Senior NSA Executive: We’re In a Police State!

• Senior NSA Executive: We’re In a Police State! 
  by WashingtonsBlog 
  “We Have a Significant Element of Our Government In League With Corporations and Other Unelected Officials Who’ve Decided That The Constitution Is Essentially Null And Void”
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  Thomas Drake is a decorated Air Force and Navy veteran, who has been awarded numerous medals including:
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  * Meritorious Service Medal
  * Air Medal
  * Air Force Commendation Medal
  * Ridenhour prize
  * Sam Adams Award
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  Drake was a member of the Defense Intelligence Senior Executive Service. With a strong technical background in surveillance and computers, Drake was also one of the top NSA executives, and was Senior Change Leader within the NSA.
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  To get a sense of who Drake is, watch this recent PBS interview. Washington’s Blog asked Drake if America is drifting towards tyranny.
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  WASHINGTON’S BLOG: Senator Frank Church – who chaired the famous “Church Committee” on the unlawful FBI Cointel program, and who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee – said in 1975:
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  “Th[e National Security Agency’s] capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. [If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A.] could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.“
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  Is the NSA turning its capability around on the American people, as Senator Church warned?
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  THOMAS DRAKE: I believe they are. Those words are words that have been ringing from inside Pandora’s box … the one that I opened and looked into right after 9/11.
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  I grew up in the early 70′s as a very young teenager, and I remember those hearings in 1975. And it was rather a dramatic warning that he [Senator Church] actually issued to the nation.
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  I never imagined in ’75 that in a short 26 years later that I would become confronted by the stark reality that my own government would jettison the Constitution.
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  And doing so in the deepest of secrecy under the mantle, the excuse, the label of “national security”. I shudder every time I hear national security invoked. Somehow it’s some “special dispension” when you use it in any sentence, that “justifies” anything when it’s done for (ostensibly) national security purposes.
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  It’s not rule of law. This secret law, secret rule, executive authoritarianism has saddled up again. [Indeed, the government now uses secret evidence, secret evidence, secret witnesses, and even secret laws.]
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  read more!
  

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