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Surveillance, Secrecy, and Democracy
Daniel Ellsberg
January 30, 2014
Daniel Ellsberg is the former military analyst and government official who leaked the
top secret Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971.
was just reading the president’s speech from the State of the Union yesterday. Jim Skelly gave it to
I
me, as I wasn’t able to hear it because I was in the air. Obama said to Congress, “As president, I’m
committed to making Washington work better and rebuilding the trust of the people who sent us here. I
believe most of you are too.” Just yesterday, I was looking at a poll by Public Policy Polling that put
Congress at 8% public approval, so there’s a lot of trust to be re-earned there. I’ll resist telling you one of
the lines from the poll, which you can look up yourself. No, on second thought, I can’t resist. This poll
was taken in October, the last time the government shut down over the budget because they couldn’t
reach an agreement. The poll asked, “What do you have a higher opinion of, Congress or…”—and then
there were a lot of alternatives, most of which were rather negative. Interestingly, Congress was not at the
bottom of people’s opinions. Actually, Vladimir Putin, Miley Cyrus, Anthony Weiner, and the war in
Syria all ranked below Congress in approval ratings. On the other hand, the majority of those polled had a
lower opinion of Congress than of the IRS, public radio fund drives, witches, cockroaches, zombies,
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hemorrhoids, and dog poop.
In the coming months, let’s see if the president can make some progress; let’s face it, public
belief in Washington has suffered some serious blows. I don’t know if the president was referring to the
speech that he gave a little over a week ago, on January 17, when he was addressing the problems of
public belief in our institutions raised by Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency (NSA) in
general. Now, he did say, “I welcome this debate,” and I noticed quite a few people found that
hypocritical in some sense.
I supported President Obama in 2008 and 2012 and I actually got quite a bit of criticism from
friends of mine who were third party advocates during that time, and that’s no joke. I lost some
friendships over it, in fact, and I’m not sorry that I did that. I probably wouldn’t have watched the State of
the Union Address yesterday because I can’t stand to watch Obama. I don’t believe anything he says.
When he said in regard to Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency (NSA), “I welcome this
debate,” and “This debate will make us stronger,” I hope that’s true. But his notion of what stronger will
be or where he hopes this debate will end up is certainly not shared by Edward Snowden or by me.
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