Shh! I've Got a Secret

In an article today, Glenn Greenwald wrote the following:

That's the mindset of the U.S. Government: everything it does of any significance can and should be shielded from public view; anyone who shines light on what it does is an Enemy who must be destroyed; but nothing you do should be beyond its monitoring and storing eyes...

I've been thinking about this dichotomy a lot lately. Since the dawn of the first so-called Patriot Act, efforts have been ramped up for our government to spy on its own citizens. They can intercept our emails. They can install wiretaps and invade our homes without a warrant. They can imprison us WITHOUT filing charges and limit the contact we have with the outside world, including our attorneys. They even can mandate that public libraries turn over a list of all the materials we've checked out since the beginning of time.

Sounds more like the Nazi's Gestapo or the Russian KGB than the land of the free and the brave!!

Yet, at the same time that America is turning into a prison camp, the government itself is invoking the cloak of secrecy more and more. This explains the hysterical response to WikiLeaks. As Greenwald states above, ANYONE who tries to nudge the curtain back as much as a smidge must be taken down post haste and taken down as ruthlessly as possible.

Wake up, people!! The grand experiment of American democracy has come to its end. Democracy cannot exist without a certain measure of governmental transparency and that certain measure has dropped over the horizon.