Barack O'Bush stays on course with wiretapping. Screw privacy!

Not a good way to start a week: the radio-alarm kicked in with NPR's Steve Inskeep talking with retired congressman, Lee Hamilton.  In a measured pace, Hamilton referred to Obama's foreign policies not being that much different from Bush's.  Half-asleep still, I pick up the local paper, which screams in its headlines that the Obama administration wants to expand wiretapping--which began under Bush.

I was sure that Glenn Greenwald would have said something about this; he does:

What these Obama proposals illustrates is just how far we've descended in the security/liberty debate, where only the former consideration has value, while the latter has none.  Whereas it was once axiomatic that the Government should not spy on citizens who have done nothing wrong, that belief is now relegated to the civil libertarian fringes.  Concerns about privacy were once the predominant consensus of mainstream American political thought. 

Greenwald notes that America is no different from Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates (and India too?) that demand:

full, unfettered access to all communications.  Amazingly, the administration had the temerity to condemn the UAE's ban on Blackberries on the ground that it impedes "the free flow of information," but in response, the UAE correctly pointed out how hypocritical that condemnation was:

Yousef Al Otaiba, the UAE Ambassador to the United States, said [State Department spokesman P.J.] Crowley's comments were disappointing and contradict the U.S. government's own approach to telecommunication regulation.

Not a good beginning to a week, which is also the beginnings of a new academic year.
And, here is how Greenwald ends his commentary:

What makes this trend all the more pernicious is that at exactly the same time that the Government is demanding greater and greater access to what you do and say, it is hiding its own conduct behind an always-higher and more impenetrable wall of secrecy.  Everything you do and say must be accessible to them; you can have no secrets from them.  But everything they do -- including even criminal acts such as torture, assassinations and warrantless surveillance -- is completely off-limits to you, deemed "state secrets" that not even courts can review in order to determine their legality.

Well, renew your ACLU membership, and fight for civil liberties that, yes, the Constitution guarantees us.