Posted on 12/25/2013 2:43:26 PM PST by foxfield
Hi and Merry Christmas. I’m honored to have a chance to speak with you and your family this year. Recently we learned that our governments, working in concert, have created a system of worldwide system of mass surveillance watching everything we do. Great Britain’s George Orwell warned us of the danger of this kind of information.
The types of collection in the book -– microphones and video cameras, TVs that watch us –- are nothing compared to what we have available today. We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go. Think about what this means for the privacy of the average person.
A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought. And that’s a problem because privacy matters; privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.
The conversation occurring today will determine the amount of trust we can place both in the technology that surrounds us and the government that regulates it. Together we can find a better balance, end mass surveillance, and remind the government that if it really wants to know how we feel, asking is always cheaper than spying.
For everyone out there listening, thank you and Merry Christmas.
(Excerpt) Read more at mediaite.com ...
Really makes one take pause!
ping for later
I am torn.
I appreciate that it is wrong for the government to spy on us.
But I still think the guy is a traitor.
But, I still want to know what else he stole.
But I hate that he ran to China and Russia.
Those are my concerns.
Consider that powerful people want him hanged for treason. What would you do? If you decide to run, where could you go. It has to be somewhere without an extradition treaty, and powerful enough to stand up to pressure from the U.S. to turn you over. It’s not like Snowden had a lot of choices, once he started down this path.
U.S. Gov has stopped having legitimate authority over its people, by all rights, we’re indistinguishable from an oppressed nation at this point.
I find it a pity we still don’t shoot traitors.
Cant wish him well even at Christmas..
The argument of his detractors is that he could simply have gone to his superiors and they would have fixed the problem. Nonsense. Nothing would have happened and he would have been drummed out of his job.
The “whistle blower” statutes are never enforced and those who try inevitably lose their jobs or bankrupted.
The ones who defend this surveillance would feel a whole lot differently if the shoe was on the other foot; their foot. Our government is out of control. Period.
I am also still undecided, but consider this-
Snowden is not being blamed for anyone’s death yet, but our idiot in chief Joe Biden has been blamed by some for causing the deaths of 29 US Navy Seals (of Seal team Six) because of HIS release of classified information. But then again, ol joe probably knows all about the setup involved....
China and Russia were probably about the only countries the US wouldn’t dare to threaten militarily, risking heavy retaliation if it chose that path. More importantly, the governments of those countries aren’t malleable to foreign whim.
If you were Edward Snowden and your own government was after you for being a whistleblower, where would you go?
I don't consider him a traitor. Maybe if we weren't a communists controlled Federal Government things would be different. King Obama is a hard core communists black Muslim and I still do not believe that he had the legal right to Presidency. There have been many questionable killings against informers in America and he has the right to protect his life. As we find out more about the Government running our lives, it will be a thing of the past to be able to question without fear of our lives.
.......you beat me to that point! So far as “we” know, the information Snowden has disseminated has not killed anybody. Moreover, we know the primary information he divulged was “illegal U.S. government activity” regarding the recordation of everyone in America’s phone calls.
We further know that the top man in our government on this point (Clapper) knew what the government was doing and knew it was illegal and then lied about it to the representatives of the American people.
Finally, what he lied about was egregious!! There simply is no justification for recording every cell phone in the United States and that needs to stop. But for Snowden, we would all still be in the dark.
So, for now, based on what information we know “NOW”, Snowden is the good guy and our Marxist government is the bad guy. That could change. We will see.
Snowden IS a hero and those bastards who run NSA are traitors and violators of the Constitution.
IF he has some really good dirt on Obama, I sure wish he would reveal it.
Snowden: Godless , constitution-worshipping libertarian traitor.
The only thing good you can say about him is that he is a libertarian which a has a Dr Jeckyl/Mr Hyde aspect to it
( two sided coin). Typically their focus on constitutional issues reign supreme over family issues(drug use, pornography, gay issues/marriage, freedom of religion).
Sorry to bother you.
The fact that he's holed up in Russia somewhere should speak volumes to those who think this US government can be trusted by the American people. Our greatest enemy is ourselves.
The question is how do we beat ourselves?
How can this genie ever be put back in the bottle?
If Snowden is a traitor then Obama is a patriot. Simple.
If we shot traitors, there wouldn't have been a Democrat President or Governor since 1930, and Snowden would have never left the country.
Careful, E.S. “Pajama Boy”, on a black ops, just might offer you a steam cup of Russian cocoa, spiked with hemlock extract.
He was in a complex flight to avoid extradition. He figured out his route. To go to friendly states of the US or even some neutral states, with bilateral agreements, would have meant his detention by local authorities and then remanding to the US Embassy and then probably spirited out by a CIA or DIA team on the pronto, to spend 40 years of his life in Federal Prison being forceably buggered nightly by a big fat hairy New Jersey hitman mobster named “Gus”. Unfortunately that left him with little opportunities. He chose the areas where the USGov could not get to him easily. Hong Kong (which is still a free economic system even though under the political control of the PRC, as a separate system) and then off to Russia (which was probably initially just a transit spot for him). It is debatable about what he did, but the countries he went to kind of make logical sense if one is escaping extradition, and that was his immediate objective, i.e. keeping either alive, or keeping the cold metal off his own wrists. History will prove if he is hero or traitor I think. What happens if extremely damaging things come out for example on Obama’s birth certificate and covering up there, why that would make him an immediate hero if it resulted in the impeachment or resignation of the Poser. I think many of us are “torn” over this dude.
If Snowden and his followers are welcome here I’m not, nor would I want to be, Libertarians are actually a greater threat to the country than Liberals in my view as they have infiltrated the Conservative movement...
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