"STOP watching us," was the slogan of thousands of U.S. citizens demonstrating in Washington, as was the content of messages from Germany, Brazil, France and Mexico. The government secret is in full view and before them the dangers of this part of power operating in the shadows.

Since Edward Snowden dared to divulge and confirm the existence of a massive system of U.S. espionage on peoples and governments of the world, via the exemplary bravery of journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras (among others) and The Guardian newspaper (followed by a large number of other media), part of the democratic disguise of Washington has come undone and revealed what is behind the mask.

It transpires that the administration of Barack Obama, who affirmed from the beginning that it would be the most transparent in history, has much to hide, not only from its enemies, but from those it calls its allies and partners and from its own people.

If you see something, say something, has been the maxim since September 11: in other words, everyone is suspect. Suddenly, the most sacred aspect in the official rhetoric of this country – the rights and liberties of individuals before the state and that the power of government is exercised with the authorization of the governed – has been subordinated in the face of a threat characterized as a constant, brutal and permanent. They forgot the advice of the founding fathers, such as Benjamin Franklin: "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

In the name of national security the longest wars in the country’s history were launched, an internal security apparatus was extended and espionage programs and secret operations, possibly unprecedented, were developed at the global level. The always existing secret government once more became a super-secret government, with vast programs of selective assassination, clandestine kidnappings and, as is now known, a massive vigilance of such dimensions that this commentary will probably be seen by some spy before being revised by the editorial team of this newspaper.

The Obama administration and politicians from both parties who justify and defend mass espionage, untiringly repeat that these programs are vital for the battle on terror. For example, in the last few weeks, the government has reiterated that these programs have dismantled or annulled 54 terrorist conspiracies. However, a report from ProPublica, a group of investigative journalists, concludes that no evidence has been presented to confirm this affirmation and, in fact, the same officials have admitted that it is not accurate, despite its continual dissemination. This is repeated in other areas of what is being revealed.

When asked to confirm its statement that all programs are legal in terms of judicial authorization and supervised by Congress, the government initially argued that it could not offer evidence of judicial authorization because the rulings are also secret. Moreover, legislators have complained that it is not possible for them to supervise secret operations, given that they do not possess the details.

More recently, the government has insisted that its intelligence programs are no different from those of other countries. However, massive surveillance programs of the U.S. population or its maximum political leadership by countries such as Germany, Brazil, France or Mexico remain unheard of.

At the same time, it has been very difficult for the government to justify spying on the political leaders of allied countries as part of an anti-terrorist effort (or is it that Merkel, Rousseff, Hollande and Peña Nieto are suspected of something that only the National Security Agency knows?).

As Greenwald affirms in his column in The Guardian, is there some doubt that the U.S. government repeatedly tried to deceive the world by insisting that this unsuspected espionage system was motivated by an attempt to protect the U.S. population from ‘Terrorists’? His research revealed espionage on conferences to negotiate economic agreement, on the Organization of American States, oil companies, secretaries who supervise mines and energy resources, democratically elected leaders of allied states and entire populations in these states. Can President Obama himself and his most loyal followers seriously maintain that this is about terrorism?

Meanwhile, the government has criminalized the dissemination of information via the media, and insists that doing so will be considered as something akin to treason. Authorities have prosecuted at least seven whistleblowers of classified official information to the press in accordance with the extremely old Espionage Act of 1917, double the number of cases than the total of all previous governments.
Moreover, it has spied on and persecuted journalists. Recently the Committee to Protect Journalists published its first report on the freedom of the press in the United States and condemned Obama’s policies of control of information. The author of the report, Leonard Downie Jr, former executive editor of the Washington Post affirmed, "The administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in The Washington Post’s investigation of Watergate."