Posted on 05/10/2014 7:09:22 AM PDT by nuconvert
Those who know the files he stole think he was working for a foreign power, perhaps Russia, where he now lives.
-excerpt-
The vast majority of those [stolen documents] were related to our military capabilities, operations, tactics, techniques and procedures.
...the media and Mr. Snowden's admirers have only his word as to what went on. His detractors are the people who know enough about what happened to conclude that far from being a whistleblower, Mr. Snowden was a participant in an espionage operation...
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
IIRC his job was as some sort of IT person. That kind of access is more than enough to get what he did.
This is simply NSA supporters trying to smear Snowden.
Oh my, you’re ruining the game of sound and fury signifying nothing. Must you be so practical all the time? How can CIA, NSA, etc. run their disinformation campaigns and spew outlandish faux data if you keep steering the discussions back to rational data points?
Google does that with just one query.
Tsk tsk, you’re not supposed to speak of false flags operations here. Those do not happen, even though such crap as fast and furious shows the fedzilla will do anything to anyone for any reason they want, with no real consequences to fedzilla.
Do these “reporters” need to keep asking questions in their headlines? Or should they just go and do their damned jobs and answer them.
On a related note the Snowden incident shows just how out of control the NSA really is. Stealing confidential data willy nilly while letting the barn door wide open should be enough conviction to shut them down permanently. Who cares what Snowden “did” or “didn’t do”. What’s more important is that working for the NSA is a dream job...if you want everyone else to know what the NSA knows about everyone.
Without the Snowden revelations where might we have been regarding personal freedoms here in the USA? Just asking.
“Do these “reporters” need to keep asking questions in their headlines? “
It’s called an editorial
Speaking to your point #1...
“1) Why did such a low level and relatively new employee have unfettered access to such a vast amount of highly classified and sensitive information”
It’s my understanding that Snowden’s role was that of IT and we might assume he regularly worked with others to resolve the everyday issues associated with computers and networks. He would only need to target the most clueless or gullible person, gain their password and access. It might be as easy as looking over their shoulder after performing some repair on their computer: “I need you to login to see if this patch took.” Response: “Ok, sure”
Ivan.
Russian bombers off the coast.
Our GPS systems went down, some aircraft reported that their GPS stayed down for the entire duration of four hour flights from LAX
Russia has it's own system - GLONASS - which, oddly enough, went down on April 9th...
yeah no kidding
I am not buying any “news” papers on line
Most definitely.
It is laughable for the open borders WSJ to suggest such he did this for a foreign power.
By many orders of magnitude the greatest threat our Republic faces is the evil left and the evil RINOs.
The Federal government is accelerating it's power grab. Every bureaucracy is geometrically expanding it's power and intimidating the people.
If Russia and China's ally is Obama. He is taking aggressive steps to make it very, very, very difficult for Liberty and free enterprise to once again prosper in this Republic.
Think about the ultra-left Marxist bureaucrats that will remain once this fraud is gone? Would a Jeb, Christie or Romney seek to root them out? Not a chance.
Without any doubt, the evil left is our mortal enemy.
If you recall, Putin stated Snowden did not tell them anything they did not know.
It’s funny how many people are split on Snowden—about half seem to consider him a hero, the other half a traitor.
I’m old school—you don’t divulge classified information, ever. If Snowden is ever given a pardon, it will open the flood gates to whole bunch of people who will emulate him. They will look at disclosing classified as a way to instantly become a “rock star”.
Wrong conversation, as usual. I want to know what is being done to dismantle the domestic spying program. Has anyone been held accountable? Snowden and his role is irrelevant at this point, especially considering little to nothing has been done to tear this program down.
Bump
Agree
“If you recall, Putin stated Snowden did not tell them anything they did not know.”
Hahaha
Those questions have been answered completely. A visit to wikipedia will get you started if you want to do a little research. I am not saying wikipedia is a definitive authority, but the footnotes and reference links can get you started.
Here is what most people don't realize: Snowden's job at Booz Allen (the contractor for the NSA) was to make a back up of the entire NSA database to be stored in Hawaii in the event of a catastrophic hardware failure on the mainland.
Snowden created a backup system for the NSA that was implemented, and often pointed out security bugs to the agency. The former colleague said Snowden was "given full administrator privileges, with virtually unlimited access to NSA data" because he could "do things nobody else could." Snowden had been offered a position on the NSA's elite staff of hackers, Tailored Access Operations (TAO), but turned it down for the contractor position at Booz Allen.They knew he was making the backup -- they hired him to do it. He had tried to show them that there were bugs in their system, and he (in Geneva w/ the CIA) tried to protest the practices of gathering and storing information of ordinary people.
So he took the Booz Allen contract in Hawaii (for less money) and made the back up as per the contract. What they didn't know was that he was making a copy for himself.
There is so much more to the story if you just decide to spend some time on it. I don't have an opinion about the rightness or wrongness of what he did: I could argue either way. But for better or worse, Edward Snowden changed the world.
It is a fascinating story, and we haven't heard the half of it yet.
Welcome to government, where "servants" are presumed by outsiders to have secret knowledge and super powers. The reality is an inefficient world of very ordinary bureaucratic functionaries who neither see nor care about much that is outside their own sphere or cone of responsibility or function. Part of the appeal of its mundane nature is access to supposedly "secret" information that mere "civilians" (Citizens and Taxpayers) are not allowed to know -- for their own good, of course.
The dirty truth of the matter is that very little of what is classified as "Secret" is not already common knowledge, and much that is "Top Secret" is in the public realm but might require a little digging to compile. The bureaucratic culture -- self perpetuating beast that it is -- breeds and nurtures a bias to classify almost everything, and this has created a dangerous "us versus them" mentality in which the "servants" actually rule the masters. In a free society, the natural bias must be against classification and there should be very little that is justifiably shielded from public knowledge.
As for the Snowden affair... Sometimes bad things serve good ends. Criminals kill other criminals. Dangerous bacteria break down dead matter and destroy other dangerous organisms. What Snowden proved to the American people was that their own government -- using the people's own hard earned taxes -- is actively spying on us and recording for later retrieval every word we speak and every keystroke we make. The fact that only a handful of the people's elected representatives were "granted access" to knowledge of this activity is very troubling, and the fact that Congressmen who did know were barred by "secrecy laws" from blowing the whistle on unconstitutional government activity is downright shocking.
The culture of government secrecy is out of control. Whatever his motives might have been, Edward Snowden performed a great service to America that far outweighs any theoretical damage to the oft-overstated "American security."
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