How are republicans dealing with Snowden as the source of surveillance reforms - is it still a straight liberal conservative hero/traitor situation?
Given Obama pretty well embraced bulk collection in his first term, are people across the political spectrum acknowledging Snowden has made a greater contribution than any non-elected citizen?
Can anyone who loves their country not be grateful to him?
You overestimate the memory span of the public by supposing that 1) we still remember that snow guy or 2) that we make any connection between today’s political viewpoints and yesterday’s political viewpoints.
I hate being overly negative about it, but that’s really the truth. Cognitive disso… Squirrel!
(As for me personally and not the zeitgeist in general: I still think he committed treason and should be punished for it. I’m not so bothered by the data collection methods being used, or other Snowden revelations. If he highlighted any problems, it’s that there may be a disconnect between Congressional oversight and intelligence agency operations. If such a disconnect in oversight exists, I would like that fixed. That way Congress can stop - or not - activities like data collection that are perceived as over-reaching.)
I think overall the view of him is pretty polarized. I don’t think it is a straight liberal/conservative thing. I’m a rock-solid Dem and I hope he spends the rest of his life in prison.
Contribution? No. A greater “impact” than any non-elected person? Sure, that’s a fair assessment.
See my first paragraph.
It’s generally understood (with gratitude or with regret, depending on whether or not shaking up the status quo made things easier or harder for your position) that Snowden pushed the issue onto the political stage.
Beyond that, the message has outgrown the messenger. He’s not particularly relevant to ongoing events (e.g. reforms to dial back some of the government’s power grabs, steps to properly secure the telecom networks, etc) except as a distant Jeffersonian icon or an Emmanuel-Goldsteinesque boogeyman invoked for rhetorical purposes.
I don’t mean this in a provocative way but, with the passing of this Republican legislation, it is a matter of fact his actions have rolled back the tide of state interference in the personal lives of citizens. Do you not support that?
He has always been a hero because he put his own welfare on the line to expose criminal behavior by his government. I don’t know what role partisanship plays in it. I recall Biden talking about wanting him prosecuted, and Ron Paul filibustering the civil rights abuses he helped expose.
“Tide of state interference in the personal lives of citizens?” I’m not trying to be personal, but the way you phrase this, I’m not sure you understand the issues at all.
The main reform getting the most attention is the change to the telephone metadata collection program. Under the old law, the Government would obtain lots of metadata about phone calls in the U.S. With a court order, the Government would query the data, held on Government servers, to find connections between various phone numbers.
Under the new law, the Government no longer holds all that data. But then with a court order, the Government directs the phone companies to produce the exact same data from the same queries for the same purposes.
What, in your view, constitutes the “tide of state interference in the personal lives of citizens” that has been corrected? That your phone metadata now sits on a phone company’s computer, even though the Government will have pretty much the exact same access to the data for foreign intelligence purposes?
That gets to the trust issue that lies at the heart of the matter. We are solemnly told, double-pinky-swear, that the government only accesses this data for specific legitimate causes… but after the Snowden revelations a lot of us don’t believe it. It becomes somewhat easier to believe if the government has to bring some outside entity into the loop. (To be sure, there is a long sordid record of government and corporate bureaucracies cooperating in joint corruption like a pair of Siamese twin octopi engaging in an unnatural act. As I said, “somewhat”.)
I’m with Ravenman on the part that the attitude towards Snowden was never broken down by liberal/conservative lines.
For myself I’m largely undecided about Snowden. On the one hand he did uncover a government program that I am largely against. On the other hand he probably did it illegally.
He’ll be remembered for inventing Wikileaks.
Quoted for truth. I do not believe in conspiracy theories. However, I think in this case, these powers are too vast and too useful for the intelligence agencies to simply forget about. So it’s illegal for the NSA to collect this info. Okay, but what if this information goes from the companies to say Canada and then Canada voluntarily sends it back to the NSA? Is this not the purpose of the Five Eyes? We’re not allowed to spy on our own citizens but we can’t really (as in don’t want to) stop our allies from doing it…
In any case, if there’s a rule there’s a way around the rule. Is the NSA bound by law to stop doing things the same way? Sure but that doesn’t mean they haven’t found a way of doing it differently.
I’m Canadian so the intricacies of Snowden’s fate are meaningless to me. However, I wonder how many people would just rather not have known the things he revealed. This seems like a case where ignorance is not bliss.
Since we’re giving our own opinions: The only reason to throw Snowden in jail is to prevent more whistleblowing, and the only reason to do that is so you can do more bad stuff behind the scenes. It’s really that simple.
There’s no danger of someone leaking data if there isn’t some horrible stuff going on that people don’t know about. And the data was leaked to the public, not to some third party that could use it to harm us. They know that the data is known, meaning they can mitigate any bad effects.
I mean, we have an FBI that wants the ability to have a back door into our encryption, no matter the fact that a back door inherently means poorer encryption that will be compromised. We had Obama actually trying to keep the Patriot Act active. And we have all the secrecy of the TPP and the fast pass. We have a government we can’t trust. Rather than try to become more trustworthy, they’re trying to strong arm their way.
In fact, I think Wikileaks is why we know about the TPP. And why we are attempting proper encryption without back doors. And is why there was any problem passing the Patriot Act–even if the U.S. Freedom Act is only marginally better.
More important than the question of if it is illegal is should it be illegal. He and his boss were both illegally going around the official chain of oversight, but his boss was doing it to hide the fact that the NSA was violating the rights of the American people, while Snowden did it to stop the NSA violating the rights of the American people. Just because criminals like those that dominate the NSA and CIA have been given the power to make it illegal to go public about their crimes does not mean it is immoral to do so.
To be honest he’s not a political issue, I’d say that only a small number of people are embracing Snowden as a “cause” and there is no significant political interest in him. No interest in seeing him offered amnesty.
No, I don’t think anyone would acknowledge that because frankly it isn’t true. Snowden has made minimal contributions, and most of what he has done has just given countries like Germany carte blanche to bitch about the United States (even though they themselves were part of this data collection program and knew it was going on the entire time.)
I can. The text of the legislation that allowed for this program, everything we knew about FISA courts and simple common sense had already revealed everything Snowden leaked. Snowden broke the law because he’s a weird asperger’s type who wanted attention. I have a lot more respect for guys who go through proper channels and actually expose themselves to risk, like Daniel Ellsberg did.
Oh come on. He’s obviously the bastard son of some northern Lord!
Ug, not this again. Please look up the case law on treason and come back with any that you find that are even remotely similar to this.
Who?
Right. Like revealing the NSA was violating the constitution on an industrial scale. Or maybe that the NSA was spying on the phone conversations of the leaders of the US’s friends and allies. Or how about revealing PRISM, the arrangement between the NSA and Facebook, Google, Yahoo, etc? Or that the NSA’s own internal auditors repeatedly confirmed the NSA was systematically breaking the law thousands of time a year - essentially making criminals out of entire tiers of NSA mangers and decision-makers?
Hey, what’s a constitution, an enormous criminal conspiracy within a state agency and the privacy of the US people. It’s all “minimal”. Nothing to see here #the nightly news
Had Snowden gone through “proper” channels, the info would have been buried and Snowden would have gone to jail, without opportunity to divulge any more. You’re bitching about him not doing it the manly way, but the way you’re thinking of would have failed. By the way, Ellsberg himself will tell you the same thing.
Then why should I care if the police come do a warrantless search through my house every day? Because, after all, if they got a warrant they could get the same info. Same thing, right?
What makes Ellsberg an expert on how the government is functioning today?
But that isn’t what is happening, which makes me believe that some people either don’t understand the issues at stake, or are just exaggerating for dramatic effect. You’re comparing a warantless search to one with a warrant; when the issue here mostly breaks down to whether NSA needs a warrant to search data that was collected by the telcos and turned over to the NSA subject to a FISC order; or whether it is a huge advance for freedom for the NSA to get a warrant to search the data that is in the hands of the telcos.
I respect that people have different opinions than me. SteveMB for example is very well informed on this issue, and we disagree on a lot. But the logic of why the NSA doing (hypothetically) just as many searches of data held by the telcos is so much better than NSA doing the same number of searches of the same data, only it is in NSA’s hands? I guess I don’t understand why the former is so much better than the latter so long as the NSA is actually following the law in both cases (as opposed to SteveMB’s suspicion that NSA is often breaking the law).