In an extended interview on The Colbert Report, Glenn Greenwald reveals more about the upcoming big NSA news. When asked directly what it will be about, he says that “One of the missing pieces is about who are the people on whom the NSA is spying on in America, who are they targeting, for what purposes, who are these people that they are declaring to be sufficient threats that it warrants reading their emails and what is the pattern of people that they have targeted. Are they political dissidents, are they critics of US foreign policy, or are they actual terrorists?”
So it looks like they are going to name names. This could be much bigger that Richard Nixon’s secret ‘enemies list’. Actor Paul Newman was on that list of 20 people and he said that he considered it his greatest accomplishment.
Greenwald said that the story will be ready for publishing in about four to eight weeks.
(These clips aired on May 12, 2014. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post. If the videos autoplay, please see here for a diagnosis and possible solutions.)
“Are they political dissidents, are they critics of US foreign policy, or are they actual terrorists?”
I would guess the answer is “yes”. It really isn’t an “or” question.
Frankly the most shocking answer to me would be “actual terrorists.” Not that it wouldn’t be nice to have more evidence, but I suspect Greenwald’s “revelation” will be that the NSA is focusing on the same motley crew of (almost entirely nonviolent) socialists, environmentalists, hackers, and vegans that the FBI has been been directing it’s “counter terrorism” efforts towards for decades.
As much as I respect Greenwald, I have a feeling his grand finale will just be a cover version of a Will Potter song.
I wonder if Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks is on there.
I believe that when this whole story started breaking, I commented that it’d be awesome if Greenwald and Snowden were holding back screenshots of browsing some New York Times journalist or congressperson’s email/cell/etc traffic, waiting for the epsionage-industrial complex to flatly deny that such a thing was possible. Looks like I may have been right. That would be a pretty obvious move in the tactics of mistake strategy, and the NSA and CIA are all about mistakes. I hope that what Greenwald and Snowden post is screenshots of Feinstein’s ‘private’ communications or something similarly juicy. The american people appear to be amazingly accepting -- so far -- of this bottomless story.