ENEMY OF THE STATE PART TWO: JOURNEY TO THE OTHER SIDE…OF ARGUMENTS

On the other hand, what does the opposite end of this spectrum of opinions have to say regarding the NSA’s actions? Glenn Greenwald – one of the journalists who Edward Snowden had drawn out to Hong Kong and to whom he leaked the NSA’s documents – lands among the men ultimately on Snowden’s side of things, as he is not happy with the NSA’s actions which he considers to be unconstitutional. Greenwald, in the same debate in which General Hayden had partaken, begins his argument challenging the NSA to prove that they are tracking the enemy – and that as soon as that is proven, journalists will back off. However, until that is proven, he claims that journalists, including himself, will not back down. He later said that the classic excuse that all of this is being done as a result of the constant terrorist threat from which they are trying to protect innocent American citizens is just that – an excuse, and in his opinion, an excuse that has been overused and whittled down into almost meaninglessness. Greenwald also emphasizes time and time again in his argument that unlike the NSA claims over and over again, their online surveillance is not limited or focused while it rather extends past merely persons of interest but to all Americans who reside in the digital world. He deems it to be aggressive and indiscriminant, contrary to the NSA’s claims, an opinion he expressed when he said, “Over and over in the documents of the NSA…is aggressive boasting about the system of indiscriminant, suspicionless [sic] surveillance that they have constructed in the dark where entire populations…who are guilty of nothing have their communications routinely monitored and surveilled [sic] and stored.” There were also a few statistics on the matter that he referenced. For example, Greenwald said that approximately 100 million people are affected by this unwarranted surveillance, asserting that this surpasses the true number of people of interest by far. Likewise, he presents another piece of numerical data, saying that 1.7 billion telephone calls and emails taking place among Americans are documented by the NSA on a daily basis. He also references a recent court decision that ruled this unwarranted surveillance as unconstitutional. Unlike General Hayden, Glenn Greenwald focuses on questioning the NSA’s true intentions as to why they choose to spy on hundreds of millions of Americans – as he claims that they intended not to use state surveillance as a way to zero in on suspicious and possibly threatening persons of interest but rather to encroach upon all Americans’ privacy.