Pulitzer Prize and Emmy Award winning reporter and documentary filmmaker Hendrick Smith talks about his PBS special “Spying on the Homefront,” about the National Security Agency and FBI’s spying on the American people – far beyond the so-called “terrorist surveillance program” that the administration claims, the fact that the feds now have almost total access to private firms’ records, why innocent people do have something to worry about, the suitably of the FISA court in handling warrants for national security threats, the unanimity of the people involved in the program that the American people’s liberty is threatened, jerking tappers around for sport and how it’s only getting worse.
MP3 here. (16:55)
Hedrick Smith is Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of several best-selling books. He has created and hosted twelve award-winning PBS prime-time specials and series on topics including Washington’s power game, Soviet perestroika, the global economy, education, and teen violence. For 26 years, Smith served as a correspondent for The New York Times in Washington, Moscow, Cairo, Saigon, Paris and the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that produced the Pentagon Papers series. In 1974, he won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting from Russia and Eastern Europe. Hedrick Smith has published several national best-selling books, including The Russians (1976), The Power Game: How Washington Works (1988), The New Russians (1990) and Rethinking America (1995). Smith’s books and documentaries are frequently used for college and high school courses on government, sociology, and economics.