Somebody talk me down, but it sure looks like our government has gone rogue. What happened to гласность (glasnost) in our current government? If you weren’t around during Gorbachev’s time, during ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’: glasnost stands for openness, publicity or the more modern term, transparency. Perestroika stands for restructuring. The two concepts eventually took down the Soviet empire.

Here, in the United States, we’re slowly building a police state and we seem to be happy letting it happen. Read up on what happened in Germany in the early 1930s, and how it started slowly. We all know how it ended. The government had ultimate power. It could take people’s stuff (taxes and property), it could take people’s religion, it could take people’s rights, freedoms, and lives. And it wasn’t accountable to anyone.

Our government can now take our personal data and communications and when somebody points this out to us, they are flagged as traitors and supposedly “aiding the enemy.”

This is ludicrous. How does this aid the enemy? Who is the enemy anyway?

From TechDirt:

In 2008, now President Obama ran with the following as a key plank in his campaign:

Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled as they have been during the Bush administration. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.

None of that has happened. Instead, as we’ve discussed repeatedly, President Obama has been the most aggressive President ever in attacking whistleblowers and bringing the full weight of the law down on them. In fact, in 2012, rather than promote protecting whistleblowers in his campaign, the campaign bragged about how it cracked down on whistleblowers:

President Obama has done more than any other administration to forcefully pursue and address leaks of classified national security information…. The Obama administration has prosecuted twice as many cases under the Espionage Act as all other administrations combined. Under the President, the Justice Department has prosecuted six cases regarding national security leaks. Before he took office, federal prosecutors had used the Espionage Act in only three cases.