THIS IS MORE THAN A "SO THERE" POST

Conservative gasbags are trying to claim the higher moral and constitutional ground on the issue of NSA data collection but many liberals,  perhaps most notably Glenn Greenwald, have been speaking out against this brave new security state for years.  As I was looking through a couple of interesting New Yorker articles, one from today and the other from 2011, I found this from Jack M. Balkin, a Yale Law School professor:

Jack Balkin, a liberal law professor at Yale, agrees that the increase in leak prosecutions is part of a larger transformation. “We are witnessing the bipartisan normalization and legitimization of a national-surveillance state,” he says. In his view, zealous leak prosecutions are consonant with other political shifts since 9/11: the emergence of a vast new security bureaucracy, in which at least two and a half million people hold confidential, secret, or top-secret clearances; huge expenditures on electronic monitoring, along with a reinterpretation of the law in order to sanction it; and corporate partnerships with the government that have transformed the counterterrorism industry into a powerful lobbying force. Obama, Balkin says, has “systematically adopted policies consistent with the second term of the Bush Administration.”