June 6, 2013
theblaze.com
"The story of an organization that exists in Washington, D.C., poses as a part of the United States government — it is not — and is more secretive than the NSA, more secretive than the CIA, and some would allege is even more powerful than the United States government.”
t doesn’t even take one page for you to be blown away by Brad Thor’s highly successful thriller from last summer “Black List.” It’s right there on the first page of the preface.
But why are we talking about last year’s success rather than his latest project (“Hidden Order“) slated for release on Tuesday? Because last year’s book warned of one of this year’s biggest scandals: the NSA spying story.
“This is not only real stuff, but it chilled me to the bone,” Thor told TheBlaze in a sit-down interview in Salt Lake City, Utah, on Friday. “This” is the NSA’s capability to surveil its own citizens — but not just its capability, also its willingness and practice.
“I said, ‘That’s what I’m going to base my thriller, “Black List,” on,’ and that’s what I did.”
The first page of the book makes that clear. On it is a transcript of a 1975 “Meet the Press” appearance featuring Sen. Frank Church. At that time — nearly 40 years ago — Church issued a dire warning on what would happen if the U.S. government ever decided to turn its intelligence-gathering capability on its own people. The correlation to the most recent headlines is eery [emphasis added]:
“[America’s intelligence gathering] capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left. Such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.
If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.
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