In an epic boxing match, we have in one corner 600 pound gorillas like Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), head of the House Intelligence Committee that is determined to abet spying on you in your bedroom, and in the other corner we have 98 pound weaklings like Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, who are without Rogers’s power base among the Midwest 1% or his political reach. Snowden is holed up in transit lounge in Moscow, and Greenwald, a journalist for The Guardian, has been vilified by the lackey corporate press corps. And yet, Snowden and Greenwald are getting in some left hooks and right crosses, and haven’t just fainted because Rogers called them traitors, echoing his ideological ancestor, Joe McCarthy (R-WI).
Blurb for the show:
‘As Congress holds its second major public hearing on the National Security Agency’s bulk spying, we speak with Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who first published whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations. The NSA admitted their analysis of phone records and online behavior far exceeded what it had previously disclosed. “The fact that you now see members of both political parties increasingly angry over the fact that they were misled and lied to by top-level Obama administration officials, that the laws that they enacted in the wake of 9/11 — as broad as they were — are being incredibly distorted by secret legal interpretations approved by secret courts, really indicates exactly that Snowden’s motives to come forward with these revelations, at the expense of his liberty and even his life, were valid and compelling,” Greenwald says. “If you think about whistleblowing in terms of people who expose things the government is hiding that they shouldn’t be, in order to bring about reform, I think what you’re seeing is the fruits of classic whistleblowing.”‘