US crusade to hide the truth of spying

It has become increasingly clear now why the United States government is so anxious to crack down on whistle-blowers, pursuing over 20 charges against Bradley Manning, a US soldier who gave secret government and military documents to WikiLeaks, hunting down former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden who revealed the NSA's vast surveillance programs around the world, and even trying to arrest Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks' editor-in-chief and founder who published secret files.

On Wednesday, Glenn Greenwald, one of the first journalists to report Snowden's revelations in May in the British newspaper The Guardian, again shocked the world by reporting another US secret surveillance program revealed by Snowden.

The so-called XKeyscore program is touted by NSA in its training materials as its "widest-reaching" system for developing intelligence from the Internet. It allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing e-mails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals. This new revelation showed how easy it is for the administration to access databases, which US President Barack Obama and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers have blatantly denied.