…except for the paucity of meaningful documentation (of course, if one cannot measure the cold mailed fist of impending government repression, it must mean that it is enormously and subtly effective, or something like that :dubious:).
And I suspect the major reason more people are not active in the Unitarian Church is a low threshold of boredom, not fear of the Government storming in to haul the coffee klatchers off to FEMA camps.
According to Wyden the rest of Congress did not know how these rules were being used, and rightly or wrongly, intelligence committee members felt they could not go public. And we already know the NSA lied to Congress at times, which creates a different oversight problem. The administration has since acknowledged that the FISA court system might need to be reformed so the courts don’t acquiesce to the agency so easily - and again, the NSA wasn’t always forthright with the courts and did not always follow instructions. There were supposed to be checks and balances in theory, but the system did not function the way it was supposed to.
The guy was undercover and did receive pay for his work (“expenses” and we all know what that can mean!) He seemed quite proud of his work, and i don’t disapprove after all anyone he informs on isn’t going to be shot or hauled off the prison in the UK without more evidence. But it is similar to east german informers in that he gains money and “brownie points”.
He was probably thinking of the Pentagon not offering assistance which isn’t remotely the same thing.
He must really hate the French over their reaction to the Kubrick movie Paths to Glory.
Which no one here said it was a perfect system. Entirely different from saying Snowden was justified in not trying to go public in a more respectable way like Ellsberg did. It also says nothing of the fact that Snowden, if he was truly doing this for the American people could have dumped 100% of his files into the public domain. Instead he’s shared it only with foreign intelligence agencies, a select number of journalists, and essentially has dribbled it out over time for maximum attention for himself. He’s doing this for himself to advance his own interests, very much unlike Ellsberg that wanted to expose a concerted deception being perpetrated on the American people and did so by giving the full amount of information needed to do so immediately to Congress, once it became obvious going through the chain wouldn’t work.
Snowden and Manning never tried to go through the chain, then went public through essentially charlatans and profiteers.
The system isn’t working. That means your comments about oversight and the proper process are basically irrelevant. If the system were working properly, there would be solid oversight and sufficient openness and there probably wouldn’t be a Snowden.
Ellsberg seems to think Snowden did the right thing.
There is no evidence he’s shared anything with any intelligence agency.
He’s not dribbling out anything. He gave his materials to journalists long ago and they are slowly going over it because that’s how reporting works.
You realize this doesn’t matter at all, right? It’s irrelevant.
Snowden went through reputable news outlets and reporters who have extensive experience in the relevant fields. What charlatans and profiteers are you talking about?
Snowden wasn’t doing foreign intelligence agencies any favours. In fact, his revelations proved that some of those agencies were in cahoots with the American bad guys and did actively assist them in their devious shenanigans. NOTE that not all governments made strong protest to what was revealed. NOTE CLOSER that those who didn’t were usually the guilty parties. My own government as case in point.
Wikileaks is neither a charlatan nor a profiteer.
If you are convinced that SOMEONE in the church congregation is stealing you can take it up with the priest whose life is dedicated to honesty, but in the Manning-Snowden instances the chain of command were the bad guys themselves.
Is Senator Wyden, in your consideration, a “bad guy”? Because I’m really not seeing what stopped Snowden from going the Ellsburg route and getting Wyden to introduce the documents into the Congressional Record.
Is Senator Wyden a “good guy” by your own personal account? And is your conviction of his “good guy-ness” in retrospect or aforehand knowledge?
In the end I guess it doesn’t really matter. Given the choice … you must chose one and Snowden took the path of less risk. If there are any disadvantages (by his choice) to the goal of getting the info out, then I don’t see it.
Has anyone clicked onto the significance of Snow(den) on Christmas?
Senator Wyden is, well, a senator, and by dint thereof is privileged from arrest for anything he says or does in official conduct of his office. It is therefore my understanding that it would not have been illegal for him to enter into the Congressional Record any or all of the documents in Snowden’s possession, had Snowden chosen to trust them to him rather than to a foreign for-profit corporation.
One advantage is that he wouldn’t be hiding out in Russia right now. Although I hear Moscow at Christmas is very charming.
I don’t follow. How would other options of getting out the message avoid him being stuck in Moscow? Spending Christmas in Moscow must be better than being banged up in Leavenworth or Guantanamo (warmer temperatures not-withstanding).
I think Wyden has the right idea on these issues but there’s no reason to think he would have done this. He spent a couple of years complaining the NSA was not being honest about its activities but never took this step even when he felt he was being lied to. Otherwise it would have been a very good solution.
So if what you say is true, Snowden would have known this too. I think he took his best option and he knew it.
The claim that the government is only collecting metadata is absurd on its face. This is a matter of simple arithmetic:
The metadata for one phone call, as admitted by the government:
[ul]
[li]Calling Number: We’ll be overgenerous by at least a factor of two and assume one byte per digit (obviously, binary-coded-decimal will hold two digits per byte) and allow 16 bytes per number.[/li][li]Called Number: 16 more bytes (see above)[/li][li]Call Start Time: Using the same absurdly inefficient one-byte-per-digit coding, that’s four for the year, two for the month (inefficient by a fact of four, as a half-byte will clearly do), and two more each for hour, minute, and second, for a total of 10 bytes.[/li][li]Call End Time: 10 more bytes (see above)[/li][/ul]
This gives us a total of 52 bytes per call, which we’ll round up to 64 just to be sure.
Assuming that everyone, including infants, deaf-mutes, and Fourth World subsistence farmers, makes an average of 10 phone calls per day, this gives us 7.110^910365.2564 = 1.7*10^15 bytes of call metadata per year. That will fill 1100 1.5 terabyte (marketing definition of 10^12 bytes) drives, which will cost less that $100K on the retail market even without a bulk discount. (Actually, it will cost less than half that, since you can’t print your own money and will therefore insist on fixing the above-referenced gross inefficiencies).
Obviously, the NSA’s actual storage demands indicate capture of content, not metadata.
As noted in my previous message, the claim that only “metadata” is collected is simply not credible. Anyone who believes it is to arithmetic what Sarah Palin is to rhetoric.
Au contraire, Supreme Court precedent clearly indicates that adding technology can convert a constitutionally permitted activity (a cop looking at your house) into a constitutionally prohibited activity (a cop looking at your house through an IR scanner).
We know from previous NSA whistleblowers that that approach has been tried and has failed:
Ergo, by your own argument the proper and logical thing for Snowden to do was bypass the levels of oversight that had failed, just as Ellsberg did. And, since you’re citing Ellsberg as a guide, you might want to read his view of the matter. (Well, actually you probably don’t want to, since it shoots down your argument, but you should anyway.)
That’s precisely what he did. Glenn Greenwald has the full data dump, and is quite sensibly parceling it out bit by bit in order to 1)verify that there isn’t any legitimately secret material in the latest disclosure, 2)give the government a fair opportunity to come clean (instead of telling more lies and being exposed by the next revelation), and 3)maintain the pressure for reform. No doubt that last one sticks in the craw of those who want the discussion confined to quiet rooms, but too damn bad.
For the reasons noted above, this would be both less responsible and less effective than Snowden’s actual strategy.