insight on the real implications of this case i spoke earlier with kevin stole a journalist with firedoglake i first asked him why the average american should care about this latest leak take a look. here for the same reasons that edward snowden happened to care about the material because he came forward and shared this information because from the inside he was seeing that the n.s.a. along with other national security agencies was transferring the world into a massive surveillance state as tom drake an n.s.a. whistleblower described it to me these are stasi like programs on steroids and i think given what he saw he was making a decision about how he wanted to have a future where he could live in a society that has. motiv com of privacy when you are on the internet or when you have connections to electronic devices that give the government an amazing capacity to track you and has been what's revealed taken what was previously authorized by the patriot act to new extremes and if so how. the author one of the authors of the patriot act representative jim sensenbrenner actually wrote an op ed f

, firedoglake, and others, brought by the constitution -- center for constitutional rights that challenges secrecy in manning's court trial. >> the court-martial of bradley manning is really the last ugly chapter of our sort of an ugly iraq war. a war we rushed into catastrophically in no small part because of extreme government secrecy is now ending in the trial of a truth teller behind a veil of extreme government secrecy. none of the cia torture is, much less bush or cheney, were put on trial but washington has finally found a scapegoat and a young army private who leaked these important documents. to put things into perspective, this is the biggest security breach in the history but also less than 1% of what washington classifies in a given year. it has not put us on the brink of total transparency. it has not caused diplomatic armageddon. there is no concrete evidence whatsoever that any civilian or soldier has been harmed by the leaks. on the other hand, we have a very clear understanding of what the iraq war was really all about and what our afghan war is still all about. the leaks