When it comes to privacy vs. security, are the only choices Glenn Greenwald and Lindsey Graham, two egomaniacal lawyers with no sense of balance?
Thanks to his latest hue and cry, TV talking heads are belaboring Greenwald’s “discovery” that “The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.”
To disentangle that scare scenario from reality is requiring bend-over-backward responses not only from the White House but such responsible figures as Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss, bipartisan leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to point out, without breaching security, that such activities go back over a decade to the Patriot Act and are severely limited in scope.
Since 9/11/01 we are living in a world where freedom and terror have been colliding constantly, with no clear answers on every question. Demagoguery on either side does not help.
Even such civil liberties stalwarts as Bill Moyers are taken aback at Greenwald’s absolutism. In a recent interview, when he railed at “reverence for military and political institutions” during the days following the Boston bombings, Moyers asked, “Couldn’t it have been just relief? Relief that they had found the other guy? That they didn’t have to go to bed that night wondering if another bomb would go off?”
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