Name:

I was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator and am now a journalist. I am the author of three New York Times bestselling books -- "How Would a Patriot Act" (a critique of Bush executive power theories), "Tragic Legacy" (documenting the Bush legacy), and With Liberty and Justice for Some (critiquing America's two-tiered justice system and the collapse of the rule of law for its political and financial elites). My fifth book - No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the US Surveillance State - will be released on April 29, 2014 by Holt/Metropolitan.

Sunday, January 19, 2014

Who elected them?

Who elected Daniel Ellsberg and The New York Times to take it upon themselves to reveal  thousands of pages of the top secret Pentagon Papers to the American public?

Who elected Dana Priest and her still-unknown source(s) to take it upon themselves to reveal in The Washington Post the existence of the CIA's top secret network of black sites?

Who elected Sgt. Joseph Darby and the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh to take it upon themselves to tell Americans about the classified operations at Abu Ghraib?

Who elected Mark "Deep Throat" Felt to illegally disclose, and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to publish, secret information from an FBI investigation in the pages of The Washington Post?

Who elected Thomas Tamm, Jim Risen and Eric Lichtblau to spill Bush's top secret NSA warrantless eavesdropping program in the pages of The New York Times?

Why did all these people - whom we didn't elect - think they had the right to decide which classified information should be disclosed?