Big whoop, if you think that mining even more data is going to make us safe when there was already tons left un-analyzed before 9/11 then you're an even bigger idiot than you appear. The only people who are being put at risk by the pervasive violations of privacy rights in America are Americans. In the same way that Americans are now more at risk from their own government than foreign terrorists. Read the damn articles, more Americans have been murdered by cops in the same period than died in Iraq, which was a war zone. I've been clear why I'm so passionate about protecting rights and freedoms in America, why don't you come clean about why you're so passionate about the right of the state to assert near complete control over Americans?Fuzzy logic-If you think the kind of power that is being given away in the name of security is going to be given back willingly then your critical thinking skills are pathetic.This is your first response to me on this thread after I posted a polite, rational response of my own opinion on the subject. Who's a troll? You're pathetic!
Okay, I'm bugging out for now. When I return, I expect (?) to see more thoughtful and insightful dialogue and less personal attacks. (But in parting I would like to say... Ted Cruz sucks.)Yah, sorry TimB. I think this is a crucial issue for America, I'll try to keep my partriotism in my pants here in the future.:-)
Folks, TimB is right. Let’s dial the rhetoric down a few notches and cut out the personal attacks. Thanks.
The only people who are being put at risk by the pervasive violations of privacy rights in America are Americans. In the same way that Americans are now more at risk from their own government than foreign terrorists. Read the damn articles, more Americans have been murdered by cops in the same period than died in Iraq, which was a war zone.How are Americans being put at risk by violations of their privacy? You still haven't explained that? And how is that the same way that Americans are now more at risk from their own government than Foreign terrorists? First off people are not murdered by cops. You sound like a real upstanding citizen there Fuzzy. You're not blogging us from prison or anything are you? Do you know the number of police officers who are killed in the line of duty each year? Probably not. You sound like a real winner. The average number of justifiable homicides by police officers is 400 a year. That makes 4000 in 10 years. That's not more than Iraq. Just because that goofy rag you cited twists the figures around and puts it on the internet doesn't make it true. But even if it was true, there are far more people in the US and far more guns and criminals and police than there are US soldiers in Iraq. So what's your point? I think you are just a foreign citizen blogging anti-American sentiment here on this Forum. That's what I think. It's obstructive and a nuisance.
Military officers pledge to defend the Constitution, not the state. If the state is acting in a way that attacks the rights of citizens encoded in the Constitution then they are in fact domestic enemies.Seriously TimB, you want to entertain this? It's a thought. But I think I see your point about it being something that someone like Ted Cruz (Canadian) or Rand Paul (who is, BTW, not Canadian) might spout, in supporting his own ultra-right agenda. But I don't think that Fuzzy has an ultra-right agenda. (And Fuzzy, I don't mean to insult you, if you are, partially, Canadian. I just, really, really, really don't like Ted Cruz.) I'm with you there, I can't stand the far right. My point about the Constitution is it's supposed to be the foundation of protection of rights in America, not the CIA, the NSA the FBI or either major party. And anyone who's working to undermine the basic principles of the Constitution is attacking the rights and freedoms of Americans.
I think this is a great observation by VA, and it applies to this issue as well.
True and I’m not denying that but who put them there? Ultra conservative presidents. And who put those presidents in power? The electorate. Now that we have a moderate (he’s by no means a liberal, he just appears that way in front of the right wing majority in the House) he’s hamstrung by conservative justices and congress and it may get worse this Fall. Remember also that all the Koch bros and their one percent buddies weren’t able to use their funds to keep him out. So even though the playing field isn’t level, public opinion can still be used to fight the one percenters. What we really need are more moderates and less extremists. We’re too polarized now with an “all or none" agenda.I'm critical of Obama for not doing better, but I place most of the blame on the batcrap crazy far right who have basically lost it. The Republican Party and especially the Tea Party members of Congress are a disgrace to the nation. I hope Obama pardons Snowden but I also realize that to a great extent he's under almost literal seige in the White House by some of the biggest hypocrites America has ever seen.
First, let's be realistic, there's no way the government would parden Snowden for breaking their laws... OccamNo one in the government has to pardon Snowden, except one man. The President. You are correct, the president can give pardons without the permission of any other part of the government. The problem for Mr. Snowden is that the president is one of the main players who setup the espionage that Snowden exposed. Obama would rather get Snowden with a drone than pardon him. And, any politician who sticks their neck out for Snowden would see their political career evaporate in a hot minute. If Obama pardoned Snowden, he would be quickly impeached for breaking the presidential oath of office. The fact is that Snowden committe treason no matter how any lawyer could spin it. It's an open and shut case. The government will bend the law in the name of national security in a flash, but not for treason. Never, for treason.
I suspect plenty of military officers don't know what the Constitution says or what it stands for. They follow orders.Fuzzy Logic-Military officers pledge to defend the Constitution, not the state. If the state is acting in a way that attacks the rights of citizens encoded in the Constitution then they are in fact domestic enemies.
So if you had access to the information Snowdon had access to and you saw that the US was breaking laws, spying on its own citizens and gathering information it had no right to you would say and do nothing? The US government broke laws and acted against its own citizens. What do you think should happen to to lawbreakers in government? Should the US government be above the law and only individual citizens be punished for revealing law breaking by the government?That is exact the point. Lois is right here, VYAZMA. No. I'm afraid not. I'm afraid you'll have to show which laws were or are being broken. Scrape away all the hysteria first and all of the misinformation and hyperbole and show me what violations of the law took place. The CIA and te FBI are restricted on what information they can legally gather on ordinary American citizens and how it can be collected. They seriously overstepped those bounds, and when Snowdon discovered that breach, he blew the whistle. Even the CIA and the FBI are bound by laws--as hard as that may be to believe. They do not have carte blanche to do wholesale spying on the activities of American citizens and gather information on them. Lois
It is not clear to me, at all, that Snowden committed treason. The Constitution defines treason rather narrowly, as I see it: Article 3, Section 3 - Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.
He, definitely, was not levying war against the United States. And I don’t see how his actions were “an adherence” to our enemies. Did he give aid and comfort to our enemies? If you define that broadly enough to cover Snowden’s actions, then one might say that the actions of the NSA are also treasonous, as surely, our enemies must have some sense of aid and comfort in the fact that the agency spies on so many of its own citizens. The many futile, misguided, and horrifically wasteful policies of the Bush administration, surely have given aid and comfort to our enemies, but no one was convicted of treason.
So no, I don’t think that it is an open and shut case. Thus if Snowden is convicted, or pleads to some lesser charge, then the President could pardon or provide clemency without fear of successful impeachment.
Also, President Obama probably has no further national political career aspirations, other than to serve out his term as effectively as possible. And it should be clear to everyone by now, that the Republicans are going to continue to obstruct his efficacy by every means at their disposal, no matter what he does.
Furthermore, I think that it is rather cynical, and unfounded, to say that President Obama would kill Snowden rather than pardon him (even if the thought has crossed his mind).
I suspect plenty of military officers don't know what the Constitution says or what it stands for. They follow orders.No doubt. The point I was trying to make was the importance is placed on the principles that protect individual freedom in America, not on protecting the state. And by violating any real privacy by carpet collection of electronic communications state security is protecting the state at the expense of the principles that guarantee rights and freedoms. Obama isn't too bad, but what if the next President is some Tea Party extremist who thinks we really need to go to war with Norwegia or something. While Obama is in office he should be doing everything he can to roll back the actions taken under Bush and Cheney to drastically reduce civil rights in the US under things like the Patriot Act.
TimB, I probably am cynical. That doesn’t mean that Snowden deserves or will ever get a pardon. I appreciate your optimistic approach to this issue, and I mean no offense when I say the following; the exact opposite of cynicism is naivety. We just approach this issue from very different perspectives. Only time will tell which one of us correctly predicted the outcome of this proposed pardon for Mr. Snowden.
The last guy to do this got 35 years in prison.
Bradley Manning was sentenced today to 35 years in prison for giving hundreds of thousands of secret military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks in one of the nation's biggest leak cases since the Pentagon Papers more than a generation ago. In a brief hearing at Fort Meade, Md., Col. Denise Lind, a military judge, didn't offer any explanation for the sentence. The soldier will be dishonorably discharged from the U.S. military and forfeit some of his pay, she said.
I thought that things "Orwellian" bothered you. Today the marital infidels and closet-gay-trucker-porn-aficionados may be the ones in fear of their privacy invasions. Tomorrow it may be the intellectuals who dare to think or privately say things other than what is mandated by the State. But as Occam says, just worry about today, as many of us won't be alive, probably, by the time things get that bad. Our security today is more important than the freedom of the young and their children, etc. Sorry, Viasma and Occam, my idealism extends to people that I don't know and to people who will be alive long after I'm gone. Is it just impotent idealism? Maybe. But actualized reality has a funny way of being preceded by ideals or by cynicism. The proliferation of espionage on a State's own citizenry is the problem. It has been said so often, that it seems trite, that those who would give up liberty for the sake of security, deserve neither. Is that true? I don't know. But as an ideal, it sounds right. Does Snowden deserve to be pardoned? Maybe not. But in my possibly naïve opinion, the ideals that I would hope my country stands for, deserve for Snowden to be pardoned.I vastly prefer your "naive" idealism to the kind of cynicism that claims we must throw rights and freedoms out the window in pursuit of short term "security" that isn't very secure in the first place. It wasn't a shortage of information that allowed 911 to happen it was a shortage of actual intelligence of those who were supposedly in charge. There was more than enough intelligence on what was coming but there was no will to act responsibly which was one of the main hallmarks of the last administration. It was deficits in democracy in the US that allowed that administration into power in the first place, the remedy isn't to go even further down the road to a totalitarian state, it's to return to the core values of the nation which are about freedom and respect for rights. Not about creating a new empire as some seem to be convinced of.
I think Snowden is getting exactly what he deserves. I hope he is never pardoned. He broke the law then he didn't even stick around to test the waters. He ran to our two biggest antagonists with tera-bytes of State Secrets. Years ago that would have openly reeked of outright treason.That's not accurate, Snowden turned everything he had over to a journalist in Hong Kong, he was no longer in possession of any secret files when he went into exile. And I think it takes a huge amount of courage to make this kind of stand. I guess if you consider organizations like The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New York Times, CBC and many more media outlets as the enemy then Snowden is a traitor. As this is about a globe spanning secret intelligence program that also included private companies like Microsoft sharing vast amounts of information about citizens of the countries involved then there is a very excellent argument to make that Edward Snowden is in fact a whistleblower who was acting in the interests of the public who's trust was being violated by governments who were acting far beyond the reaches of any legal control. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosures_(2013–present)
Ongoing news reports in the international media have revealed operational details about the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and its international partners' global surveillance[1] of foreign nationals and U.S. citizens. The reports mostly emanate from a cache of top secret documents leaked by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who obtained them while working for Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the largest contractors for defense and intelligence in the United States.[2] In addition to a trove of U.S. federal documents, Snowden's cache reportedly contains thousands of Australian, British and Canadian intelligence files that he had accessed via the exclusive "Five Eyes" network. In June 2013, the first of Snowden's documents were published simultaneously by The Washington Post and The Guardian, attracting considerable public attention.[3] The disclosure continued throughout the entire year of 2013, and a significant portion of the full cache of the estimated 1.7 million documents[4] was later obtained and published by many other media outlets worldwide, most notably The New York Times, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Der Spiegel (Germany), O Globo (Brazil), Le Monde (France), L'espresso (Italy), NRC Handelsblad (the Netherlands), Dagbladet (Norway), El País (Spain), and Sveriges Television (Sweden).
This hardly inspires confidence in NSA standards.
In a March 2009 order that was declassified Tuesday, Judge Reggie Walton of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said the government "frequently and systematically violated" the procedures it had said it was following. The judge criticized what he described as "repeated inaccurate statements made in the government's submissions." The revelations called into question the NSA's ability to run the sweeping domestic surveillance programs it introduced more than 10 years ago in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks. Officials said the violations were inadvertent, because NSA officials didn't understand their own phone-records collection program. Gen. Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA, told the judge in a 2009 legal declaration that "from a technical standpoint, there was no single person who had a complete technical understanding of the [business record] system architecture." Top U.S. officials, including Gen. Alexander, have repeatedly reassured lawmakers and the public that the phone-records program has been carefully executed under oversight from the secret national security court. "This is not a program where we are out freewheeling it," Gen. Alexander said in June. "It is a well-overseen and a very focused program."So the NSA has already been violating their already very loose controls and claiming it's been due to lack of understanding of their own systems while also touting how accurate their systems are. I think more than a little of the hostility being directed at Edward Snowden is motivated by embarrassment by officials who got caught with their pants down. Also the fact that Snowden was able to remove so much sensitive material points to severe shortcomings in the security of the program. The same was also true of Bradley Manning who was allowed to bring and use recordable CDs and flash drives with his "secure" systems in Iraq. There seems to be a systemic disregard not just for the privacy of the people who are supposed to be served by these organizations but for any real sense of professionalism. It's no revelation that few politicians show any real sense of responsibility to the electorate any more, is it any wonder that the government agencies under them are also acting with contempt for the law and civil rights.
This hardly inspires confidence in NSA standards. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324094704579067422990999360Excellent points. They were caught with their pants down and now they are trying to do damage control by demonizing the whisleblower. A common tactic. LoisIn a March 2009 order that was declassified Tuesday, Judge Reggie Walton of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said the government "frequently and systematically violated" the procedures it had said it was following. The judge criticized what he described as "repeated inaccurate statements made in the government's submissions." The revelations called into question the NSA's ability to run the sweeping domestic surveillance programs it introduced more than 10 years ago in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks. Officials said the violations were inadvertent, because NSA officials didn't understand their own phone-records collection program. Gen. Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA, told the judge in a 2009 legal declaration that "from a technical standpoint, there was no single person who had a complete technical understanding of the [business record] system architecture." Top U.S. officials, including Gen. Alexander, have repeatedly reassured lawmakers and the public that the phone-records program has been carefully executed under oversight from the secret national security court. "This is not a program where we are out freewheeling it," Gen. Alexander said in June. "It is a well-overseen and a very focused program."So the NSA has already been violating their already very loose controls and claiming it's been due to lack of understanding of their own systems while also touting how accurate their systems are. I think more than a little of the hostility being directed at Edward Snowden is motivated by embarrassment by officials who got caught with their pants down. Also the fact that Snowden was able to remove so much sensitive material points to severe shortcomings in the security of the program. The same was also true of Bradley Manning who was allowed to bring and use recordable CDs and flash drives with his "secure" systems in Iraq. There seems to be a systemic disregard not just for the privacy of the people who are supposed to be served by these organizations but for any real sense of professionalism. It's no revelation that few politicians show any real sense of responsibility to the electorate any more, is it any wonder that the government agencies under them are also acting with contempt for the law and civil rights.
TimB, I probably am cynical. That doesn't mean that Snowden deserves or will ever get a pardon. I appreciate your optimistic approach to this issue, and I mean no offense when I say the following; the exact opposite of cynicism is naivety. We just approach this issue from very different perspectives. Only time will tell which one of us correctly predicted the outcome of this proposed pardon for Mr. Snowden.I am certainly not immune to naivety. But note that I did not predict that Snowden will be pardoned. I advocated that he should be. I am not convinced one way or another, as to whether he deserves it. But I think that, by supporting whistleblowers, in general, it would support one avenue for us citizens to get information about what our governmental agencies are doing, when they are doing things that should not be kept from us. Right now, it's a one way mirror. The FBI, NSA, CIA, etc. have the capacity to know just about anything they want about us, (if we are doing something we shouldn't or even if we are not) but we don't have any effective capacity to know when persons within those agencies are doing something they shouldn't.
The last guy to do this got 35 years in prison. http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/bradley-manning-gets-35-years-in-u-s-wikileaks-case-1.1301924That case bothered me, because Manning's stated motives were humanistic. I think that Manning being a member of the military, pretty much assured his prosecution. It is interesting to note, however, that he was not convicted of "aiding the enemy", which, I think, means that he was not convicted of treason.Bradley Manning was sentenced today to 35 years in prison for giving hundreds of thousands of secret military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks in one of the nation's biggest leak cases since the Pentagon Papers more than a generation ago. In a brief hearing at Fort Meade, Md., Col. Denise Lind, a military judge, didn't offer any explanation for the sentence. The soldier will be dishonorably discharged from the U.S. military and forfeit some of his pay, she said.
That case bothered me, because Manning's stated motives were humanistic. I think that Manning being a member of the military, pretty much assured his prosecution. It is interesting to note, however, that he was not convicted of "aiding the enemy", which, I think, means that he was not convicted of treason.Right, he was facing life in prison if convicted of treason. There were some right wingers calling for his execution when this first broke in the news.