Comforting the NSA and Afflicting Its Dissenters

[kpete]

Comforting the NSA and Afflicting Its Dissenters
No serious defense of the surveillance state can ignores its anti-democratic abuses, its lawbreaking, and its record of punishing whistleblowers.

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Since the September 11 terrorist attacks, many U.S. officials in many different parts of the government have blatantly violated the Constitution, U.S. law, and duly ratified treaties. They've invoked national security to cover up their wrongdoing. At times, they've gone so far as to commit perjury to hide the truth. And almost none of them has ever been charged or prosecuted. As the national-security state engages in serial abuses to a degree that hasn't been equalled in the United States since the days of J. Edgar Hoover, it is abetted by commentators who proceed as if the most worrisome legal violations are actually being perpetrated by dissenters who expose illegal government behavior. These commentators invoke the rule of law as if whistleblowers violate and threaten it more than powerful officials, whose misdeeds they elide and ignore.

the rest:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/comforting-the-nsa-and-afflicting-its-dissenters/381947/?single_page=true