> I would think there would be far more leniency.
I'm less concerned with Snowden's treatment than with the way that our leaders dealt with the revelation that crimes had been committed in the excessive collection of data.
In my opinion, at least a few senior intelligence officials should have faced prison time, several more should have stepped down, and we should have seen full details disclosed about the problematic programs and seen the technology infrastructure get dismantled.
But we saw nothing like this. President Obama pretended nothing had happened and things just continued on pretty much the way they had been.
The key point is that the surveillance programs Snowden revealed are illegal, criminal programs and there is zero accountability for those whose misdeeds and lies led to the programs.
While I have no doubt that the vast majority of intelligence agency employees are honest, law-abiding people, I am not comfortable with a massive surveillance system being built behind closed doors with no democratic oversight. The stakes are just too high.
I have a number of friends who work in government and I wonder whether they feel comfortable expressing their honest opinions about the programs since for all we know there is a sentiment analysis being done on the emails, tweets, texts, and phone conversations of all government employees with security clearance.
From the standpoint of preventing crimes by leveraging surveillance and data mining, of course there would be a sentiment analysis system, and the threat level posed by dissenting sentiment would be easy to monitor so that measures could be taken to prevent undesirable occurrences from happening.
Can a democracy exist when there is a massive surveillance system that everyone realizes is lurking behind every web cam and ISP? I'm not sure it can.
We've seen a handful of generals and public officials get destroyed by "leaks" of data that were quite likely obtained via the surveillance infrastructure. This should probably terrify us, but there is very little scrutiny of the methods used, including parallel attribution, and most government claims are taken at face value.