Perhaps some vestigial civil libertarianism remains in North America, but the vast majority have been co-opted into believing that they are deeply 'invested' in the status quo, that they have much to lose, making them easily convinced that the surveillance state and the loss of liberty are just the cost of doing business in today’s world. People, liberals and conservatives alike, have been carefully cultivated by fear mongering to accept that their tiny slice of the pie will be taken from them by the 'terrorists'.
In a fear-filled world, murder isn't the crime; unmasking and distributing evidence of it is. This hypocrisy lies at the heart of the secret military trial of Bradley Manning. The security state demands that the compliant media focus the public's attention on Manning not his message [ad hominem], but the trail isn't about Manning. It's about a government obsessed with secrecy about its crimes against humanity. If Manning is an enemy of the state then so too is truth.
To insist that Manning or Snowden's disclosures put their colleagues in harm's way is a bit like a cheating husband claiming that his partner reading his diary, not the infidelity, is what is truly imperilling their marriage. Avoiding responsibility for action, one instead blames the information and informant who makes that action known.
Glenn Greenwald said today that, "The purpose of whistleblowing is to expose secret and wrongful acts by those in power in order to enable reform. A key purpose of journalism is to provide an adversarial check on those who wield the greatest power by shining a light on what they do in the dark, and informing the public about those acts." The whistleblowers remind us that resistance is still an option.
Liberals and conservatives in believing they have something to lose are easily controlled by propaganda, fear and secret surveillance but not those who fly under the security radar, not those who live at the margins - the dispossessed, the homeless and the dropouts. Having nothing to lose they see more clearly that as FDR famously said, "We having nothing to fear but fear itself"
