Edward Snowden may have a point in exposing the U.S. Government’s efforts to monitor telephone calls in America.

I think he thought what he did was a great revelation of information about the activities of the police, the FBI and CIA and that he was doing a public service.

The book “Top Secret America” exposed more than anything I know Snowden to have uncovered. Washington Post reporter Dana Priest along with military expert William M. Arkin wrote about the increase in U.S. government agencies in domestic monitoring and how it has increased since 9/11.

Priest wrote articles for the Post about the topic, too.

The authors spent several years doing research for the book including visiting new buildings built without addresses, floors without a designation or an elevator button with tens of billions of dollars President George W. Bush and Congress approved shortly after 9/11.

“The FBI and the military were also building huge biometric databases – with fingerprints and iris scans of nearly 100 million people, people with top security clearances, Americans in uniforms and of their families, government retirees, first responders, contractors.”

President Barak Obama gave blood, voice and retina samples himself and his DNA is catalogued. His security detail ballooned after his inauguration.

“From the lowliest U.S. Capitol Police officer to the most elite ‘in extremis’ commando teams, a special set of watch officers, analysts, special agents, eavesdroppers, collectors, bomb disposal experts, chemical and biological warfare officers, hostage rescuers, bodyguards, communicators, and drivers formed an army dedicated to him alone.”

The FBI’s counter terrorism structure grew three times as big as it had been before 9/11 and continues to expand under Mr. Obama.

Priest comments about how the National Security Agency helped a great deal in finding terrorists on the battlefield, but refused to clarify what extent it was collecting emails and telephone calls were being collected in search of terrorists’ communication.

“The NSA, which now ingests 1.7 billion pieces of intercepted communications every twenty-four hours: telephone calls, radio signals, cell phone conversations, emails, text and Twitter messages, bulletin board postings, instant messages, website changes, computer network pings, and IP addresses.”

Priest and Arkin write that a lot of the increased intelligence is technologically driven. For instance, some local police departments can scan a car’s license plate and find out if the owner has served time in prison or has outstanding warrants.

The cost of all this diminished available resources for schools and health care for poor people during an economic downturn with unemployment rising and homes being repossessed, Priest wrote. Osama bin Laden must have been gloating over all this in that how the U.S. was reacting to 9/11 was causing more harm than the terrorist act on 9/11, which is what al-Qaeda wants.

Priest also criticizes how the U.S. media covers terrorism events by treating them as a special category instead of crimes like any other crimes as the European media covers it. The American media’s style of reporting terrorism creates greater paranoia about it. This also justifies greater spending and secrecy about from the governments’ and public’s point of view.

She also argues that exposed “secrets” have not jeopardized any operation or soldiers’ lives. In fact, by keeping secrets, the U.S. government is playing into the hands of those who oppose democracy by creating a more closed society and anxiety, which is also what the terrorists want and what a democratic country is not.

Overall, Priest and Arkin make a statement about America and Americans. We unrealistically expect our government to prevent all terrorist attacks – threats to our way of life – on our soil and allow sacrifices to our open society along the way.

Our government promotes open democracy around the world, but is going about protecting our way of life in a secret, less-than-democratic way. They also argue that being more open is better than being closed.

“In this era of involuntary transparency, there is evidence everywhere that the more a nation comes to rely on secrecy to maintain its form of government and its relations with other countries, the more vulnerable it is to political turmoil once those secrets are revealed.”