In a chilling leaked email, a top US government lawyer hopes for a terrorist attack to justify spying on Americans.
If we are to go by what Bill Maher and other pro-government propagandists in the media tell us, the US state's spying on millions of Americans is about protecting against terrorist attacks. Evidence cited against this consists of the basic fact that the digital surveillance against Americans has not stopped any terrorist attacks.
Perhaps better still is the evidence that the US government uses terrorism to justify the spying, to the point of wanting terrorist attacks to happen.
Lawyer Robert S. Litt wrote, "the legislative environment is very hostile today … [but] it could turn in the event of a terrorist attack or criminal event where strong encryption can be shown to have hindered law enforcement." A government official also called for dead children as a way of persuading the public to accept tyranny to protect them:
People are still not persuaded this is a problem. People think we have not made the case. We do not have the perfect example where you have the dead child or a terrorist act to point to, and that’s what people seem to claim you have to have.C4SS (Center for a Stateless Society) writer Jason Farrell sees this quest for an impervious "national security" state as a threat to the actual security of American citizens, concluding as follows:
The leak underscores the problems associated with secret laws, secret courts, secret spying programs and the failure of the democratic process to secure privacy rights. The competitive nature of domestic spying programs could compel states to further erode privacy rights within their own borders in the pursuit of “national security.” What sort of security that leaves us with remains to be seen.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjEEM1XCfTk
When Glen Greenwald was in the above (linked) interview with Bill Maher, Maher described US whistleblower Edward Snowden as "batshit" for thinking the US government spies on American citizens for any reason other than to keep them safe. Reality shows otherwise.
It's a human right to be #Anonymous + use #encryption. @Jason_M_Farrell @c4ssdotorg http://t.co/BJnoAm9H8g pic.twitter.com/XPzepgs2SS
— The clubof.info Blog (@ClubOfInfo) September 20, 2015
