Glenn Greenwald :

That's the mindset of the U.S. Government: everything it does of any significance can and should be shielded from public view; anyone who shines light on what it does is an Enemy who must be destroyed; but nothing you do should be beyond its monitoring and storing eyes. And what's most remarkable about this -- though, given the full-scale bipartisan consensus over it, not surprising -- is how eagerly submissive much of the citizenry is to this imbalance. Many Americans plead with their Government in unison: we demand that you know everything about us but that you keep us ignorant about what you do and punish those who reveal it to us. Often, this kind of oppressive Surveillance State has to be forcibly imposed on a resistant citizenry, but much of the frightened American citizenry -- led by most transparency-hating media figures -- has been trained with an endless stream of fear-mongering to demand that they be subjected to more and more of it.

Update (a coda from same piece) :

Joe Biden not only voted for the Iraq War, but was Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in 2002 as the Senate authorized that attack, one which resulted in the deaths of well over 100,000 innocent human beings and which was launched under the strategic banner of "Shock and Awe," designed explicitly to terrorize Iraqis out of resisting through the use of a massive display of urban devastation. Julian Assange has never authorized any violence, never killed anyone, never advocated killing anyone, and never threatened anyone's death. Yet the former can accuse the latter of being close to a "high-tech terrorist" without many people batting an eye -- illustrating, yet again, what a meaningless and manipulated term "Terrorism" is; to the extent it means anything, its definition is this: "those who impede or defy American will with any degree of efficacy."