[quote]SirTroyRobert wrote:
In the interview he recently had, he covered the reason why he won’t come home. He said under the espionage act, there would be no fair trial for him. He’d be at the mercy of the government with no way to defend himself. Granted, I don’t know everything about the whole situation, I’m glad he let us know what the NSA is doing. It’s Orwellian to say the least. IMO the founding fathers would praise Snowden. He saw something that he didn’t believe was constitutional, and did something about it. He gave the information to the people. He tried to communicate his concerns to higher level personnel in the NSA, but they basically told him not to ask questions. This is documented.
The NSA did admit that there was at least one time when Snowden expressed concerns. Thomas Jefferson said it best ,“When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.” Right now it’s safe to say that many of us fear the government and not the other way around.[/quote]
I don’t think that Snowden deserves praise as much as the rest of us deserve to be reprimanded.
After all, it was partially this country’s own slavish reaction to a fear-based argument put forth by the Bush administration and further propagated by the Obama administration. We should have flipped the fuck out over the Patriot Act and things of that ilk, but we didn’t. Conservatives by and large decried vocal opponents as being “soft on terrorism”. Liberals by and large acquiesced to this shameless accusation by going along with everything, lest they also be accused of being soft on terrorism.
Any conservative or liberal who criticizes the NSA for their actions and who also voted for either Bush or Obama has no one to blame for this shit than themselves. People act as if these revelations are…revelatory. They aren’t. The gov’t has been doing this shit since the earliest days of the Cold War in some way, shape, or form. Our liberties are constantly being assailed by the very people that we elect and who turn around and use fear to further curtail said liberties. It is US who essentially gave the NSA a blank check to spy on everyone. We voted for one President who openly called for similar measures in Bush, and when we had the chance to vote a different type of President in, we put the black, Democratic version of Bush into the White House instead.
And we act like Snowden is a hero. He’s no hero. He’s naive, ignorant, misguided at best, and all he’s really done is inadvertently revealed just how lax we have all become regarding our greatest responsibility as an American, namely to protect our liberties and those of the next generation of Americans. We have failed miserably at that, but that does not make Snowden a hero or anything remotely close to it.
[quote]DBCooper wrote:
People act as if these revelations are…revelatory. They aren’t. The gov’t has been doing this shit since the earliest days of the Cold War in some way, shape, or form. [/quote]
Perhaps they didn’t reveal anything that wasn’t already suspected to those with more than two brain cells, but what he did largely CONFIRMED what was suspected. If you harbor thoughts that perhaps the court system can rectify these abuses (I don’t but let’s play devils advocate) what Snowden revealed is a big deal considering the government has used lack of standing to get challenges to the security state dismissed from the courts.
“American Civil Liberties Union v. National Security Agency, 493 F.3d 644 (6th Cir. 2007), is a case decided July 6, 2007, in which the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held that the plaintiffs in the case did not have standing to bring the suit against the NSA, because they could not present evidence that they were the targets of the so-called “Terrorist Surveillance Program” (TSP).”