America the passive
"Rachel Maddow spoke for a lot of progressives, as usual, when she admitted on her show Thursday night, about the rolling wave of revelations about NSA’s data-dragnet: “Part of me feels like screaming, part of me feels like we’ve known this was going on since 2006-2007.”
"It’s true, we’ve learned a lot about aspects of the vast post-9/11 surveillance state in the last 10 years, and it’s hard to keep track of who knew what when, and what mattered most about each revelation (including these latest). It’s true that George W. Bush took both the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and pushed them beyond the boundaries of legality – and then Congress acted, not to rebuke Bush or rein him in, but to make those abuses legal."
The laws haven’t been secret, but the ways the administration interprets and acts on the law long have been. Sens. Jeff Merkley, Mark Udall and Ron Wyden have been trying to tell us this for a long time; they and others, like Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, say these new revelations ought to force much more accountability on the administration. (Sen. Dianne Feinstein, by contrast, defends it all on the grounds that it’s “kept us safe,” and Lindsey Graham is proud to have Verizon sharing his phone records with the government.)
http://www.salon.com/2013/06/07/america_the_passive/
= new reply since forum marked as read
but not the extra scrutiny of ALL the American people, that is another thing that sticks in my crawl... thank you for sharing Rachels thoughts, I don't have teeVee so I don't get to see her show, just read about it, or sometimes snippets that are posted online about serious topics that I care about, like this one.
Thanks for sharing 
