By Jim Hightower
In the
standard spy thriller, our hero gets captured by agents of a repressive
government. They take him into a dark interrogation room, where the sadistic
spymaster hisses: “We have ways of making you talk.”
In real
life, the director of our National Security Agency hisses at journalists: “We
have ways of keeping you from talking.”
In an
interview, he called for outlawing any reporting on his agency’s secret program
of spying on every American: “I think it’s wrong that newspaper reporters have
all these documents…giving them out as if these — you know it just doesn’t make
any sense,” he told Politico‘s
Josh Gerstein.
Then
came his spooky punch line: “We ought to come up with a way of stopping it…It’s
wrong to allow this to go on.”
Holy
Thomas Paine. Alexander says he thinks it’s OK for the government to spy on us.
But he wants to deny the media the freedom to report on Big Brother’s
surveillance.
What
country does this autocrat represent? Alexander’s secret, indiscriminate,
supercomputer scooping-up of data on every phone call, email, and other private
business of every American is what “doesn’t make any sense.”
It’s an
Orwellian, mass invasion of everyone’s privacy, creating the kind of routine,
24/7 surveillance state our government loudly deplores in China and Russia —
and it amounts to stomping on our Fourth Amendment guarantee that we’re to be
free of “unreasonable searches and seizures.”
That’s
the real outrage we should be stopping. But our constitutionally clueless
spymaster is doubling down on his dangerous ignorance by also stomping on the
First Amendment.
If this
were a movie, people would laugh at it as being too silly, too far-fetched to
believe. But there it is, horribly real.
OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator,
writer, and public speaker. He’s also editor of the populist newsletter, The
Hightower Lowdown. OtherWords.org