With all the conspiracy theory and pre-conspiracy theory flippantly bandied about on the internet and especially TheIntercept, which, for me, is the new TMZ of massive secretive and illegal government combinations, I’m shocked that the sharpest of those theorists haven’t circled around and started to devour the most obvious one: Greenwald and Snowden have worked with the NSA to shape the message. This theory fits the facts better than all of the other conspiracy theories.
Greenwald has had a year to sift through potentially millions of Top Secret files, and he had the services of a mole who had worked for the CIA for years, who had worked for two NSA contractors, who was trained to be a “real spy” (and real spies know how to break in and steal things), who had Admin privileges on NSA computers and who had spent months stealing all of the classified material he could find, and yet those two have managed to provide proof of exactly zero tiny intentional violations of the Constitution by the Government.
I mean, if you believe that the United States is “worse than the Stasi,” or is a “Security State” or a “Big Brother” which sees and hears everything and violates the United States Constitution on a minute-by-minute basis, how else do you explain it?
If Greenwald were reporting on Greenwald, he would have implied a connection between Greenwald and the NSA by now. And, Greenwald would have chastised Greenwald for not dumping all of the documents on the public. Further, Greenwald would have hinted that Greenwald was “gotten to” and was not being transparent. By this time, Greenwald would have called into question Greenwald's truthfulness 1,028 times and called Greenwald a liar on 712 other occasions. “What does the NSA have on Greenwald?,” is what Greenwald would be obliquely asking.
And the big “Fourth of July Fireworks” that Greenwald promised as a finale? What a perfect way to dramatize the fact that the NSA under President Obama was carefully balancing national security with privacy rights. Hell, Greenwald even used screengrabs to imply that the surveillance of those Muslim-Americans ended in “2008.” In the end, Greenwald and Snowden have proved two very important things: First, they have established beyond a reasonable doubt the profundity of having our effective whistleblowing scheme in place so that naive 29-year-olds, who are ignorant of the most important law (Smith v. Maryland) and fact (Congress knew all about the NSA programs and voted to re-authorize them multiple times) related to his supposed whistleblowing, have no reason to become information vigilantes and make grave policy decisions on behalf of the entire country.
Second, when nobody was supposed to be watching it, the Obama Administration’s intelligence community has been very professional and protective of privacy rights. The Bush Administration, on the other hand, used warrantless wiretaps of Americans, had no court order for its telephone metadata collection program, and was much less effective in stopping terrorism, which just goes to show you how important it is to have Democrats in federal offices.
(Of course, I don’t believe the conspiracy theory aspects above, as that would make me a conspiracy theorist too. The evidence shows that even with all of the advantages afforded to Greenwald and Snowden, they couldn’t prove one intentional constitutional violation by the Government, and that President Obama has been buzz-fucking-light years ahead of President Bush in protecting the privacy of American citizens, which means it's time for a cartoon.)