Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald delivered a memorable and hard-hitting speech at the University of Utah in April 2015 titled “Edward Snowden and the Secrets of the National Security State.” His remarks focused on the National Security Agency’s collection of ordinary law-abiding U.S. citizens’ communications. He emphasized that, even then, nearly eight years ago, people had ceded too much of their independence to unaccountable bureaucrats without even realizing it. If that trend continued, he argued, America would soon be closer to a totalitarian state than a democracy.
He was right.
Two years earlier, during his work on the Snowden story, Greenwald had been privy to a vast quantity of classified government material (courtesy of Snowden). He had reported on the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program, initiated following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, “collectively known by the NSA codename Stellar Wind.” At the time of the article, Greenwald reached out to a senior Obama administration official who said this program had ended in 2011.
What this official left out was that Stellar Wind had been replaced by other more invasive data collection programs. Greenwald wrote about one new program that actually led to a “doubling of the amount of data passing through its filters” (emphasis added).
During the Obama years, the level of Big Tech’s cooperation with the government increased. More frightening still, the liberal media altogether abandoned the practice of real journalism and allied with the security state to control the flow of information in the United States.
American politics have always been messy. But the collusion between the government and powerful private companies to monitor and control public thought has deepened and accelerated to a dangerous degree. The “security state” in Washington now conducts business as if they’re leaders of a third-world dictatorship.
The “Twitter Files” have revealed a level of corruption most people never dreamed they’d see, culminating in an intentional effort by Democrats, the FBI, Big Tech, and the media to influence the results of a U.S. presidential election. Unfortunately, this alliance is more the rule than the exception, as Greenwald pointed out years ago.
“The U.S. security state has integrated itself directly into these companies and their decision-making processes about who is and is not being permitted to be heard,” he told Fox News this weekend. “So, whatever your ideology is, how is it that as an American, you’re not disturbed when you learn that the FBI and Homeland Security and even the CIA are working hand in hand with these companies to control the flow of information domestically inside the United States? That is not their role.”
Again, this didn’t start with Twitter. It’s been happening for years. Referring to the classified documents he’d viewed in 2013, Greenwald said the NSA was working hand in hand with companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google, routinely asking them for data. He told Fox News that the companies would just hand it over, no search warrant required.
There’s no shortage of evidence. We’ve known for a long time that Google manipulates search results for political purposes. YouTube has been censoring conservative content for years. Facebook routinely blocks content that disagrees with the liberal worldview. We could literally fill a book with examples of government officials working with Big Tech leaders and the legacy media to influence the information that reaches the public.
The Twitter Files have simply confirmed that social media companies often take their cues from the government and that the legacy media have become the government’s de facto communications department. They’ve all demonstrated their willingness to break the rules to achieve their common goals.
President Ronald Reagan once famously said: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
Notwithstanding the Cold War, Reagan’s words may have been considered hyperbolic at the time. Sadly, today they are entirely appropriate.
* Article from: The Washington Examiner
