If you’re not completely appalled by the actions of the Bush administration (& inaction by Obama) after watching the part 1 of Frontline’s United States of Secrets, you’re comatose. The hubris of people like former NSA director Michael Hayden and Vice President Cheney’s former legal counsel David Addington is jaw-dropping and the treatment of longtime NSA employees turned whistleblowers absolutely chilling.
Yesterday as I was finishing up a deadline, I noticed this at the Guardian website. The partner of Glenn Greenwald (one of the journalists who broke the Snowden/NSA story) was detained for 9 hours at London’s Heathrow airport. As an American and an editorial cartoonist, this is a very disturbing development. I remember right after 9/11 how ordinary people were detained for weeks without access to legal counsel, all in the name of preventing terrorism threats.
This reinforces one of my biggest fears- that people who criticize the government will be targeted. Every time I’m interviewed I always talk about how we American cartoonists never have to face the types of threats other cartoonists around the world do because we have the First Amendment to protect us. This is the first time I truly feel the situation has changed.
Here’s Glenn’s response and Andrew Sullivan’s piece challenging PM Cameron. Be sure to read the last line; the unfortunate reality is that it’s a question which needs to be asked.
With the latest developments on Syria and red lines, you might have missed a member of Congress calling for a reporter to be prosecuted for doing his job. Appearing on CNN, Rep. Peter King said that journalists who reported the leaks of the NSA’s surveillance program should be prosecuted. Later on Fox News he singled out the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, claiming that Greenwald would release the names of CIA operatives. Greg Sargent has Greenwald’s response here.
Where to start? It seems like new developments about domestic spying are coming every hour. Before we get ahead of ourselves, here’s a good AP piece which will give you some background about how we got to this point. Glenn Greenwald & Ewen MacAskill from The Guardian broke the story and revealed the identity of the whistleblower, Edward Snowden while Barton Gellman & Laura Poitrus of The Washington Post had the breaking story of the metadata mining program, “PRISM”. Here’s the link to my take on metadata gathering.