I respect you for taking and defending your position, but this is the height of disingenuousness. Do you really think he incurred no huge personal cost? Living away from his home, among strangers, followed and monitored everywhere, always at risk whether real or perceived? Exiled from his previous life, vilified by his countrymen, and with no prospect of a road home?
Or, as you suggest, maybe he should spend the next 60 years in a supermax following the verdict of his peers?
Let’s take these one at a time, shall we?
This is, meaningfully, untrue. The agendas of the people managing the government are directly responsible for the actions of government. This should not be difficult to believe. If government violates the Constitution, is it somehow doing that in a way that is NOT due to the actions of those managing the government? If you believe that, I’m afraid I disagree with you.
Government is the people who are elected - in less and less free elections - and who control the levers of state. That does not get people off the hook, however. “Just following orders” isn’t a viable defense. If one finds government breaking the law, does one have a duty to report it in clear? I believe so.
This is certainly true, but it is not the case that this has occurred. Are you arguing that government should operate outside the scope of its purview because it believes it has a right to do so? If so, where does that stop? The constitution is there, largely, to set controls on government. Should that be ended and government allowed to do as it pleases?
And finally, ah, yes. The old chestnut of ‘If you’re not a bad guy you have nothing to fear’. It’s a fallacy, of course. When government violates a right - civil or otherwise - it becomes easier for it to violate other rights. If government can disregard the fourth amendment - that controlling unreasonable search and seizure - what is to later prevent it from violating the second amendment and seizing guns? Or the first and preventing you from speaking out against it?
Yes. He gets to live rent-free, all expenses paid, as the honored guest of a state that ensures his wellbeing because of how usefulness to them, and gets to be feted and treated like a celebrity by people who are mad at George W. Bush.
Why?
I don’t consider archiving metadata to be “unreasonable”, especially since the NSA is actually gathering less information about you than you’re voluntarily giving to Google and Facebook.
I don’t consider seizing guns to be a violation of the Second, either.
Great paragraph, and I find myself nodding in agreement. In Snowden’s case, it’s a ultimately a question of whether or not outing the government’s wrongs are/were worth the price he’s paying. He seems to believe that it is.
It’s also worth pointing out that James Clapper pretty clearly committed perjury before Congress when he was asked by Sen Ron Wyden of Oregn an explicit yes/no question about whether the government was essentially snooping on citizens and responded in the negative. Why is it legal for Clapper to commit perjury but not legal for Snowden to share secrets that expose both the abuses of civil liberties and subsequent perjury?
Yes, but in the case of Facebook and Google, we are essentially consenting to provide information about our activity in exchange for free use of their product. And even then, people are pushing back and urging the government for regulation of data collection when they believe that their fundamental ‘agreement’ has been violated. Thus, one problem with the bulk data collection is that the government is collecting data about our private communication without our consent.
Another problem with the program was the lack of oversight, and the reason for this lack of oversight had everything to do with the program’s secrecy. The data collection procedures were apparently so secret that even the people responsible for its oversight were not truly aware of what the agencies were collecting, for what purpose, and how it was being used.
One of Snowden’s chief concerns and motives for is defiance of the government is the fact that the government is increasingly operating in secrecy whereas it simultaneously has access to limitless streams of data about individual citizens. It fundamentally represents an imbalance in power between the state and the citizen, and I find it hard to disagree with him. In one of his interviews before the 2016, he presciently cautioned that we tend to trust the government’s data collection practices because we trust the right people to carry them out, but what if this power falls into the wrong hands? That’s especially important to consider now when you have a government that is increasingly willing to weaponize its bureaucracies against political opposition, is it not?
Clapper had an obligation to keep classified information confidential that trumped his obligation to answer the question in any way other than in negative.
Snowden decided on his own that he was above the law and knew better than anyone else what should or shouldn’t be classified.
Noone’s civil liberties were violated by the existence of the program.
If you consent to provide this information to corporations, then you have no reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to the government acquiring it.
And this is a good thing. If no one person knows the scope of the data being collected, then its potential to be misused is mitigated.
It’s not his decision to make as to whether the government has “too much power”, and he’s wrong in believing that it does. The state should have more power than the citizen.
Donald Trump isn’t going to be president forever, and we’re still going to need to be able to hunt down pedophiles, drug dealers, slave traders, and terrorists after he’s gone. If anything, we’ll need those abilities even more when the time comes for a proper de-Republicanization of our body politic.
I haven’t seen him in the news, where are you getting this info about his all expenses paid celebrity lifestyle?
No, he emphatically did not. His whole process was to send information to select newspapers and let *them *decide whether or not they should publish it, whether or not this was a national discussion worth having, how much of the information to reveal and so on.
He could have dumped the lot on WikiLeaks if his motives were those you ascribe to him. He did not.
Because I’m a government employee who doesn’t like you. Or has been assured you’re hiding something. Or just feels it in my bones. So every morning, every noon and every evening I’m going to detain you for a 30 minute search of your person. I will also regularly toss your entire home searching for evidence while you’re at work.
Surely you have nothing to fear, no right to complain and don’t see any problem whatsoever with this state of affairs ?
He is living as a guest of the Russian government and getting paid to give talks to people who are still mad at George W. Bush.
Some people would commit treason to have a lifestyle like that.
He was already earning six figures and living in Hawaii, dude.
It wasn’t his place to decide whether newspapers should make that decision. He decided that he was above the law and he knew better than anyone else what information the press ought to have.
You’re going to get bored pretty quickly and your boss is going to have your ass on a platter about you wasting so much time on a middle-aged loner with nothing interesting or noteworthy about him.
Also, remind me exactly who’s being detained for 90 minutes every day by the programs Snowden compromised?
Hell, I get paid by the hour.
But he had to work back then. Clearly he felt he’d be better off as a living piece of Agitprop.
Got paid. In 2015.
Or maybe you are being completely silly. I’m not saying you should like the guy but trying to say he did what he did for a personal lifestyle bump makes you look rather irrational on the subject.
Or he thought the world would be better off at his considerable expense.
If that was what he wanted, he’d be in prison right now.
Or was putting his money where his mouth was too expensive for the “benefit” the world would gain from destabilizing America’s national security?
The point was here.
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This is what I mean by sounding irrational. What he wanted was to get the information out, not be Smapti’s perfect example of a martyr.
That was not what he was after, either.