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Posted on 06/13/2013 8:02:49 AM PDT by National Review
There’s a difference between civil disobedience and mere lawbreaking.
By Daniel Foster
It is a testament both to the complexity of the political and legal questions surrounding the NSA’s PRISM program, and to the mixture of intellectual honesty and political opportunism characterizing those debating them, that one cannot accurately extrapolate from a person’s views on the program his views on Edward Snowden, the low-level government contractor who exposed it.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
Snowden has caught our attention and caused us to consider where we are now. The government now has a general warrant, That much is sure.
Maybe not but he did show us the massively expensive, ineffective, near total surveillance state we live in that is anything but secure.
MLK??
Seriously? Who thinks up this kind of drivel?
Apparently Dan Foster.
The real MLK was not MLK we imagine either.
‘We shall over-come’
I hope Snowden likes Chinese food.
Good writing, good questions, but I am not at all pleased with the reasoning used or the answers he finds.
The NSA was using powers granted it by Congress, under the watch of the courts, for the purpose of protecting America. This program may be unwise, it may be dangerous, it may be immoral, and it may yet be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. But does the information Snowden had at hand, and disclosed to the press, make that case obviously and overwhelmingly? Is the injustice of the monitoring program so gross that it morally compelled Snowden to break his oaths, and the law, to reveal it?
I find the program with its apparent general warrant to be obviously a violation of the letter and the spirit of the Fourth Amendment, and that the violation is an overwhelmingly shocking and flagrant intrusion on our privacy. We don't need a lawyer to parse words in the Constitution and in previous rulings to know that this was an unreasonable search and that a general warrant by its nature cannot be supported by probable cause.
How did Snowden ever get access to that info, is the real question that should be investigated.
He himself pointed out that plenty of no-nothings like him are given the same access.
Information protected at one of the highest levels of classification, TOP SECRET/SI/ORCON/NOFORN, and a "low-level" employee had access to it. Right.
Information, by its very classification which, if divulged, could cause exceptionally grave damage to the United States (their definition, BTW).
He was either NOT a low-level employee and mistrusted with information of an exceptionally grave nature, OR he was more than that, period. So much so that the classification, and trust, went a level beyond Top Secret to Compartmentalized where even those without a NEED TO KNOW in government with a Top Secret Clearance could not access it.
Given a working a knowledge of information and government classification, one would be correct in assuming something is very amiss here. This isn't about information about some towel heads in a desert in Qatar, or in Afghanistan, or even Saudi Arabia or Arabian Europe. It is precisely about Americans and their communications. It is about government overstepping, overreach and oppression, and in that, the information was purposefully misclassified to hide it from free scrutiny.
People crushed by laws, have no hope but to evade power. If the laws are their enemies, they will be
enemies to the law; and those who have most to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous."
-- Edmund Burke
So that we don't focus on the Amnesty bill they are trying to pass behind our backs.
Snowden also to hide that OBama ordered the IRS to rig the election for OBama and the democrats/socialists in the Senate.
>> He was either NOT a low-level employee and mistrusted with information of an exceptionally grave nature, OR he was more than that, period <<
No, you forgot the third possibility, which is that he’s lying about at least some aspects of the matter.
The powers that be sure do hate Snowden.
I’d like to hear more from him. He needs to make more youtube videos or do a talk show. :)
MLK was a real man.
Snowden is an invention. A device for distraction. A shiny object if you will.
That is fine and good to look into this man and we should. Though, you take what Snowden has done. Leaking out about the Prism program and showing the citizenry how the government took away our rights to make a/all decision (s) to be able to shred the 4th Amendment; you have to see that some citizens are going to be very concerned. No accountability, no outrage from Washington; like the IRS.
In the dynamics between taking away our privacy rights to Snowden revealing this was being done, to me, he’s a good guy on the side of liberty. Maybe hero of liberty was what some were saying. The things he has leaked to date should never ben secret in the first place. MLK never came to my thinking. It was more as though a person made a personal decision to do something very dangerous by leaking how this intrusion of our government is in policy now.
Whether people like Snowden, you cannot tell me that this government does not have a pattern of punishing certain groups of Americans. That is unbelievable. That is not from American values and some want to say Snowden is the problem.
This government has done so much damage to our constitution and our constitutional rights. If the politicians would just obey the constitution, they would see what it tells them what to do even in the modern world of super tech.
It has to be humiliating for some to see their government, their country being embarrassed for freedom being squashed but that is happening because of the current person in leadership and from a adorning media and a weak opposing party which is so old and outdated (because they left their platform in other words) Now, we are here. It’s a miracle there are not 50 Snowdens coming out. We want to be safe though the people in the top must have integrity that we can trust. I am sorry, I just do not trust this government where there is no oversight.
It doesn’t explain the file, with markings, he gave to the Guardian. I’m just trying to say if that he was an IT, he was entrusted across multiple compartments most likely. This isn’t a low-level employee. He only release, from what we’ve seen, just one.
I agree. This government is not our friend.
“...The real MLK was not MLK we imagine either....”
...was not what we were indoctrinated into believing, either.
There. Fixed it.
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