The US: Surveillance, secrets and security

This special edition of the show delves into the continuing crackdown on whistleblowers in Barack Obama’s America.

On August 21, Bradley Manning, the US soldier convicted of leaking a trove of secret government documents to anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks, was sentenced to 35 years in prison having been convicted in July of 20 charges against him, including espionage. This is one of the latest developments in the ongoing story of secrecy and surveillance in Barack Obama’s America. When we first took an extended look at the White House’s war on whistleblowers a year ago, little did we know that there was another figure waiting in the wings, about to make political history. Edward Snowden took the stage in June 2013, revealing the sweeping extent of the NSA's surveillance programme. He has gone down as one of US' most important whistleblowers of all time, becoming the seventh person to be charged by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act, more than double the number of prosecutions of all previous presidential administrations combined. For the most part, coverage of this story by the US mainstream media has been interesting, to say the least.