Snowden illuminated US criminality: William Spring
Press TV has conducted an interview with William Spring, human rights activist, about a new report showing that the United States National Security Agency spies on hundreds of millions of ordinary people around the world, many of them US citizens.
- William Spring, it was interesting what one analyst has said about this and that is that the US is most worried about its own citizens inside the United States.
Do you see it that way and of course never mind the fact that this is violating Americans right as inscribed in the Constitution?
- Of course this is a reverse of 1984. Do you remember there is a book by George Orwell and it was assumed that totalitarianism would necessarily apply to the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc and that the West was free and liberal.
Now in the first decades of the 2000, we are finding in fact the reverse is the case, that the Western countries are the most spied on, the most under surveillance, the most subject to arbitrary arrest, the most subject to disinformation by institutions for example such as the BBC.
Consequently, I find it rather odd that how things have been changed. You see, it does not seem that Snowden has told us anything that we did not already know. We all knew and all of us assumed in Britain that we have been spied on by the British government for years. No one sensible has ever doubted that.
This is very useful evidence that he has produced about both the British and the Americans. Now the Americans are slightly more virginal about their constitutional rights. I do not know why they should be because United States of America seems to be almost the most draconian state in history. I mean they still have got open a concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay which is contrary to the US Constitution. They are using secret renditions all over the world.
Now what Snowden has done and what Assange has done and what Bradley Manning did was express and illuminate the criminality which is at the heart of United States administration.
And this is not just Tricky Dicky Nixon burgling a few offices down in Watergate complex. This is a massive conspiracy by the central government of United States not only against its own citizens but also against the citizens of allied countries such as Britain and throughout the world and through their online apparatchiks such as Google, they have been collecting data for years and also fundamentally changing the basis of life on this planet.
Now this suits the Americans but I think that we cannot say we did not know. Snowden has simply corroborated the facts, he has verified the facts so a lot of it is a very technical information which I am certainly not that type of character able to assess it all.
All I can say is that I am quite happy to go along with Alan Rusbridger’s evaluation of the Snowden material and I feel that if he thinks it is important, then it is important and if the editors of The New York Times and Washington Post and all these editors all around the world who support Alan Rusbridger think it is important, it is important.
We cannot believe for one minute the excuses, the spacious lies put forward by the American administration and by the British.
I mean can anyone really believe the British government after the war in Iraq and after the failure, or not merely failure of intelligence but the absolute deception of the British people by the British government. I think anything which brings out the nature of this police state that we now have operating here in England and in United States, is a very good thing.
I mean even today down at the High Court of Justice, there is this case of this young man who was shot dead by a group of so-called police but it turns out they weren’t dressed up as policemen, they were effectively a gang running around London shooting people dead based on misinformation because this particular young man had no criminal record anyway.
So when are we going to call a stop to this? I think Snowden has done a wonderful job and I think he should be supported one hundred percent.