Does Snowden Deserve Clemency?

[kalm]

Discuss.

Entertaining on-air battle between Greenwald and D.C. sycophant Ruth Markus of the WA Post on the issue.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/dorsey/glenn-gr ... rd-snowden" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[VictorG]

IMO Snowden Deserves a .45 slug deposited somewhere in his brain pan. Then we can forgive him!

I still can't believe people are shocked at the information that they finally listened to which was ORIGINALLY presented after 9/11. When the US first started tracking and killing terrorists from 9/11 there were news reports on how they found and tracked the terrorists before "getting" them. Same stuff!!!!!!!!!

Why all of a sudden is it news 12 years later????

[GannonFan]

Kinda agree with Victor here - it's not like what Snowden put out there was all that shocking - we pretty much knew the US could listen to anything anytime anywhere, so it was pretty logical and reasonable to assume they had overstepped the possible legal bounds. It was like when people started being shocked by the fact that cigarettes could be dangerous to your health, in spite of the fact that the medical community had been warning us for years about that.

As for the clemency, I think it really depends on what he's done since he's been abroad - who has he talked to, what has he told them, and how significant any of that is. Whistleblowing on the program is one thing, and certainly worth clemency, but taking a tour of potentially adversarial countries and giving them even more insight and information, well, that's a different story.

[BlueHen86]

Kinda agree with Victor here - it's not like what Snowden put out there was all that shocking - we pretty much knew the US could listen to anything anytime anywhere, so it was pretty logical and reasonable to assume they had overstepped the possible legal bounds. It was like when people started being shocked by the fact that cigarettes could be dangerous to your health, in spite of the fact that the medical community had been warning us for years about that.

As for the clemency, I think it really depends on what he's done since he's been abroad - who has he talked to, what has he told them, and how significant any of that is. Whistleblowing on the program is one thing, and certainly worth clemency, but taking a tour of potentially adversarial countries and giving them even more insight and information, well, that's a different story.

[UNI88]

Kinda agree with Victor here - it's not like what Snowden put out there was all that shocking - we pretty much knew the US could listen to anything anytime anywhere, so it was pretty logical and reasonable to assume they had overstepped the possible legal bounds. It was like when people started being shocked by the fact that cigarettes could be dangerous to your health, in spite of the fact that the medical community had been warning us for years about that.

As for the clemency, I think it really depends on what he's done since he's been abroad - who has he talked to, what has he told them, and how significant any of that is. Whistleblowing on the program is one thing, and certainly worth clemency, but taking a tour of potentially adversarial countries and giving them even more insight and information, well, that's a different story.

[YoUDeeMan]

Snowden is a damn hero.

The administration should be the ones being prosecuted...and most of them,, along with Congress, should be in jail.

WTF harm did Snowden do? What harm did the WikiLeaks release do? All it did was embarrass our fat cats in Washington.

Several judges and Obama's own panel said that there is NO proof (none, zero) that metadata collection has done a single thing to stop terrorism. Not one damn thing.

Once again, we are all bowing down to "national security" scare tactics when in fact, it has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with several small companies making gobs of money selling programming and over-the-top weapons to our government...funded with our tax money.

Obushma has gone after more whistleblowers than all previous Presidents COMBINED...and you folks want to hang Snowden?

For what? Some damned idea of "order" that is necessary to preserve our country?



Get real. Obama and Bush both held press conferences, simply to improve their ratings, that gave away far more secrets about how our military special forces work. They both killed THOUSANDS of our troops, while lying out their azz, for what?

Look, I'm all for blowing the crap out of anyone that wants to attack America, but hardly anyone in some backwoods country really wants to put much effort into killing Americans...they simply are trying to live in their own little neighborhoods.

Hey, let's send in our military to attack the Midwest states because there are a hundred whack jobs that want to take down the United States government.

Or, hey, send our uniformed boys into Detroit to set up outposts...and then send them on Search and Destroy missions to kill those mother fvckers that are wrecking normal people's days. Obama will call it the "right war"...and be sure to send in some drones to attack the families of anyone we think has bad ideas.

C'mon, folks, this, "Snowden is a bad guy" obsession is absolutely ridiculous. He exposed our government for what is is...a bunch of clowns catering to their own self interests and big business' desire to make more money off our people. The same "super secret" data gathering technology is conveniently being used by corporations to monitor people's behaviors. Duh.

[kalm]

Snowden is a damn hero.

The administration should be the ones being prosecuted...and most of them,, along with Congress, should be in jail.

WTF harm did Snowden do? What harm did the WikiLeaks release do? All it did was embarrass our fat cats in Washington.

Several judges and Obama's own panel said that there is NO proof (none, zero) that metadata collection has done a single thing to stop terrorism. Not one damn thing.

Once again, we are all bowing down to "national security" scare tactics when in fact, it has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with several small companies making gobs of money selling programming and over-the-top weapons to our government...funded with our tax money.

Obushma has gone after more whistleblowers than all previous Presidents COMBINED...and you folks want to hang Snowden?

For what? Some damned idea of "order" that is necessary to preserve our country?



Get real. Obama and Bush both held press conferences, simply to improve their ratings, that gave away far more secrets about how our military special forces work. They both killed THOUSANDS of our troops, while lying out their azz, for what?

Look, I'm all for blowing the crap out of anyone that wants to attack America, but hardly anyone in some backwoods country really wants to put much effort into killing Americans...they simply are trying to live in their own little neighborhoods.

Hey, let's send in our military to attack the Midwest states because there are a hundred whack jobs that want to take down the United States government.

Or, hey, send our uniformed boys into Detroit to set up outposts...and then send them on Search and Destroy missions to kill those mother fvckers that are wrecking normal people's days. Obama will call it the "right war"...and be sure to send in some drones to attack the families of anyone we think has bad ideas.

C'mon, folks, this, "Snowden is a bad guy" obsession is absolutely ridiculous. He exposed our government for what is is...a bunch of clowns catering to their own self interests and big business' desire to make more money off our people. The same "super secret" data gathering technology is conveniently being used by corporations to monitor people's behaviors. Duh.

[kalm]

Kinda agree with Victor here - it's not like what Snowden put out there was all that shocking - we pretty much knew the US could listen to anything anytime anywhere, so it was pretty logical and reasonable to assume they had overstepped the possible legal bounds. It was like when people started being shocked by the fact that cigarettes could be dangerous to your health, in spite of the fact that the medical community had been warning us for years about that.

As for the clemency, I think it really depends on what he's done since he's been abroad - who has he talked to, what has he told them, and how significant any of that is. Whistleblowing on the program is one thing, and certainly worth clemency, but taking a tour of potentially adversarial countries and giving them even more insight and information, well, that's a different story.

It was reasonable to assume they had the ability. It was also reasonable to assume that they still had to jump through certain constitutional hurdles before they could LEGALLY search your private conversations. Even IF some people guessed they MIGHT be doing this going back to the first time they watched "Enemy of the State", it was never for sure until Snowden. We had government officials like James Clapper perjuring himself in front of congress over the issue, so it must of still been an important secret to them.

Clapper deserves jail time ahead of Snowden.

Perhaps some State AG's can sue the NSA a la big tobacco over the right to protect their citizens.

[CitadelGrad]

Snowden is a hero. We should build monuments to him.

[DSUrocks07]

Snowden is a hero. We should build monuments to him.

Exactly. Once he left the country he did what he had to do for his own survival. Not sure what this moral obsession with martyrdom comes from.

"If he really cared, he would have stayed in the US and faced his execution for treason like a man..."

wut?

[89Hen]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... ed_he.html

It is true that Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance of American citizens—far vaster than any outsider had suspected, in some cases vaster than the agency’s overseers on the secret FISA court had permitted—have triggered a valuable debate, leading possibly to much-needed reforms.

If that were all that Snowden had done, if his stolen trove of beyond-top-secret documents had dealt only with the NSA’s domestic surveillance, then some form of leniency might be worth discussing.

But Snowden did much more than that. The documents that he gave the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman and the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald have, so far, furnished stories about the NSA’s interception of email traffic, mobile phone calls, and radio transmissions of Taliban fighters in Pakistan’s northwest territories; about an operation to gauge the loyalties of CIA recruits in Pakistan; about NSA email intercepts to assist intelligence assessments of what’s going on inside Iran; about NSA surveillance of cellphone calls “worldwide,” an effort that (in the Post’s words) “allows it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.” In his first interview with the South China Morning Post, Snowden revealed that the NSA routinely hacks into hundreds of computers in China and Hong Kong.

These operations have nothing to do with domestic surveillance or even spying on allies. They are not illegal, improper, or (in the context of 21st-century international politics) immoral. Exposing such operations has nothing to do with “whistle-blowing.”

[93henfan]

Snowden exposed some things that should have been exposed and some that shouldn't have. For the latter, he should be terminated. I hope he is disappeared.

[OL FU]

Snowden is a damn hero.

The administration should be the ones being prosecuted...and most of them,, along with Congress, should be in jail.

WTF harm did Snowden do? What harm did the WikiLeaks release do? All it did was embarrass our fat cats in Washington.

Several judges and Obama's own panel said that there is NO proof (none, zero) that metadata collection has done a single thing to stop terrorism. Not one damn thing.

Once again, we are all bowing down to "national security" scare tactics when in fact, it has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with several small companies making gobs of money selling programming and over-the-top weapons to our government...funded with our tax money.

Obushma has gone after more whistleblowers than all previous Presidents COMBINED...and you folks want to hang Snowden?

For what? Some damned idea of "order" that is necessary to preserve our country?



Get real. Obama and Bush both held press conferences, simply to improve their ratings, that gave away far more secrets about how our military special forces work. They both killed THOUSANDS of our troops, while lying out their azz, for what?

Look, I'm all for blowing the crap out of anyone that wants to attack America, but hardly anyone in some backwoods country really wants to put much effort into killing Americans...they simply are trying to live in their own little neighborhoods.

Hey, let's send in our military to attack the Midwest states because there are a hundred whack jobs that want to take down the United States government.

Or, hey, send our uniformed boys into Detroit to set up outposts...and then send them on Search and Destroy missions to kill those mother fvckers that are wrecking normal people's days. Obama will call it the "right war"...and be sure to send in some drones to attack the families of anyone we think has bad ideas.

C'mon, folks, this, "Snowden is a bad guy" obsession is absolutely ridiculous. He exposed our government for what is is...a bunch of clowns catering to their own self interests and big business' desire to make more money off our people. The same "super secret" data gathering technology is conveniently being used by corporations to monitor people's behaviors. Duh.

[Vidav]

Snowden exposed some things that should have been exposed and some that shouldn't have. For the latter, he should be terminated. I hope he is disappeared.

[Col Hogan]

Snowden exposed some things that should have been exposed and some that shouldn't have. For the latter, he should be terminated. I hope he is disappeared.

Tough call for me , but in less than 30 words, this sums up my opinion...

[93henfan]

Snowden exposed some things that should have been exposed and some that shouldn't have. For the latter, he should be terminated. I hope he is disappeared.

Tough call for me , but in less than 30 words, this sums up my opinion...

Yes. His style was bad. Part of me says that he should have gone to WaPo, but I understand his desire to get out of the jurisdiction he would have been prosecuted in for divulging any classified info. He just should have taken a little less info with him when he got out of Dodge.

[kalm]

So which Obushma administration members should've been terminated?

( I probably just made a watch list ).

There is a final weakness in Barro's argument. He treats clemency for Snowden as if it would meaningfully weaken norms against leaking classified information even though people in power leak classified information all the time without being punished for it. Jack Shafer made this vital point at length in a column published almost immediately following the first stories sourced to Snowden. "Without defending Snowden for breaking his vow to safeguard secrets," he wrote, "he’s only done in the macro what the national security establishment does in the micro every day of the week to manage, manipulate and influence ongoing policy debates."

The difference is that the constant leaks that serve those in power seldom get to the point where prosecution is considered. Indeed, they are seldom even noticed they happen so often. Shafer writes:

President George W. Bush’s administration declassified or leaked whole barrels of intelligence, raw and otherwise, to convince the public and Congress making war on Iraq was a good idea. Bush himself ordered the release of classified prewar intelligence about Iraq through Vice President Dick Cheney and Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to New York Times reporter Judith Miller in July 2003...
And the Obama Administration?

In 2010, NBC News reporter Michael Isikoff detailed similar secrecy machinations by the Obama administration, which leaked to Bob Woodward “a wealth of eye-popping details from a highly classified briefing” to President-elect Barack Obama two days after the November 2008 election. Among the disclosures to appear in Woodward’s book “Obama’s Wars” were, Isikoff wrote, “the code names of previously unknown NSA programs, the existence of a clandestine paramilitary army run by the CIA in Afghanistan, and details of a secret Chinese cyberpenetration of Obama and John McCain campaign computers.”

The secrets shared with Woodward were so delicate Obama transition chief John Podesta was barred from attendance at the briefing, which was conducted inside a windowless, secure room known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or “SCIF.” Isikoff asked, quite logically, how the Obama administration could pursue a double standard in which it prosecuted mid-level bureaucrats and military officers for their leaks to the press but allowed administration officials to dispense bigger secrets to Woodward.
And "in 2012, as the presidential campaigns gathered speed, after the New York Times published stories about classified programs, including the 'kill list,' the drone program, details about the Osama bin Laden raid, and Stuxnet, all considered successes by the administration. The reports infuriated Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who essentially accused the Obama White House of leaking these top secrets for political gain."

The final category of leak that Shafer chronicles is perhaps closest of all to what Edward Snowden did, and if you read to the excerpt's end I fully agree with its conclusion:

Sometimes when policy debates get driven underground by secrecy, members of the governing elite band together and tell their story to the press. The most recent example of this banding would be the 2005 storiesin the New York Times about a previous secret NSA surveillance program. The Times series by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau enraged the Bush White House, but there nobody was charged with leaking because the series portrayed itself (accurately, I would guess) as the product of intense, internal government dissent. As Risen and Lichtblau wrote, nearly “a dozen current and former officials” spoke to the paper anonymously about the program “because of their concerns about the operation’s legality and oversight.”

The willingness of the government to punish leakers is inversely proportional to the leakers’ rank and status, which is bad news for someone so lacking in those attributes as Edward Snowden. But as the Snowden prosecution commences, we should question his selective prosecution. Let’s ask, as Isikoff did of the Obama administration officials who leaked to Woodward, why Snowden is singled out for punishment when he’s essentially done what the insider dissenters did when they spoke with Risen and Lichtblau in 2005 about an invasive NSA program. He deserves the same justice and the same punishment they received.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc ... nt/282759/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[JohnStOnge]

Don't know. We all know have an idea as to what the law is and he certainly knew he'd be breaking US law by doing what he did. If you break the law you know what the consequences can be.

But I'm glad he did what he did. There are countless examples in history of situations in which breaking the laws of the society of the place and time was the right thing to do. And I think this is an example of such an instance. Don't know if his motivation was noble or not. But it was right that somebody throw at least some wrench into the idea that the desire for security trumps everything else and exposed the frightening power of our intelligence apparatus.

Now if we can just somehow get public opinion to start evolving away from the "if it will save lives I'm for it" mentality. Not only when it comes to "terrorism" but when it comes to just about everything else including food safety, traffic safety, etc. "Safety First" is not the right way to be. "Liberty First" is.

[Chizzang]

Snowden is a damn hero.

The administration should be the ones being prosecuted...and most of them,, along with Congress, should be in jail.

WTF harm did Snowden do? What harm did the WikiLeaks release do? All it did was embarrass our fat cats in Washington.

Several judges and Obama's own panel said that there is NO proof (none, zero) that metadata collection has done a single thing to stop terrorism. Not one damn thing.

Once again, we are all bowing down to "national security" scare tactics when in fact, it has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with several small companies making gobs of money selling programming and over-the-top weapons to our government...funded with our tax money.

Obushma has gone after more whistleblowers than all previous Presidents COMBINED...and you folks want to hang Snowden?

For what? Some damned idea of "order" that is necessary to preserve our country?



Get real. Obama and Bush both held press conferences, simply to improve their ratings, that gave away far more secrets about how our military special forces work. They both killed THOUSANDS of our troops, while lying out their azz, for what?

Look, I'm all for blowing the crap out of anyone that wants to attack America, but hardly anyone in some backwoods country really wants to put much effort into killing Americans...they simply are trying to live in their own little neighborhoods.

Hey, let's send in our military to attack the Midwest states because there are a hundred whack jobs that want to take down the United States government.

Or, hey, send our uniformed boys into Detroit to set up outposts...and then send them on Search and Destroy missions to kill those mother fvckers that are wrecking normal people's days. Obama will call it the "right war"...and be sure to send in some drones to attack the families of anyone we think has bad ideas.

C'mon, folks, this, "Snowden is a bad guy" obsession is absolutely ridiculous. He exposed our government for what is is...a bunch of clowns catering to their own self interests and big business' desire to make more money off our people. The same "super secret" data gathering technology is conveniently being used by corporations to monitor people's behaviors. Duh.

I enjoy the spirit of this ^ post... its 100% AMERICAN

[YoUDeeMan]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... ed_he.html

It is true that Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance of American citizens—far vaster than any outsider had suspected, in some cases vaster than the agency’s overseers on the secret FISA court had permitted—have triggered a valuable debate, leading possibly to much-needed reforms.

If that were all that Snowden had done, if his stolen trove of beyond-top-secret documents had dealt only with the NSA’s domestic surveillance, then some form of leniency might be worth discussing.

But Snowden did much more than that. The documents that he gave the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman and the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald have, so far, furnished stories about the NSA’s interception of email traffic, mobile phone calls, and radio transmissions of Taliban fighters in Pakistan’s northwest territories; about an operation to gauge the loyalties of CIA recruits in Pakistan; about NSA email intercepts to assist intelligence assessments of what’s going on inside Iran; about NSA surveillance of cellphone calls “worldwide,” an effort that (in the Post’s words) “allows it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.” In his first interview with the South China Morning Post, Snowden revealed that the NSA routinely hacks into hundreds of computers in China and Hong Kong.

These operations have nothing to do with domestic surveillance or even spying on allies. They are not illegal, improper, or (in the context of 21st-century international politics) immoral. Exposing such operations has nothing to do with “whistle-blowing.”

Let's address these individually:

1) "The documents that he gave the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman and the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald have, so far, furnished stories about the NSA’s interception of email traffic, mobile phone calls, and radio transmissions of Taliban fighters in Pakistan’s northwest territories"

Seriously? Obama told the world how we found Osama…it was all over the news. We tracked cell phone calls and e-mails of Al Qaeda all over the world, including northern Pakistan...should we kill Obama for exposing that information, or does everyone give him a pass because it made him seem smart and in control of things?

Everyone in the world knows we’ve been tracking enemy radio transmissions since WWII. But now that Snowden has rehashed that info, including our government’s own admission of how we track AQ and other bad guys, we want to hang Snowden? WTF kind of thinking is that?

2) about an operation to gauge the loyalties of CIA recruits in Pakistan;

Huh? Let’s admit one thing…we lie to the Pakistanis and they lie to us. In fact, our whole relationship with Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Egypt, and virtually the whole world is based upon lies – especially our government’s lies to our own population. Heck, our government lies to us about us…but it is only for our protection and best interest.

The riot part of all this is that our CIA is operating not-so-covertly in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and they are giving away hundreds of millions of our taxpayer dollars (almost entirely funded under the table, in black box funding), to purchase the "loyalty" of warlords (WARLORDS...hello) in both countries. These warlords have PROVEN to be as unreliable as, well, warlords. There have been numerous articles about these warlords taking our money for “loyalty,” and then buying guns for their people, and then launching attacks on our military. And yet, we continue to purchase “loyalty” from these really bad people who do really bad things to other people around them while continuously and openly telling us that they don’t want us around. Want a funny story...our CIA had a shop keeper on their payroll who was an “informant”. That informant was calling in drone strikes on random people because he was not a really good informant due to the small, yet relatively important, fact that he actually had absolutely ZERO connections to the local Taliban or AQ folks, but he wanted to continue to get money from his CIA handler (true story).

Face it, we are in a backwoods country that has always had infighting, and we expect loyalty from folks who know that we will sell them out in a heartbeat (and we have already, many times over)? Heck, we've repeatedly left our local loyal “recruits” alone as we exited their village and left them to be executed by the locals. Anyone remember our loyalty to our snitches in Vietnam? It is too comical that when Snowden supposedly “exposes” a CIA operation to gauge the loyalty of some recruits (an operation that had how much proven success versus the other failed loyalty operations?), an operation that has almost no long term probability of success, and no long term impact on the safety of Americans, and people want Snowden dead?

3) about NSA email intercepts to assist intelligence assessments of what’s going on inside Iran;

C’mon, no one can be serious about being upset about this. If you aren’t concerned about the NSA being able to snoop on our e-mails, and believed they already doing that, then how can anyone be upset/surprised that we would be using those capabilities against Iran…and how could anyone, including the Iranians, not think we were doing it? The Iranian government and military already knew we were spying on their communications, so what is the big deal? Where was the big failure in our national defense grid that Snowden let folks know we were reading Iranian e-mails? Again, it is as if we are to believe that the Iranians didn‘t read or view the Obama Administration’s own interviews and press releases regarding our intelligence gathering about AQ and Pakistan.

No, the only ones who might not have been clued in were some Iranian business folks…and that is probably why we are upset. Some fat cat Wall Street insider trading boys no longer have an early leg up on oil production information (or some other product).

4) about NSA surveillance of cellphone calls “worldwide,” an effort that (in the Post’s words) “allows it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.”

Again, Obama already announced that we tracked Osama and his buddies by connecting dots on their communications…e-mail and cell phone. Is the surprise (and the reason for hanging Snowden) that we were actually using that same technology “worldwide” instead of just on the AQ networks?

5) In his first interview with the South China Morning Post, Snowden revealed that the NSA routinely hacks into hundreds of computers in China and Hong Kong.

Shocking! Round up the usual suspects!

Wait, we’ve been complaining for YEARS that Chinese hackers have been hacking into our defense department and businesses. So Snowden should be hanged for corroborating that we have been doing the same thing? You’re joking, right?

Snowden is a hero for exposing our government and businesses as a bunch of self-serving clowns that have ZERO respect for the privacy or safety of the average American (or anyone else in the world). We are not in Afghanistan to protect Americans...we are not in Pakistan, Syria, Libya, Iraq, or anywhere else to protect the average American. We are not spying in Germany, Mexico, Britain, France, or anywhere else to protect Americans. We are doing these things to gain a financial advantage for some wealthy and well connected businessmen.

I'll say it again...the same super secret computer programs that were developed to track metadata for the NSA are now being used to track consumer behavior. FACT. That is not at all a coincidence.

[kalm]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... ed_he.html

Let's address these individually:

1) "The documents that he gave the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman and the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald have, so far, furnished stories about the NSA’s interception of email traffic, mobile phone calls, and radio transmissions of Taliban fighters in Pakistan’s northwest territories"

Seriously? Obama told the world how we found Osama…it was all over the news. We tracked cell phone calls and e-mails of Al Qaeda all over the world, including northern Pakistan...should we kill Obama for exposing that information, or does everyone give him a pass because it made him seem smart and in control of things?

Everyone in the world knows we’ve been tracking enemy radio transmissions since WWII. But now that Snowden has rehashed that info, including our government’s own admission of how we track AQ and other bad guys, we want to hang Snowden? WTF kind of thinking is that?

2) about an operation to gauge the loyalties of CIA recruits in Pakistan;

Huh? Let’s admit one thing…we lie to the Pakistanis and they lie to us. In fact, our whole relationship with Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Egypt, and virtually the whole world is based upon lies – especially our government’s lies to our own population. Heck, our government lies to us about us…but it is only for our protection and best interest.

The riot part of all this is that our CIA is operating not-so-covertly in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and they are giving away hundreds of millions of our taxpayer dollars (almost entirely funded under the table, in black box funding), to purchase the "loyalty" of warlords (WARLORDS...hello) in both countries. These warlords have PROVEN to be as unreliable as, well, warlords. There have been numerous articles about these warlords taking our money for “loyalty,” and then buying guns for their people, and then launching attacks on our military. And yet, we continue to purchase “loyalty” from these really bad people who do really bad things to other people around them while continuously and openly telling us that they don’t want us around. Want a funny story...our CIA had a shop keeper on their payroll who was an “informant”. That informant was calling in drone strikes on random people because he was not a really good informant due to the small, yet relatively important, fact that he actually had absolutely ZERO connections to the local Taliban or AQ folks, but he wanted to continue to get money from his CIA handler (true story).

Face it, we are in a backwoods country that has always had infighting, and we expect loyalty from folks who know that we will sell them out in a heartbeat (and we have already, many times over)? Heck, we've repeatedly left our local loyal “recruits” alone as we exited their village and left them to be executed by the locals. Anyone remember our loyalty to our snitches in Vietnam? It is too comical that when Snowden supposedly “exposes” a CIA operation to gauge the loyalty of some recruits (an operation that had how much proven success versus the other failed loyalty operations?), an operation that has almost no long term probability of success, and no long term impact on the safety of Americans, and people want Snowden dead?

3) about NSA email intercepts to assist intelligence assessments of what’s going on inside Iran;

C’mon, no one can be serious about being upset about this. If you aren’t concerned about the NSA being able to snoop on our e-mails, and believed they already doing that, then how can anyone be upset/surprised that we would be using those capabilities against Iran…and how could anyone, including the Iranians, not think we were doing it? The Iranian government and military already knew we were spying on their communications, so what is the big deal? Where was the big failure in our national defense grid that Snowden let folks know we were reading Iranian e-mails? Again, it is as if we are to believe that the Iranians didn‘t read or view the Obama Administration’s own interviews and press releases regarding our intelligence gathering about AQ and Pakistan.

No, the only ones who might not have been clued in were some Iranian business folks…and that is probably why we are upset. Some fat cat Wall Street insider trading boys no longer have an early leg up on oil production information (or some other product).

4) about NSA surveillance of cellphone calls “worldwide,” an effort that (in the Post’s words) “allows it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.”

Again, Obama already announced that we tracked Osama and his buddies by connecting dots on their communications…e-mail and cell phone. Is the surprise (and the reason for hanging Snowden) that we were actually using that same technology “worldwide” instead of just on the AQ networks?

5) In his first interview with the South China Morning Post, Snowden revealed that the NSA routinely hacks into hundreds of computers in China and Hong Kong.

Shocking! Round up the usual suspects!

Wait, we’ve been complaining for YEARS that Chinese hackers have been hacking into our defense department and businesses. So Snowden should be hanged for corroborating that we have been doing the same thing? You’re joking, right?

Snowden is a hero for exposing our government and businesses as a bunch of self-serving clowns that have ZERO respect for the privacy or safety of the average American (or anyone else in the world). We are not in Afghanistan to protect Americans...we are not in Pakistan, Syria, Libya, Iraq, or anywhere else to protect the average American. We are not spying in Germany, Mexico, Britain, France, or anywhere else to protect Americans. We are doing these things to gain a financial advantage for some wealthy and well connected businessmen.

I'll say it again...the same super secret computer programs that were developed to track metadata for the NSA are now being used to track consumer behavior. FACT. That is not at all a coincidence.

Ummm.....how do you say it.....? Motherfucking tits ripped off......?

[CID1990]

If he had stuck solely with the domestic eavesdropping fishing expeditions, then I could be onboard with some kind of qualified clemency.


But he also gave a away a lot of tradecraft and specifics that had no bearing on domestic abuses and for that he can share a little box with that namby pamby Army dude/dudette and the FBI guy who gave all those secrets to the Russians.

[Chizzang]

If he had stuck solely with the domestic eavesdropping fishing expeditions, then I could be onboard with some kind of qualified clemency.


But he also gave a away a lot of tradecraft and specifics that had no bearing on domestic abuses and for that he can share a little box with that namby pamby Army dude/dudette and the FBI guy who gave all those secrets to the Russians.

I don't really care what happens to him honestly
but
How can something sitting on the internet be a secret or safe..?
and like TOR is some big secret

and for every Snowden...
Their are 1500 little Chinese brains unearthing motherloads of our "Top Secrets"

[Ibanez]

If he had stuck solely with the domestic eavesdropping fishing expeditions, then I could be onboard with some kind of qualified clemency.


But he also gave a away a lot of tradecraft and specifics that had no bearing on domestic abuses and for that he can share a little box with that namby pamby Army dude/dudette and the FBI guy who gave all those secrets to the Russians.

This is pretty on point.

[CID1990]

If he had stuck solely with the domestic eavesdropping fishing expeditions, then I could be onboard with some kind of qualified clemency.


But he also gave a away a lot of tradecraft and specifics that had no bearing on domestic abuses and for that he can share a little box with that namby pamby Army dude/dudette and the FBI guy who gave all those secrets to the Russians.

I don't really care what happens to him honestly
but
How can something sitting on the internet be a secret or safe..?
and like TOR is some big secret

and for every Snowden...
Their are 1500 little Chinese brains unearthing motherloads of our "Top Secrets"

It isnt the things that are "sitting on the Internet" that have been damaging.

But you are correct- we are VERY open. The Chinese and Russians don't know how easy they really have it with us. They'd still be flying steam gauge technology in their airplanes if not for all proprietary tech we have willingly given them