‘Panic made us vulnerable’ how 911 made the US surveillance state – and

On the morning of 11 September 2001, an 18-year-old was driving his white Honda Civic on the way to work as a freelance web designer. It was a beautiful day under a sparkling blue sky, and as he sped down Maryland’s Route 32 with the window down and radio blasting, the teenager was sure it was going to be a lucky day. Soon after 8.46am the radio cut to news that a plane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers in New York City. At 9.03am, by now at his desk, he was stunned to hear that a second plane had crashed into the other tower, followed half an hour later by similar catastrophe at the Pentagon in Washington. He leapt back into his car and screeched into reverse, only to find himself stuck in gridlocked traffic sandwiched between hundreds of other vehicles. He was stuck outside the headquarters of the National Security Agency (NSA), the US intelligence body that runs one of the largest surveillance operations in the world. The road was jammed with personnel streaming out of the NSA building following an order to evacuate. The air was thick with the sound of yelling, cellphones ringing, car engines revving vainly in the stationary traffic. The surreal spectacle of thousands of NSA intelligence agents abandoning their posts after the worst terrorist attack on the US, only to be bogged down in gridlock, made a deep impression on the teenager, Edward Snowden. As did 9/11 itself, which radically changed the course of his life. In its wake, Snowden became caught up in the surge of patriotism that swept the nation. Inspired to play his part, he joined the army, entered the intelligence community, and some 12 years after 9/11 found himself back at the same NSA where he had ground to a halt on that fateful day. The attacks on the Twin Towers and Pentagon had brought Snowden deep into the heart of America’s secretive surveillance operations. But in the process it had given him access to highly classified databases that revealed to him a massive secret world, a sort of hidden state-within-the-state that had been created in the wake of 9/11. Snowden would go on to carry out the largest intelligence leak in the NSA’s history. It would expose one of the great legacies of 9/11 – the rise of the ubiquitous US surveillance state.“Panic made us politically vulnerable,” Snowden told the Guardian as he ruminated on the upcoming 20th anniversary of 9/11. “That vulnerability was exploited by our own government to entitle itself to radically expanded powers that had for decades been out of reach.”Snowden said that upon reflection the explosion of domestic spying post-9/11 should have been anticipated. “We should have known what was to come and, looking back at the public record, I think that on an intellectual level many of us did know. But political and media elites relentlessly repeated that the choice here was obvious: a guarantee of life or a certainty of death.”That teenager on 9/11 is now an exile from his own country, charged under the Espionage Act for All data is taken from the source: https://bit.ly/2l8PxlE Article Link: https://bit.ly/3thofNB #snowden #channel7newsdetroit #wltxnews19 #news #nytimes #cnn #newsnow