Donald Trump’s wish for hacking powers sets up disaster scenario Snowden feared

[Commentary] Donald Trump shocked a lot of people when he suggested (maybe sarcastically, maybe not?) that he hopes Russia is hacking the e-mails of Hillary Clinton so they can find the ones she deleted from her private server. There was another phrase, however, he used later in the day that didn’t get the same attention yet was perhaps more disturbing. While claiming he didn’t have anything to do with the hacking of his political enemies at the Democratic National Committee, he said: “I wish I had that power, man, that would be power.”

This really gets at the crux of why civil libertarians have been arguing for years that the National Security Agency has to be significantly curtailed. Even if you believe that the Obama Administration is 100 percent trustworthy and no one at the NSA under his watch has abused the agency’s vast spying powers (which, by the way, evidence refutes), the real danger is the infrastructure in place that would allow some future leader to wreak havoc. A future leader just like Donald Trump. In fact, this was the exact scenario that Edward Snowden warned about when he first went public in 2013.

[Trevor Timm is the executive director of Freedom of the Press Foundation.]