The Government is the Enemy of Privacy, Safety, and Freedom

Glenn Greenwald is, without a doubt, the most important journalist of the 21^st century. This would be true if we only considered his work as a constitutional lawyer and civil rights defender. But Greenwald’s legacy shot into the stratosphere after coming into contact with Edward Snowden in 2013, revealing the horrific and monstrous degree to which the United States government, in league with the British government, was raping the rights of American citizens. To describe what the US government has and is doing as mere violations of basic human rights is so demented it is absurd, like describing having your arms cut off as merely a flesh wound. And Greenwald’s willingness to expose these governments for the corrupt institutions they are, is a level of courage that most people simply do not appreciate. People have been drone bombed, murdered, and disappeared for less my the American government.

But Greenwald’s work doesn’t end there. Since 2013, he has become one of the most intelligent, insightful, and ardent defenders of the right to privacy and its foundational places as the basis for basic human liberty in over a century. He has maintained a love for the truth that is both unique in any age of journalism, one which has made him loved and hated in equal measure and one which has given him the ability to cut through the partisan hackery to reveal reality. That he refuses to be deceived by the supposed political party divisions in the United States and recognizes that the worst actions of the US government – from spying on the public to murdering citizens to endless warmongering and everything in between – are all bipartisan endeavors makes his voice one of the most necessary of all to listen to on these subjects. To that end, I share the address below.

Held at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts and sponsored by numerous educational institutions, including the BYU Humanities Center, this address by Greenwald addresses numerous topics. Some of them, such as the way that national security agencies (CIA, FBI, NSA, etc.) in the United States and other countries operate almost entirely on their own with little or no oversight by elected officials and the dangers this represents to human liberty and safety, I have addressed before. Other stuff, such as the way that the US government is constantly expanding its power to spy on us while denying us even the basic ability to know what it is doing or why it is doing it, and how this undermines even the basic idea of democratic government that so many claim to cherish or the base hypocrisy with which politicians operate wherein they are all to happy to violate our basic human rights but get shocked and angered when anything even remotely like what they are doing to us happens to them. His comments on the power of the individual – from Rosa Parks to Edward Snowden and countless others – to challenge and ultimately tear down even the most powerful and entrenched agencies of government dominance and control are truths that are needed as much now as they ever have been.