“Once You Give Up Your Rights, You Can Never Get Them Back. Once You Turn On That Police State, You Can Never Turn It Off.”

Richard Clarke is one of the four White House panelists on NSA spying, and the former top counter-terror czar in the Clinton and Bush administrations.

Clarke has previously said that mass surveillance isn’t needed to keep us safe. And see this.

As Tech Target reports:

Revelations about NSA monitoring activities over the last year show the potential for a police state mechanism, according to the former U.S. cybersecurity czar, but there is still time to avoid the dire consequences.

***

“[T]hey have created, with the growth of technologies, the potential for a police state.”

***

“Once you give up your rights, you can never get them back. Once you turn on that police state, you can never turn it off.”

Indeed, top American officials have warned for decades of a police state enabled by the NSA.

And a former top NSA official said that we’ve already got a police state.  He told Washington’s Blog:

I am glad he [Clarke] also understands the threat to democracy.

The only reason I recognized that in 2001 is because I worked the Soviet problem for close to 30 years … and what NSA was doing was exactly what the Soviet’s tried to do (as well as the Stasi and the Gestapo/SS).

And see this.