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No citizen is immune to the ceaseless dragnet surveillance by Barack Obama’s  administration.

Among the revelations of the president’s boundless surveillance, which also  includes reporters’ phone records, is this report on how We the People thereby  lose access to breaking news affecting our lives:

Pruitt, whose speech at the National Press Club was covered by Politico’s  Weinger, said “the chilling effect is not just at AP, it’s happening at other  news organizations as well. Journalists from other news organizations have  personally told me it has intimidated sources from speaking to them.

“Now, the government may love this. I suspect they do. But beware the  government that loves secrecy too much.”

Meanwhile, more attention is being paid here to increasing anger among our  European allies to the scope and depth of Obama’s spying as revealed by Edward  Snowden to Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian.

For example, Agence France-Presse recently reported: “The EU has warned  President Barack Obama’s administration of ‘grave adverse consequences’ to the  rights of European citizens from a huge U.S. Internet surveillance program,  officials said” (“EU warns U.S. of ‘grave consequences’ from intel scandal,”  June 12).

The EU’s justice commissioner, Viviane Reding, had written to Attorney  General Eric Holder, AFP reported, requesting “‘swift and concrete’ answers  about the spy scheme.”

Basing her concerns on Snowden’s exposures in the Guardian, she sharply  challenged Holder (almost certainly to no avail), writing:

“Programs such as PRISM and the laws on the basis of which such programs are  authorized could have grave adverse consequences for the fundamental rights of  EU citizens.”

Furthermore, AFP reported, Reding asked Holder “whether EU citizens …  targeted by the U.S. programs … would be able to find out whether their data has  been accessed, and whether they would be treated similarly to U.S. nationals in  such cases.”

And dig this: In view of Holder’s chronic non-transparency to such questions,  AFP reported that “the EU official also warned that the European Parliament ‘is  likely to assess the overall transatlantic relationship also in the light of  your responses.’”

But Obama characterizes these incidents of spying as just “modest  encroachments on privacy.”

We Americans know how scarily “modest” they are.

Our next president of whatever party is going to have a lot of explaining to  do when dealing with European citizens’ abhorrence of being secretly classified  in such American databases as those of the National Security Agency and the  FBI.

As for members of the media and advocates of civil liberties, more of them  are trying to pierce Obama and Holder’s spy operations by engaging in powerfully  detailed lawsuits over constitutional abuses by the administration, as I’ll  detail next week.

On June 10, the Obama administration was targeted full-scale, according to  the Electronic Frontier Foundation: “A bipartisan coalition of 86 civil  liberties organizations and Internet companies – including the Electronic  Frontier Foundation, reddit, Mozilla, FreedomWorks and the American Civil  Liberties Union – are demanding swift action from Congress in light of the  recent revelations about unchecked domestic surveillance” (“86 Civil Liberties  Groups and Internet Companies Demand an End to NSA Spying,” Rainey Reitman,  eff.org).

In their open letter to all members of Congress, these 86 angry patriotic  organizations resounded: “This type of blanket data collection by the government  strikes at bedrock American values of freedom and privacy. This dragnet  surveillance violates the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution,  which protect citizens’ right to speak and associate anonymously and guard  against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

The cost of another president leading us as a nation under ever more  surveillance will be a future 9/11 in which the terrorists will have won – even  before all the corpses they amass are counted.

Bear in mind that a majority of us re-elected Obama, our lead betrayer. Shall  we continue betraying ourselves?

As for Edward Snowden, the man who helped cause this large-scale awakening of  the media, he is afraid. Not of his fate, but that authorities “will come after  my family, my friends, my partner,” he said. “Anyone I have a relationship with  … I have to live with that for the rest of my life” (“Edward Snowden, NSA files  source: ‘If they want to get you, in time they will,’” Ewen MacAskill,  guardian.co.uk, June 9).

Do you agree that this should be his reward for telling the truth?

Next week: More congressional rebellions that should lead all presidential  aspirants of both parties to tell us clearly and specifically what each of them  will do to overturn Obama’s betrayal of our Constitution.