NSA Whistleblower: Obama’s Attacks on the Press Indicate a ‘Soft Tyranny’

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In an interview with The Daily Caller, NSA Whistleblower Thomas Drake the Obama administration’s targeting of journalists, their sources, and government whistleblowers is an attack on the First Amendment.

“[R]eporters have shared with me privately that some of their most trusted sources within government are increasingly afraid to speak with them, even off-the-record, for fear that they will be monitored and surveilled,” Thomas Drake, a former senior executive of the National Security Agency and a whistleblower who was prosecuted by the Obama administration, told The Daily Caller in an exclusive interview.

“That’s self-censorship,” he said.

Drake explained to TheDC that he sees a “soft tyranny” enveloping the United States through the federal government’s targeting of journalists and their sources.

Drake accurately describes himself as someone who “became a criminal and was labeled an enemy of the state because I was calling out government wrongdoing and illegality.” Someone that has gone through that experience can be expected, at this point, to be calling out the Obama administration attacks on press freedoms.

But consider what CBS’s Bob Schiefer, your run of the mill, toe-the-line, stenographic broadcast “reporter,” – hardly a brave dissident like Drake – said about Obama’s cold disdain for the press (via Kevin Gosztola):

People often ask me, of all the administrations you’ve covered which was the most secretive and manipulative? The Nixon administration retired the trophy, of course. Since then my answer is whichever administration is currently in power. Information management has become so sophisticated every administration learns from the previous one, each finds new ways to control the flow of information. It’s reached the point that if I want to interview anyone in the administration on camera, from the lowest-level worker to a White House official, I have to go through the White House press office.

As Glenn Greenwald pointed out last week, this “establishes a standard where the only information the public can learn is what the U.S. government wants it to know, which is another way of saying that a classic propaganda model has been created.”

11 thoughts on “NSA Whistleblower: Obama’s Attacks on the Press Indicate a ‘Soft Tyranny’”

  1. Helen Thomas compared Obama to Nixon several years back, right before she was taken out by a Zionist rabbi for (gasp) suggesting much of the Jews in Israel were Polish and German (OMG!) and perhaps going back to Europe would solve the majority of the problems (regarding occupied territory…)GASP

    but you know, Obama and the lackey brigade of msm deflected Thomas as old person ready to retire. ooh, isn't she just cute. she called him out. just saying.

  2. Helen Thomas compared Obama's handling of the press to that of Nixon 3 or was it 4 years ago…?

    we've got to stop reinventing the wheel

  3. It's very gracious of Thomas Drake to call it soft tyranny. I call what was done to him hard tyranny.

    Even the most despotic regimes in history made use of "lawfare" because in many situations it is more effective than immediate physical force.

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  6. Speaking to reporters, Kerry inveighed against what he sees as a tendency within the United States to retreat from the world even as he defended the Obama administration’s diplomatic efforts from Syria to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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