Edward Snowden was right. Glenn Greenwald was right. The American Civil Liberties Union was right.

Throughout the Obama administration and indeed long beforehand, critics of the nation’s ever-expanding national security state have been grabbing Americans by the lapels and shaking them, trying to raise consciousness about the dangers. Their efforts too often have been in vain. Now, with president-elect Donald Trump readying for power, those dangers are more immediate than ever.

As Wired worried last month in a piece titled, “Imagine if Donald Trump Controlled the NSA”:

This expansion intensified under President George W. Bush, with warrantless wiretaps, secret kidnappings, and torture, but much of it continued under President Barack Obama, tainting a generally progressive eight years in the White House. As Greenwald—the investigative journalist who helped Snowden blow the whistle on National Security Agency wrongdoing—wrote at The Intercept on Wednesday:



[B]oth political parties have joined to construct a frightening and unprecedentedly invasive and destructive system of authoritarian power, accompanied by the unbridled authority vested in the executive branch to use it. As a result, the president of the United States commands a vast nuclear arsenal that can destroy the planet many times over; the deadliest and most expensive military ever developed in human history; legal authorities that allow him to prosecute numerous secret wars at the same time, imprison people with no due process, and target people (including U.S. citizens) for assassination with no oversight; domestic law enforcement agencies that are constructed to appear and act as standing, para-militarized armies; a sprawling penal state that allows imprisonment far more easily than most Western countries; and a system of electronic surveillance purposely designed to be ubiquitous and limitless, including on U.S. soil.

After the experience of the Bush years, it’s shameful that Democrats didn’t hold Obama to a higher standard on these issues. His unprecedented war on whistleblowers should have been a red flag, and Democrats should have pressured him to make more than modest NSA reforms after Snowden’s disclosures. The surest way to defend civil rights and civil liberties is to structure the government apparatus so that it can’t easily violate them.