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your papers, and your communications at any time—whenever they wanted. That was what John Adams
called the spark that started the revolution. That’s what they were rebelling against. And that’s what
we’ve got now. The first paper that came out from Edward Snowden was an order from the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court for a general warrant for Verizon: Give us all your telephone
communications from now on. It couldn’t be more open-ended.
A president who can decriminalize torture, who can kill people, who can take you to war—not
only conduct it as commander in chief but start it and keep it going—is not a president in the sense of the
Constitution or of what this country was meant to be. He’s a king; he’s an elected king; he’s an elected
monarch. That’s the way you could think of it. What we have in our two-party system is a choice between
two people who will administer an empire—a choice between two potential monarchs. That’s what the
founders fought against, and I think they were right to do so.
Nathan Hale said on the gallows, “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country.” What
country was that? Not the country that he was born into—that was the British Empire. It was for a country
that didn’t yet exist in the society of nations, a country that was self-governing as a republic, without a
king, and eventually with a constitution and separate branches of government. It would pit the ambitions
of one group of men against the ambitions of another group of men—and eventually women. And it
would be a place where individual rights would be protected, including our private communications, our
freedom of speech, and our freedom to give information to the press.
I would say that without investigative journalism, you do not have genuine public sovereignty. If
all that you know about the government is what it chooses to tell you, then you don’t have democracy.
Without leaks, without anonymity and the protection it provides from the punishment that is to be
expected from superiors, you don’t tell truths that your superiors don’t want to be told because they’re
embarrassing, criminal, or deceptive. Without that anonymity, you don’t have a free press, and you don’t
have democracy. I do not see, at this moment, how any journalist can promise anonymity to a source.
And, I would say it’s not just that it can’t be guaranteed, it’s also very unlikely that anonymity will be
maintained. That’s very serious. It’s a crisis of democracy. And I say “crisis” in the sense that Edward
Snowden has given us a gift of a crisis as opposed to a silent coup, which is what we had after 9/11.
Now we know how much the Constitution has been injured, attacked, and weakened. Above all,
the Fourth Amendment is near death. What the president is offering in way of reforms is not even Band-
Aids or aspirin for this dying Fourth Amendment. It’s sugar pills; it’s placebos. The question is whether
we will tell members of Congress that we want them to act under their constitutional powers to demand
answers, to investigate, and to change what Congress is doing. Republican Representative Justin Amash
and Democratic Representative John Conyers had a bill to strip the NSA of its right to engage in this mass
unconstitutional surveillance. It almost passed; it came within seven votes of passing, to the fear and
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