So I get a warning but the poster who insulted me with a lie, because it is in fact a lie, is not even mentioned?
“Why do you hate America?” is now the standard argument for anyone who disagrees with what the government is doing?
This is ridiculous. I think I’ll take a break.
That was the NYT. This is the USA Today article.
Ugh… I had to link to USAToday… 
Is it the position of the vilifiers of Snowden on this board that the American public had no business knowing the extent to which their government had been spying on them? Even if such surveillance, as one federal judge has opined, “appears to violate the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches and seizures”. Would they really have wished to remain unaware of such gross invasions of the privacy of US citizens? Of their privacy? If so then by all means excoriate Edward Snowden. If the answer however to any of these questions is no then you should be thanking the guy.
I can only speak for myself, but this just shows that had Snowdon tried to work through normal channels (which he NEVER tried to do for even a second), that he had a good chance of succeeding. There are other ways of bringing wrong-dong to light besides doing a data dump of classified information and then fleeing to Russia.
Thanks, John. Your sacrifice will not be forgotten.
I don’t think one has to believe in a particularly repressive society to think Snowden was taking serious risks with his life in doing what he did. Does the government employ people who are willing to kill? Yes. Does the government employ people who are corrupt? Yes. Is there a possibility that someone at the middle of that Venn diagram might be working at the NSA and not be happy about someone planning to blowing the whistle on their illegal spying operation? I don’t think it’s likely, but it’s not so unlikely I’d be willing to risk my life on it.
Likewise, I don’t have to believe that Snowden is going to be dragged off to some medieval dungeon to be broken on the rack, to recognize that American prison are often hellholes, and it wouldn’t take much for a guard to decide to “teach the traitor a lesson” and look the other way while I’m gangraped in the prison shower, followed by locking me away in solitary for ten years “for my own protection.”
As for going through legal channels, I’m not entirely sure what you’re suggested. Should he have not stolen the stuff, and just kept bothering people higher and higher in his org chart until he found someone who gave a shit? Because at a certain point, people are going to realize that you’re making a fuss, and remove your access to the evidence of lawbreaking. Or are you saying he should have stolen it, and taken it straight to a judge? Would that work? If Snowden shows up in a courtroom and says, “I have evidence that the government is breaking the law, and here’s the proof,” the first thing the government is going to do is say, “Due to national security concerns, that evidence is top secret, and cannot be revealed in court.” If the judge listens to them, your evidence disappears down a black hole, and you’re still up on espionage charges. And I’m not even entirely certain a judge can refuse to listen to them. Is there a clear cut legal answer to that? What’s the precedent?
The government didn’t torture Manning. He was mentally ill and suicidal - they were protecting him from himself, for his own good.
And i’d say our attitudes as a society towards lynching have changes a bit in the last 95 years.
The US in 2013 is not a banana republic where people can be tortured or executed for speaking out and the only way to oppose the system is by fleeing the country. We have functioning courts and a functioning rule of law, and behavior like Snowden’s serves only to undermine the public good, not safeguard it.
Yes. It is not the role of a private citizen to decide what should or shouldn’t be classified.
That says nothing good about you. The normal channels would require that he go via a known felon, who committed felonies specifically to subvert the oversight that was supposed to stop the NSA from doing bullshit like this.
Who is this felon you are referring to? Private Manning isn’t in the reporting chain of command.
Bullshit. The army’s treatment of Manning was deliberately cruel and done against the advice of his psychologist.
You asked, “When in the past have Americans cheered for someone to be murdered in prison without a trial?” There’s your answer, and it didn’t stop in 1919. It’s something Americans were still doing within living memory.
Yeah, and I’d like to keep it that way. One way of preventing that is by not having an arm of the government devoted to spying on its own citizens - which is one of the classic hallmarks of a banana republic. Thanks to Snowden, we’re a step further away from that than we were a few years ago.
I see nothing in that article that’s cruel.
How many American casualties due to terrorist strikes we didn’t learn about in time is worth it for the sake of knowing that your emails aren’t being archived in a government file where nobody will ever read them anyway?
How many times can the government justify breaking the law by shouting “Terrorists!” at us before it stops working?
The government hasn’t been breaking the law.
:rolleyes: The head of the NSA lied to congress to conceal his agency’s actions. Doing so is a felony under US law.
No, he doesn’t say the government is breaking the law. He says that the law which allows them to run the program may be unconstitutional. It’s not illegal to execute a law which is subsequently found to be unconstitutional - Lawrence v. Kansas didn’t mean that every prosecutor who had previously charged someone with sodomy was now a criminal.
In any event, the judge immediately suspended his own order pending relitigation before a higher court, which may take a different interpretation or rule that the law is fully constitutional anyway.
It would also have been a felony under US law for him to reveal classified information on live television. You really ought to be blaming the Congressman for ordering him to answer a question he legally couldn’t.
Nor is one man (who hasn’t been prosecuted either) synonymous with “the government”.