With Daniel Ellsberg:

If and when there’s another 9/11 while Bush is in office, I think he’ll get what he wants. And what he wants is - I have a sort of litany of what I think you’d get. Maybe I should just say the list right now.

First, I think you get a new Patriot Act, probably drafted already, that makes the old one look like the Bill of Rights. And the Bill of Rights is gone. Obviously, it hasn’t had any reality in the minds of the White House, the administration, as a desideratum, as something to hang onto, since they got in, or since 9/11 anyway.

Second, total surveillance, which apparently we may have right now. When I was saying this a month ago, it wasn’t on the assumption that they’d gone as far as it turns out they have. But I did see that happening in the future, as I started thinking 40 years ago, when I had clearances. I knew then that there was no great technical problem in simply turning on the NSA domestically, to listen to the American public the same way they listened to foreign countries. There was just a political problem, you could say a constitutional problem. And the day that they flipped that switch, for whatever reason, we would become a total surveillance society. I would say that switch was flipped, secretly, just after 9/11 (if not before).

I think that what the NSA is probably doing is a massive, massive vacuum cleaner operation here within America as well as in and out, and that we’re talking about millions and millions of intercepts. I suspect what we’re going to find out is in effect what Admiral Poindexter called Total Information Awareness, that’s what was turned on. And the targeted wiretaps–the individual ones that they should have asked the FISA court for warrants on but didn’t–are probably illegal for two other reasons as well: They’re based on the illegal mass data-mining program, and some of them, probably a lot of them, target journalists, politicians and antiwar activists with no relation to terrorism. I’m guessing that they didn’t apply for warrants–or for changing the law–because even the FISA court wouldn’t give warrants in these cases, or for data-mining, nor would even a Republican Congress make these legal.

Even before the investigations we need of all this, given the overwhelming prima facie appearance of illegality, there should be senators saying right now, “stop.” A lot of them, even Republicans, have uttered the words “illegal,” “unconstitutional,” “impeachable” about the secret NS programs. but I don’t know of one who has gone on to say, “This must be stopped. Right now.” Now: This should stop. Right now. While it’s being investigated.