Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald delivered a memorable and hard-hitting speech at the University of Utah in April 2015 titled “Edward Snowden and the Secrets of the National Security State.” His remarks focused on the National Security Agency’s collection of billions of communications of ordinary, law abiding U.S. citizens. He emphasized that, even then, nearly eight years ago, America was closer to a totalitarian state than a democracy. And he was right.
Two years earlier, during his work on the Snowden story, he’d been privy to a vast quantity of classified government material (courtesy of Snowden). He reported on the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program, initiated following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, “collectively known by the NSA codename Stellar Wind.” At the time of the article, Greenwald reached out to a senior Obama administration official who said this program had ended in 2011.
What this official left out was that Stellar Wind had been replaced by other, more invasive data collection programs. Greenwald wrote about one new program that actually led to a “doubling of the amount of data passing through its filters.” (Emphasis added.)
During the Obama years, the level of Big Tech’s cooperation with the government had increased. More frightening still, the liberal media altogether abandoned the practice of real journalism and allied with the security state to control the flow of information in the U.S.
American politics have always been messy. But the corruption that began in the Obama Administration has deepened and accelerated to a dangerous degree. The “security state” in Washington now conducts business as if they’re leaders of a third-world dictatorship.
The “Twitter Files” have revealed a level of corruption most Americans never dreamed they’d see: collusion between the FBI and a social media platform to interfere in a U.S. presidential election.
Unfortunately, the relationship between the nation’s top law enforcement agency and Twitter is more the rule than the exception. The truth is that the government, the Democratic Party, Big Tech, and the media have been collaborating for over a decade to silence conservatives.
Greenwald joined Fox News’ Dan Bongino on Saturday night to discuss the release of the sixth tranche of the Twitter Files. He said, “Oftentimes it’s assumed that the censorship is coming from the autonomous decisions of Facebook or Google or Twitter and people get mad at the executives of those companies. And sometimes that’s true. But more often than not, it’s coming from external sources to the company.
“The Democratic Party explicitly threatens the CEOs and executives of these companies,” Greenwald claimed. “‘If you don’t censor the way we want you to censor, meaning more, we’re going to impose legal and regulatory reprisals on your company.’”
He continued, “But the other, and I think more menacing part, is that the U.S. security state has integrated itself directly into these companies and their decision-making processes about who is and is not being permitted to be heard. So, whatever your ideology is, how is it that as an American, you’re not disturbed when you learn that the FBI and Homeland Security and even the CIA are working hand-in-hand with these companies to control the flow of information domestically inside the United States. That is not their role.”
Referring to the classified documents he’d viewed in 2013, Greenwald said the NSA was working hand-in-hand with companies like Apple, Facebook and Google, routinely asking them for data. He told Bongino that the companies would just hand it over, no search warrant required.
“This infiltration of these security state agencies which are supposed to exist to secure our borders and keep us safe, who are instead using these dark arts of propaganda and disinformation, not against other countries and to destabilize U.S. enemies, but to manipulate and to deceive the U.S. population to think the way they want us to think. And there’s really nothing more disturbing than that.”
There’s no shortage of evidence. We’ve known for a long time that Google manipulates search results for political purposes. YouTube has been censoring conservative content for years. Facebook routinely blocks content that disagrees with the liberal worldview. We could literally fill a book with examples of government officials working with Big Tech leaders and the legacy media to influence the information that reaches Americans.
The Twitter files have shown that social media companies take their cues from the government. And the legacy media has become the government’s de facto communications department. They’ve all demonstrated their willingness to break the rules to achieve their common goals.
Two years of Democratic rule has brought the U.S. closer than ever before to a totalitarian state. Forget China. It’s this symbiotic relationship between the government and leaders of Big Tech, aided by the liberal media, that poses the greatest threat to our freedom.
Former President Ronald Reagan once famously said: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
Notwithstanding the Cold War, Reagan’s words may have been considered hyperbolic at the time. Sadly, today they are entirely appropriate.
A previous version of this article appeared in The Washington Examiner.
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