Is Diplomacy More Important Than Constitutional Rights?

Trey Smith

People in Europe are growing increasingly incensed that the US is “hoovering up” their communications, storing them, and picking through them with mega computers that hunt for key words. But people in the US are growing increasingly angry that the NSA is doing the same thing here at home.

And just as this outrageous international electronic eavesdropping is destroying America’s image abroad and threatening long-held alliances, it is destroying American democracy, and public faith in the Bill of Rights, right here at home.

Not that Alexander and Clapper care. They don’t answer to the American people. They work for the US government, and the government these days -- the president, the Congress and the Supreme Court -- is clearly not “of, by and for” the people. It is of, by and for the corporations and the elite, and that oligarchic power elite, having stolen the country blind over the past several decades, is getting worried that the public is starting to wake up to, and grow restive about it.

The ruling elite wants an all-seeing NSA to keep the public in check, and to enable it to spot, and then to crush, any outbreak of rebellion, as was done so effectively to the Occupy Movement in the autumn of 2011.

It’s probably fair to say that the crushing of Occupy was the first battle of the second American revolution. Looking back someday, it will also probably be recognized as the trial run of the NSA security net.
~ from The Big Question the National Security State Isn’t Asking by Dave Lindorff ~

As Lindorff points out in this column, our higher ups admit that spying on allies might not be such a good thing, but they don't seem to have the same qualms about spying on Americans! So, it won't be all that surprising if NSA reforms end up protecting those in Europe more so than citizens in the US.

What I find the most amazing about these revelations about wide scale "intelligence gathering" is that, for the most part, the politicians and power brokers who support it are the very same people who present themselves as staunch defenders of the US Constitution. We should remember that Obama is a constitutional scholar and many of those on the right rabidly defend the part of the constitution that deals with "the right to bear arms." But when it comes to the part of the constitution that deals with "unreasonable search and seizure," these same defenders go mute!