Glenn Greenwald
Salon, 13 June 2011
Dan Gillmor observes that the two top New York Times headlines this morning “sum up the Obama administration”:
EXTRACT: As Yale Professor Jack Balkin recently put it to Jane Mayer about the Obama presidency: “We are witnessing the bipartisan normalization and legitimization of a national-surveillance state.” This state, as much as anything, is devoted to gathering as much intrusive data as possible about as many citizens as possible without a shred of oversight or suspicion of wrongdoing: exactly that which has proven to create inevitable abuse and exactly that which the Fourth Amendment sought to bar.
SECOND EXTRACT: The article also notes that one possible threat to Obama's plan would be a Romney candidacy, as Wall Street would love to back one of their own, and Romney — who amassed a fortune by saddling companies with debt and then firing huge numbers of their employees — is the very essence of what Wall Street loves.
