We Can't Hide from the National Security Agency | Nat Hentoff | Cato Institute: Commentary

We Can't Hide from the National Security Agency | Nat Hentoff | Cato Institute: Commentary: 'How many Americans know that as of September 2013, all of us engaged in any form of communication will be subject — with the approval of President Barack Obama and the silence of Congress — to continuous tracking and databasing by the National Security Agency?'

'I’ve already asked if any of you are at all worried about inexorably losing what’s left of your privacy outside of our rule of law. You won’t be able to go to a judge to get the government to justify how it now suspects you of being associated with an enemy of the U.S. or some other evildoer.

And where are the protests of those in Congress and around the country as James Bamford demonstrates that “there is no doubt that (the NSA) has transformed itself into the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created”?

There’s more: “For the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration, the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the U.S. and its citizens.”

We now live in a country — the former land of the free and the home of the brave — where the NSA “has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas.'