The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell.
The Guardian, after several days of interviews, is revealing his identity at his request. From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity. "I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong," he said.
Snowden will go down in history as one of America's most consequential whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning. He is responsible for handing over material from one of the world's most secretive organisations – the NSA.
Snowden is a civilian, so they can't put him in the same jail as Bradley Manning. Plus he knew to get himself outside the USA before giving up the information, and has a medical defense (epilepsy) in case TPTB get their hands on him.
I don't know whether or not Hong Kong/China has an extradition treaty with the USA, so it will be interesting to see what they try to do to him.
They've made it clear they want to go after these leaks. Only leaks that make Obama look good are acceptable. I don't think they'll get this guy though. Too many people support what he did. Way more than Bradly Manning. Plus Chinese extradition sounds highly suspect.
Last edited by RuralEngineer on Sun Jun 09, 2013 9:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.
If you listen to the interview with him from over the weekend he comes across as a very reasonable person who has thought things out including the fact that if the US (through covert methods) wants to kill him for his actions, there is nothing he could do.
This is not to say I agree with what he did (I have mixed feelings) but one can certainly understand it.
It was good being the party of Robin Hood. Until they morphed into the Sheriff of Nottingham
I wish that our government didn't do things that made such actions by individuals necessary.
The fact that he has the moral high ground in this situation should go without saying. How can anyone argue that a person who blows the whistle on what surely must be illegal surveillance of U.S. citizens should go to prison? That's something that would happen in a banana republic or other thugocracy, not here in the "land of the free."
He will, of course, be demonized by the government in every way possible. They always do this to anyone who challenges their authority.
To me, though, ANY government program that basically spies on everything that we say, write or do surely can't be legal, right? What kind of warrant could possibly authorize such sweeping surveillance? I would like to meet the douchebag judge who would sign such a warrant. It would be like taking a warrant to a judge asking to search 100,000,000 homes because you think that a handful of them may contain criminals.
At this point, five years into the Obama experience, what we have seen over and over is that the truth is exactly the opposite of what any politician or government tells you. All of that crap Obama ran on about hope and change has proven to be comically false. It's not that all Presidents don't do this sort of shady stuff, it's just that the level of hypocrisy that the Obama administration has brought to the job is just outrageous:
- The constant assassinations all over the world based on intelligence that no one is allowed to know about or review.
- The IRS used as a tool to harass political opponents.
- Spying on members of the same media that put Obama in power.
- Spying on the entire American citizenry under the thin cover of protecting us from "terrorism."
From now on, try this experiment: any time the government talks about protecting us from terrorism, substitute the word "Salmonella" for "terrorism", and see how stupid it sounds. Salmonella kills about twice as many U.S. citizens every year as terrorism does and it's hard to imagine any politicians agitating for a PATRIOT Act to battle the evil forces of Salmonella. My point is that the more time that passes the more obvious it becomes that the PATRIOT Act was never about protecting us from terrorism. Think about it.
As much as I have been hesitant to jump on the anti-Obama bandwagon over things like where he was born and whether he is really as liberal as people said he was (why hasn't anyone on Wall Street gone to jail if he's so anti-business?), but the last few months of lies, deception and heavy handedness has made him look more and more like a wolf in liberal's clothing.
When this kind of stuff happened under Bush, you could almost understand how the President may not have actually known that much about it based upon his limited mental abilities and the way his advisors constantly exploited this to their advantage (if you had watched the way he worked in Texas in the 1990s you might understand that the point I am making is not really a partisan thing), but I'm not willing to be so generous with Obama. Whatever his weaknesses may be, Obama's not stupid, and Joe Biden is certainly no Dick Cheney.
Q: “Do you have funny shaped balloons?”
A: “Not unless round is funny.”
Reub wrote:
Is this how they get the "goods" on General Petraeus and Chief Justice Roberts and others to ensure their "cooperation"?
As far as Petraeus goes, that's just an example of getting burned by the fire that you helped to set.
As far as Chief Justice Roberts goes, I think that he's just a smart guy whose principles got ground up by the chipper-shredder of political expediency, which is a fancy way of saying that he came to town an innocent girl and incrementally became a ho, like many hos do.
Picture Sheriff Andy Taylor five years after going to work for the Chicago Police Department and that's John Roberts.
Q: “Do you have funny shaped balloons?”
A: “Not unless round is funny.”
MediumTex wrote:
Picture Sheriff Andy Taylor five years after going to work for the Chicago Police Department and that's John Roberts.
Let's write a pilot.
Well first off Andy Taylor wouldn't be caught dead living and working with all those yankees. Now the New Orleans police... that might work. And they make Mexico look like a paragon of virtue and honest government.
Trumpism is not a philosophy or a movement. It's a cult.
MediumTex wrote:
Picture Sheriff Andy Taylor five years after going to work for the Chicago Police Department and that's John Roberts.
Let's write a pilot.
Well first off Andy Taylor wouldn't be caught dead living and working with all those yankees. Now the New Orleans police... that might work. And they make Mexico look like a paragon of virtue and honest government.
Andy Taylor patrolling the French Quarter would be about like one of those guys from Starship Troopers patrolling a bug hole.
I think that Andy's game would just be too subtle and nuanced for the streets of New Orleans. He would probably be about halfway into his first story to a group of drug dealers about how they were really not that much different than Otis when one of the twitchier members of the group would suddenly start filling Andy with 9mm rounds.
What you would need, I think, would be to pair Andy with someone more seasoned in urban law enforcement. Maybe another celebrity cop, except this one would be from somewhere like Detroit.
It would be similar to one of those buddy cop shows like Starsky and Hutch.
It could be called Robocop and Andy in the Big Easy.
Q: “Do you have funny shaped balloons?”
A: “Not unless round is funny.”
Xan wrote:
Anybody watch that show where Steven Seagal was a cop out in Metairie?
Yeah, I watched it when it came on. He worked for the Sheriff's Department. Pretty interesting, but I wondered how much of it was staged for him. He'd arrest criminals and they'd be happy, because it gave them a chance to meet him.
