"And, by the way, you want to talk about conspiracy, Snowden comes out 12 years after they start wiretapping everybody in the NSA, 60,000 people—30,000 people at the NSA and 30,000 contractors, like Snowden was. How many talk in 12 years? One: Snowden. How many talked after he came out? None. Talk about a conspiracy. From the day after 9/11, they began to listen to everybody in violation of every principle that exists in the NSA and in the Constitution. So, anyway, I mean, when people say to me you can’t have a conspiracy, the truth is our government, as Dan Ellsberg will tell you, too—I’ve talked to Dan a lot about this—they can keep a secret. Secrets can be kept, absolutely. And many are." Seymour Hersh http://www.democracynow.org/2016/4/25/part_2_seymour_hershs_new_book
"George Herbert Walker Bush: “Sarah, if the American people ever find out what we have done, they would chase us down the street and lynch us.” http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/4/3/1199001/-Jeb-Bush-Oliver-North-and-the-Murder-of-CIA-Drug-Smuggler-Barry-Seal-in-1986
Senator Frank Church, 1975 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee
"George Herbert Walker Bush: “Sarah, if the American people ever find out what we have done, they would chase us down the street and lynch us.” http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/4/3/1199001/-Jeb-Bush-Oliver-North-and-the-Murder-of-CIA-Drug-Smuggler-Barry-Seal-in-1986
“ | In the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air. (...) Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that 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 tyranny, 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. (...) I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.[9][10] | ” |