(1) Russ Tice: USAF intelligence analyst
(2) William Binney: NSA Technical Director.
(3) Thomas Tamm: DOJ lawyer
(4) Thomas A. Drake: senior executive at NSA
Each of them was a senior position relative to Snowden and Klein and all these cases were shut down. What change Snowden had to do traditionally by the book whistleblow or tiny traditional leak. He made the conscious decision to take the information so that they could not shut him down, and make a scene from outside the US (Hong Kong) so that there would be time to talk to the press.
Snowden made a political crime that was morally justified. It was not self serving. It turns out that Americans don't care but at least he made a splash.
Thank goodness he took his oath more seriously than the "I was just following orders" crowd. We know from WW2 that "I was just following orders" is not a legitimate excuse to help facilitate grave atrocities, like all of those other NSA employees did every single day, in violation of their own oaths that they each swore.
Klein's case didn't come with all that other baggage.
It's interesting that Klein's tell-all didn't get as much attention despite being less legally fraught. It makes me wonder how much of the Snowden media frenzy was organic in the first place, and if not much, who was pulling the strings to draw attention to practices that our own government had an obvious interest in repressing and concealing discussion of.
Mark targeted the EFF, not a news outlet, in contrast. The EFF probably first and foremost had the legal pursuit in mind, not making a story big.
The most shocking things of all for me was how ignorant ordinary people were and still are about both whistle blowers' disclosures and the subsequent pretend fixes by lawmakers. (Cynically, I'm inclined to add there might be more riots and demonstrations if you take Heinz ketchup away from people than theirlegitimate rights to privacy.)
"Mark not only saw how it works, he had the documents to prove it. He brought us over a hundred pages of authenticated AT&T schematic diagrams and tables. Mark also shared this information with major media outlets, numerous Congressional staffers, and at least two senators personally."
Tapping phones is immoral and unethical, IMO.
But a long was from the "grave atrocities" that were uncovered at the end of WWII
And the immorality doesn't stop there, that's where it starts.
"We kill people based on metadata." - General Michael Hayden, former Director of the NSA, former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and former Director of the CIA.
This includes innocent people. Women, children, civilians. Deliberately. "Acceptable collateral damage" is the euphemism used to mask the moral evil of deliberately murdering women and children.
I'm not going to defend the CIA/NSA for actions taken inside the country. On the other hand, I'm not going to second guess decisions happening on the ground in an active war zone.
Beside, killing without distinction combattant and civilians didn't work, see the result of the American Afghanistan war.
Even during the war, 99% of the country was to the hand of war leaders and talibans because everyone hated Americans. Guess why.
It took only a handful of days for Talibans to defeat the American sponsored 'democratic' gouvernement.
It's working so far for Russia. It worked for Germany in WWII until the US stepped and fought our way through Europe.
If you see a certain group as your sworn enemy for life which should be destroyed at all means possible -- then you will never have peace. All you can have is war.
they took on the Russians
The long term result of justifying the mean is always the subordination of the individuals, you migrate from a democratic society to totalitarian state.
I feel it's safe to say that no society prefer dictatorship to democracy.
So you won (maybe), your life is worst, you have no freedom anymore.
Beside you say in some case war is inevitable because there is too much hate. I don't agree, people (individuals) can be so hateful that war is inevitable but populations always aspire to peace.
Even totalitarian state always have to justify the war by pretending they're the one merely defending, being attacked because this desire for peace is so powerful.
I'm not sure about that.
If you're in the majority, and you have an opportunity to enslave/kill/jail a minority, would you not go for it?
By not fighting ethically abroad and by permitting our authoritarians largely free-rein both abroad and domestically, we gave the folks who planned and caused the destruction of the WTC towers nearly everything they were hoping for.
Overreacting and letting Bush II run his military campaigns in the Middle East was one of the greatest gifts we could have given Al Qaeda and those like them. Encouraging our populace to permit themselves to be (and continue to be) terrorized is a lesser but still significant gift to those same organizations.
Vietnam wasn't self-defense. Korean war wasn't self-defense. CIA-instigated Color revolutions and Euromaidan weren't self-defense. Kosovo wasn't self-defense. Launching a cruise missile (a precision weapon that requires the operator to enter precise geographic coordinates prior to launch) at the Chinese embassy in Belgrade wasn't self-defense.
A vast and overwhelming majority of the military operations the post-WW2 USA conducts overseas are not acts of self-defense, they are acts of imperialism.
"I want to grow the imperial empire's influence and footprint" is not justification for murdering unarmed civilians. Never has been, never will be.
It's an odd world that makes odd bedfellows. One wonders depending on how the next four years go if Snowden could even catch a pardon.
... or if he did, the Russians would even let him leave.
I may have pledged allegiance to the US flag when I was a kid, but that wasn't the same as taking an oath of elected office to uphold the constitution.
To be clear, all 3 are personal heroes of mine.