Edward Snowden says a report critical to an NSA lawsuit is authentic
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Was anyone of the US Government criminally charged for this whole thing or they only bothered to charge the guy who exposed the crime?
Laws apply to commoners, not lords.
A : Bullets don't care how much power or money they have.
After all a common thread of US History is this LBJ quip:
> If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.
That would be a pretty big change from them dynamiting and firebombing Greenwood, or taking over and thrashing Malheur.
Somehow I'm doubtful. That's just not how America has used guns ever. And that's not how it uses guns to this day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
What I struggle with is how does one make the leap from being a democracy to being a democracy which protects the rights of minorities? This doesn't have to be a gender or race thing. For example, here in the US we clearly don't do enough to protect incarcerated people from {sexual, physical, mental} abuse (by staff or by other inmates).
They tried to create one with no power for anyone but white male landowners and with provisions that made changing that extremely difficult.
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened), against domestic Violence.
ARTICLE IV, SECTION 4
This is not generally true in the abstract, but the specific form of most Constitutional republics, including the US, is basically representative democracy, though sometimes (as in the US) with skewed voting power, and democratic values (coupled with fear of the volatility and excesses of direct or unconstrained democracy) was fairly central to the founding ideology of the United States.
Read this over and over until you believe you can simply change the meaning of words
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
All democratic governments today allow decisions to be made even over the dissent of a minority of voters.
Whereas the (Republic) Constitution and the Bill of Rights protect (or are supposed to protect) the individual rights.
The individual being the smallest minority.
This is the difference I see. It is a small difference with a huge impact.
John Locke
[Civic power] can have no right except as this is derived from the individual right of each man to protect himself and his property. The legislative and executive power used by government to protect property is nothing except the natural power of each man resigned into the hands of the community…and it is justified merely because it is a better way of protecting natural right than the self-help to which each man is naturally entitled.[1]:532
China is a republic but not a democracy. Canada is a democracy and not a republic.
The Federalist Papers deal with both the Tyranny of the Majority, as well as the Tyranny of the Minority.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Federalist_Papers
It does, at least, put a citizen on equal footing when it comes to understanding the responsibility of using a weapon, at all, to defend something or someone. There are many who say that responsibility is too heavy, or too hard, or should not be born by the individual .. but in this day and age there are too many well-armed warriors with the ability to destroy the very weak, and destroy they do. Daily.
One of the key means by which war-fighters get away with atrocity is when the weaker, non-armed civilians from which they must recruit and supply themselves, allow them to do so without oversight.
An armed citizenry defuses the source of military-industrial corruption: the secrecy by which the effects of war are kept from a weak-willed, easily manipulated, public.
If we knew what it was to fight a war, we'd be doing less of it. As it stands now though, the people of the nations of the western coalition are living in a putrid fantasy as to what their military are doing, in their name. And seem to be fine with it.
I wonder if it were so easily placed on the board, as it were, if we had a means of reigning in our military masters that was truly effective. In place of technological war-fighting might, it seems the only thing we have left is the light of truth on their secrets.
So, while the notion of 'arming all the citizens' is an extreme, there may be something less extreme in the idea of 'uncover all military-industrial secrets at all costs', which is .. after all .. kind of a similar basis by which one might defuse the complex.
Look at Japanese history however and you see 100s of years of disarmament.
Like any other tool
You don't stand a chain with your desert eagle if the marines decide you should go down.
The number of veterans in this nation make the active duty army look small.
Though, even if found to be violating the law I find it hard to imagine any prosecutors trying individuals involved.
But you're right about not prosecuting individuals.
Well except for Snowden of course.
And frankly Clapper's testimony to Congress was obviously perjury. The prosecution of only Snowden is rank hypocracy.
> The whistleblower laws for intelligence community members pretend that there’s no such thing as agency level misconduct and we know that that’s not the case... If what you’re talking about is official misconduct that has been sanctioned by the agency, then obviously reporting that misconduct to that agency is not going to help. So internal channels are useless for things like torture, warrantless wiretapping, any of those major systemic abuses, like the ones we saw after 9/11.
https://pen.org/sites/default/files/Secret%20Sources%20repor...
Your passport doesn't magically cease to work after someone somewhere says it's been revoked.
AFAIK there was no HK warrant or even an Interpol notice issued for Snowden at the time. Why would he not have been allowed to board that plane?
So clearly there was an arrest warrant issued by US with a request to HK authorities to detain Snowden. You may choose to believe the excuse put out by HK/Chinese authorities that US government filled out the paperwork incorrectly but the State Department, and pretty much anybody I've ever read, has rejected that explanation.
For boarding and plane and clearing security and entry into Moscow, you made an absolutely ludicrous assertion that "Your passport doesn't magically cease to work after someone somewhere says it's been revoked." - Uh huh, there goes our entire security infrastructure ... Is it your contention that neither Hong Kong authorities nor the Russians were aware that Snowden's passport was revoked?
You sound like you're bending over backwards to try to prevent Snowden from being seen as what he is, a traitor to his country who defected to a geopolitical rival after stealing millions of documents (the vast majority of which have NOTHING to do with domestic espionage programs).
Not quite. As another poster stated, Snowden had his passport revoked a day before he cleared security in Hong Kong and boarded the plane to Moscow. The decision to allow him to board the plane could only have come from the top of Russian leadership. US also issued a request to detain him and again, the decision by Hong Kong and Chinese authorities to ignore this request could only have come from high up in the respective leadership chain.
His entire time Hong Kong is mired in controversy and implicates him as a defector (either planned or spur of the moment) - for example his visit to Russian consulate (with Putin himself acknowledging that Snowden met with Russian diplomats). Wikipedia has a good write-up [1].
* Most of the secrets were probably already known by well running spying organizations of big countries. They have their own real spies working in there, and what Snowden revealed was for a big part already suspected by many. Snowden has demonstrated the smoking gun to the planet, but a lot of people noticed the smell of the corpse before that.
* USA=Bad is a claim that sticks beter if the messenger is a knight in shining armor.
* Russia has a lot more room to mess around if the would-be police of the world iis caught with its pants down every other week.
* Russia is very good at sowing distrust between their enemies. It seems a main point of their current defence against NATO.
The problem is that the details on the existence of internal spy programs were a very small part of the cache of data he stole. Initial estimates range from 50,000 to 200,000 stolen documents (with later revisions of the estimates jumping to 1.7 million) with no real idea of the extent of the theft.
Here's how Army General Martin Dempsey (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) characterized the theft: "The vast majority of the documents that Snowden ... exfiltrated from our highest levels of security ... had nothing to do with exposing government oversight of domestic activities. The vast majority of those were related to our military capabilities, operations, tactics, techniques and procedures."
We know Snowden took those documents with him to China. We don't know what he did with them. We know he was monitored by Chinese, Russian and American intelligence agencies in Hong Kong - which should raise alarm bells because there is no way that neither Russian nor Chinese agencies would simply pass up an opportunity to exfiltrate this data for themselves. Snowden said that he destroyed all those files, though his story has changed several times and you simply have to trust him at his word ... which raises the question, why did he steal that data (not talking about domestic surveillance programs) in the first place. I mean, he sure as hell could have simply given it to the Russians, or had it stolen by another intelligence agency.
But Snowden was not the only person having this access. What about all of his colleagues? If a country manages to bribe or blackmail even one of these people to smuggle out an USB stick, you have exactly the same situation.
Given the resources available to China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc..., the sheer number of available targets, and the invisibility of the attack, what are the odds of this kind of theft not happening? And that's without all the other ways for them to get reasonable estimates of these things.
And yes, also that the theft isn't as big a deal as it seems.
So Snowden didn't actually whistleblow any crime. You may argue about the public right to know about these programs, and I would be friendly to that view, but Snowden stole much much much more than that, took it to China and asked us to trust him when he said he destroyed that data (though he changed his story quite a few times)... that's why he is a traitor.
For the same reason no one was charged for hiroshima or nagasaki. Or the illegal iraq war. It was sanctioned by the government.
For there to be criminal charges, someone in the government has to be willing to prosecute. Good luck with that.
Of course tthey didn't wwant to guarantee Snowdens freedom while here, so that interview never happened and the docs were ignored.
I bet that's going to be the NSAs play here too
Capitalism - and any other system - has to have bogeymen and terrorism as a fear, the thinking being that anything outside the system is a fate worse than death and therefore the system, in this case capitalism as we know it is better than the alternatives. We all know there aren't any 'al-qaeda' terrorists really, it certainly is not necessary to monitor everyone's phone just because of that.
Going through the courts to discern whether these Stasi style systems were/are constitutional or not is noble and good on the EFF for doing these things. However we have not acknowledged why these things had to happen, we still go along with the 'al-qaeda terrorist fear' meme.
The point of surveillance and letting everyone know that they are under surveillance is to stop people communicating in a way tantamount to dissent. The Catholic Church and the Stasi had these things in place, not to root out protestants or Western spies, it was always to keep people in line with their system of rule. When it comes to our own Western surveillance we somehow believe the authorities that it is to catch the terrorists, a noble cause that nobody could possibly argue with. Yet really it is to keep people in line and not dissenting.
In the Bush years the powers-that-be were genuinely concerned they might have a Berlin Wall moment where people just see through the lies and decide not to stand shoulder to shoulder waving flags.
Their fears were seriously unfounded though, people really were deeply wedded to the system to the point of being indoctrinated and brainwashed. No matter how feeble the phantom enemy was people went along with it, it sold newspapers and meant people didn't even dream of getting organised in some revolutionary way. Occupy Wall Street was about it, a very damp squib.
Whether the details of the mass surveillance infrastructure were technically constitutional or not does not answer the bigger question regarding what the Bush government were so scared of.
Did the NSA catch hordes of these evil al-qaeda types with their dragnet? No. Were any of these card-carrying al-qaeda terror operatives given due process? No.
There are logical fallacies that we must endeavour to see through. Did the spy dragnet keep the al-qaeda menace at bay? Originally there were supposed to be tens of thousands of al-qaeda terror operatives in sleeper cells. They said the same about the Russians a generation earlier. It wasn't so.
There may be fancy computers at Fort Mead but these still cost money. Money that could have been spent on infrastructure that benefited the citizens. There is opportunity cost, many people have actually died in collapsed bridges since the NSA went crazy.
That money definitely could've been spent on infrastructure that benefited the actual citizens of this country and actually saved lives. Unfortunately a great part of American culture is pure jingoism and war propaganda, so nothing changes.
I do find it interesting how people find reasons to believe a lie, the lie being that the post 9/11 spying wasn't on the domestic population just to make sure there was no dissent. With a population that believes the lie then things are kind of doomed. A dark age happens. People find justifications to believe it ain't so. In a unipolar world this becomes a lot more interesting. In previous times there was an 'other' out there, the people in Germany could tune into propaganda from the West, this propaganda could be true facts and it would undermine the regime, Nazi or Stasi if too many people were in on it. In a unipolar world there isn't this possibility.
There is also a trust problem between government and people. In former times gentlemen didn't read each other's mail. Acceptance of otherwise is a betrayal of trust. You have to have good reason to snoop. What was the good reason and what was the excuse in the post 9/11 world? Fear.
We don’t really describe people as enemies of the state in America. Snowden is accused of certain crimes, and has the right to communicate with legal counsel. Such counsel could provide this attestation to a court.
Were he to try to return to US soil, I'm not sure Snowden would be able to rely on that being much more than a legal technicality. Especially with the current Russian climate.
He has enemies within the state department, which amounts to the same thing, and any public trial would be at best politically charged.