More on the Exposure of the NSA Spying Program

Glenn Greenwald, the attorney and columnist for The Guardian who this week broke a story of the government’s tapping of telecommunications companies, talked with “Democracy Now!” on Friday about the “massive surveillance state” currently being revealed in unprecedented detail, and the possibility that he could be investigated for the disclosure.

“I think the crucial thing to realize is that hundreds of millions of Americans … in fact, billions of people around the world essentially rely on the Internet exclusively to communicate with one another,” Greenwald said. “Very few people use landline phones for much of anything. So when you talk about things like online chats and social media messages and emails, what you’re really talking about is the full extent of human communication. And what the objective of the National Security Agency is, as the stories that we’ve revealed thus far demonstrate and as the stories we’re about to reveal into the future will continue to demonstrate — the objective of the NSA and the U.S. government is nothing less than destroying all remnants of privacy. They want to make sure that every single time human beings interact with one another, things that we say to one another, things we do with one another, places we go, the behavior in which we engage, that they know about it, that they can watch it, and they can store it, and they can access it at any time. And that’s what this program is about. And they’re very explicit about the fact that since most communications are now coming through these Internet companies, it is vital, in their eyes, for them to have full and unfettered access to it. And they do.”

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

‘Democracy Now!’: