On Sunday’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” on ABC, liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman declared the Obama administration’s surveillance efforts “authoritarian.”
Krugman cited a 2008 article by Yale professor Jack Balkin about the so-called “surveillance” state, which asserted that states fall into one of two categories. According to Krugman, the current federal government can be classified as an “authoritarian” state.
“There was a really good article written five years ago by Jack Balkin at the Yale Law School,” Krugman said. “He said that technology means we’re going to be living in a surveillance state. But there are different kinds of surveillance states. You can have a democratic surveillance state, which collects as little data as possible and tells you as much as possible about what it’s doing. Or you could have an authoritarian state, which collects as much as possible and tells the public as little as possible, and we are kind of on the authoritarian side.