Didn’t know they knew the order he stole stuff in.
He took a huge amount of information, but only a very small fraction of it had anything to do with programs that violated Americans’ privacy. A lot of it dealt with spying on our adversaries, and war operations.
If Snowden had from the beginning intended only to reveal spying on Americans, he wouldn’t have had any need for those documents.
If he realized after the fact that he’d taken classified documents unrelated to his stated goal, he could have destroyed them, as did the activists who in 1971 revealed the FBI’s illegal domestic surveillance program COINTELPRO.
Good point.
Yep. The right screams about “bias” in reporters, teachers, and moviemakers. But people with guns and arrest powers? What could go wrong?
Once again, every accusation is a confession. Or maybe, a desire.
In the 1960s, the US Army fielded the Davy Crockett Nuclear Mortar system.
A battlefield nuke, it was deployed on a jeep or light truck.
Fire teams consisted of a Corporal (around 20), and three Privates (drafted teenagers).
Often, these units would be field-stationed on the border of East Germany, and not see a Commissioned Officer for weeks at a time.
The Army thought this was great.
Congress disagreed, & no more Crocketts.
It’s a miracle we didn’t get WW3.
I think it’s probably so much easier now to share classified documents. Just copy-paste into a discord server. In the past, someone might have had a momentary impulse to share something, but the logistics of doing it would slow them down enough to re-think. Not that that’s an excuse for this guy, but it the system is more vulnerable to human frailty than it used to be, maybe.
Actually, maybe it is not as easy as just copy-pasting, You’d hope not.