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is
the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano has written
seven books on the U.S. Constitution. The most recent is Theodore and Woodrow: How Two American Presidents Destroyed
Constitutional Freedom. To find out more about Judge Napolitano and
to read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit creators.com.
Copyright © 2014 Andrew P. Napolitano
Previous article by Andrew P.
Napolitano: The Feds Are Lawless
No comments:
Post a Comment