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He was right to blow the whistle. He was right to place his oath of allegiance to this nation above his oath to protect secrets which were destroying this nation.
I, (name), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.
I'm not sure what, if any, oath a contractor might take.
Well.. I almost feel like if a firing squad is called up..I don’t see anyone stopping it until maybe after photos surface on the web. Scary group running all levels of the government. Grateful Snowden leaked about the wrong doings. I was against the Patriot Act when others said it will always be checked through the court system to not break any constitutional laws.
In 2013 the facts come out that the bad guys have been scarfing data for years.. and we should be newly pissed about it TODAY?
Didn’t we know already?
If I put out this cigarette in the palm of my hand, should
I be outraged because it burns? Or should I have expected nothing else?
I concur with the poster above saying that in the context of what he revealed it doesn’t matter if Snowden is a hero or villain.
Snowden should have sought whistleblower protection status instead of disclosing secrets to the media. That makes him a criminal under U.S. law.
However, one can understand why Snowden would not trust the government he was exposing to protect him as a whistleblower. I think he decided to take his case straight to the American people and let the chips fall where they may.
Snowden’s actions were criminal under the law and professionally unethical in his line of work, but I’m not sure his actions were immoral. If his motivation was solely to expose government corruption and abuse of power, then I think he acted morally. If he intends to benefit personally from exposing the same, then I think he acted immorally.
I need to see where this goes before I put any labels on Snowden.
He had no recourse other than going public as far as the constitutional rights violations. There was no one to go to in government.
Where he goes wrong is his exposure of our spying on non Americans and essentially demanding that we are violating their “human rights”.
And where he goes even more wrong is threatening to seek asylum in countries that are a threat to us and most certainly are spying on us. Namely China.
Did he?
I thought that oath he took was to the Constitution, not an agency.
5.56mm
What exactly is he charged with? I’ve heard a lot of accusations but what “classified” material did he leak? Just because governmental self-preservationist and the punditocrasey have expressed outrage doesn’t mean he disclosed actual classified documents.
Naw, this guy is the Paul Revere of our generation...
Strawman. Traitor or hero? As if those are the only two choices. In any event, anyone who blindly believes everything Snowden has stated is a fool. Same goes for those who blindly believe what the government has stated.
The reality is that 99% of the pundits including the OP don’t have a clue what is true and are trying to pass off speculation as truth. Nonsense.
“There are no white-hat-wearing good guys in this story.”
Actually there is. His name is Edward Snowden. I am sorry they allow vanity posts like this. A moral dilemna! What’s a goil to do!?
An easy analogy could be this: You see a building burning (our Constitution). Unless you act, great damage may be done. But there is no water to put out the fire (all members of Congress have acquiesed in their duty for oversight, 11 hack judges have acted absolutely recklessly, and many other have lied to cover up) so you see a front loader with which you can push a water tank into the fire and stop it (reveal the truth) but the water tank will be demolished and you may be charged with stealing the front loader (accused of treason and so). You act, knowing the building contains precious articles like the bill of rights and you are a hero to all but the simplest of imbeciles.
why do you say he broke an oath. he was working for a private employer.
In common law, unlawful contracts are not binding. Likewise, oaths only exist for the honorable. If you make an oath to the dishonorable, it is not binding.
If "fighting terrorism" and preventing the attendant loss of life is what's most important, then, heck, these same Tyrannical techniques could be applied to fighting everyday criminality, since such criminality causes far more loss of life than all terrorism combined.
If I recall correctly, the terrorists will have already won if they cause America to morph into some kind of totalitarian police state which is at perpetual War. Part of the goal is to combat terror without destroying our Free society.
It seems that some have, hysterically or otherwise, totally lost sight of that consideration. Fear is a potent tool for convincing people to surrender essential liberty.
Laz, I would imagine the moral dilemma over Edward Snowden and his actions could be likened to the Founding Fathers.
They broke the law too, but they felt they answered to a Higher Power, and that liberty for them and unborn generations was worth more than life.
Many of the firebrands of the American Revoultion were clergymen, so the whole moral dilemma matrix is nothing new.
I come down on the side of applauding Mr. Snowden’s actions.
Our government exceeded the bounds of its authority, knowingly, willingly, and multiple times, without regard to our Constitutional rights or legal limits put in place by law.
Further amplifying this theme is the following article from today, show that the NSA can listen in on our phone calls on an anlayst’s whim, warrants be damned:
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3031810/posts
Lead paragraph from the source article:
“The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”
Note also this chilling paragraph from the source article:
“Earlier reports have indicated that the NSA has the ability to record nearly all domestic and international phone calls — in case an analyst needed to access the recordings in the future. A Wired magazine article last year disclosed that the NSA has established “listening posts” that allow the agency to collect and sift through billions of phone calls through a massive new data center in Utah, “whether they originate within the country or overseas.” That includes not just metadata, but also the contents of the communications.
William Binney, a former NSA technical director who helped to modernize the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network, told the Daily Caller this week that the NSA records the phone calls of 500,000 to 1 million people who are on its so-called target list, and perhaps even more. “They look through these phone numbers and they target those and that’s what they record,” Binney said.”
The drip, drip, drip technique of disclosures in now in effect.
If this government would purposely use the IRS top target political thought it did not agree with, there is no question it would use telephony and internet data against its perceived enemies as well.
The real moral dilemma is not about Edward Snowden.
The real moral dilemma is whether we understand that it is time to install new guards for our liberties, since the present ones have proven tyrannical, and what we are going to do about it.
I’m not convinced by your argument, Laz.
He exposed numerous crimes and civil rights violations by the NSA fascists and the Marxist obuma administration against you and me. That trumps any oath to secrecy. In fact, if you look through the whistleblower legislation, he did the right thing. He’s a hero.
Sorry, I think your analysis is wrong.