Obama defends police state spying - World Socialist Web Site
▻https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/01/18/pers-j18.html
In the course of his 45-minute address, Obama never mentioned the Fourth Amendment, which explicitly bans warrentless and arbitrary “searches and seizures”—precisely what the NSA and other intelligence agencies are doing, and on a scale that could not have been imagined by the Founding Fathers of the American republic.
Instead, the speech was marked by repeated paeans to the military-intelligence apparatus.
“The folks at the NSA are our neighbors, they’re our friends and family,” Obama said. “Our intelligence community follows the law and is staffed by patriots,” he added, declaring that NSA operatives “follow protocols designed to protect the privacy of ordinary people.”
Obama endorsed the surveillance programs “not only because I felt that they made us more secure, but also because nothing in the initial review [of the #NSA programs] and nothing I have learned since indicated that our intelligence community has sought to violate the law or is cavalier about the civil liberties of their fellow citizens.” (...) “If any individual who objects to government policy can take it into their own hands to publicly disclose classified information,” he declared, “then we will not be able to keep our people safe, or conduct foreign policy.” He went on to imply that #Snowden was guilty of “revealing methods to our adversaries,” i.e., engaging in treason.