"On a Slippery Slope to a Totalitarian State": NSA Whistleblower Rejects Gov't Defense of Spying

http://www.democracynow.org - As Director of National Intelligence James Clapper warns the recent leaks could "render great damage to our intelligence capabilities," we speak to William Binney, a former top official at the National Security Agency, and Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who has broken the NSA spying stories. Binney spent almost 40 years at the agency but resigned after Sept. 11 over concerns about growing domestic surveillance. He spent time as director of the NSA's World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group and was a senior NSA crypto-mathematician largely responsible for automating the agency's worldwide eavesdropping network. "The government is not trying to protect [secrets about NSA surveillance] from the terrorists," Binney says. "It's trying to protect knowledge of that program from the citizens of the United States."
Watch Democracy Now!'s ongoing coverage of the NSA leak at http://www.democracynow.org/topics/nsa.

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