Live Chat: How America Became the United States of Secrets

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By The Guardian

For the past year, the Guardian has reported on how the NSA turned its eye on ordinary American citizens after 9/11, creating a massive surveillance dragnet to collect and monitor the communications of millions— without warrants, under a legal authority that hadn’t existed before.

Now, Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, Luke Harding and others tell the story behind the NSA revelations in a new Frontline documentary, United States of Secrets: Part One, which aired Tuesday night at 9pm ET on PBS (you can watch a clip above). The documentary dives into “The Program” of surveying millions of Americans, and how it came to be. Why did the government keep it hidden from the people it was meant to protect? What happened to the whistleblowers who spoke out against it? And how does government surveillance affect the average American?

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