If all you're going to do is hurl insults at me like that traitor remark, I don't see how we could have a respectful debate, so goodbye.
Weren't you the guy who not a couple of pages back was suggesting that I was a Der Staat Der Staat Uber Alles sort of fellow?
1) It comes down to him putting the American people before the politicians.
No, it doesn't. It comes down to putting the American people behind
himself. The American people are not well-served by the four laptops full of everything he could download being made available to the Chinese and Russians. The American people are not served by Snowden exposing ways in which we spy on the Chinese, or observe them spying on us. The American people are not served by enabling Al-Qaeda planning efforts. The American people are not served by exposing the ways in which we watch Europeans, or the ways in which we watch them watching us. The American people are not served by his undermining our alliances. The American people are not served by his being a propaganda tool for thug dictatorships. The American people are not served by his exposing our joint operations with allies around the world. The only person Snowden appears interested in serving is Snowden.
We deserve to know about this program. They can not just do whatever the hell they want.
Right on the latter, wrong on the former. The American people have decided through their representatives that they wish to have an Intelligence Community to enable National Defense, and that they wish to share the authority for running and overseeing the actions of the Intelligence Community with the three branches of government so that each may halt any others' abuses. The American people have
not decided to authorize individual civilian contractors to make life/death or Constitutional decisions on their behalf in contradiction to the system that they have set in place.
2) There's no good reason to keep this a secret.
There are fantastic reasons to keep this a secret, the most important of which being that as soon as it is not a secret, it becomes useless. Making the specifics of a classified intelligence program public knowledge is like going to war with a rifle, but without any rounds. You can go "pew pew!" at bad guys all day long, but you've neutered yourself.
Which is why our enemies are already changing their TTP's, and we are scrambling - hoping - to be able to adjust and keep up.
3) You and your family have an exponentially higher chance of dying in a head on collision on the way home from church than you have of being attacked by terrorists.
you are correct which does not alter in any way the fact that the government is charged by our citizens from protecting us from the latter. We also have a higher chance of dying in a car accident than being gunned down by gangs. That is not a good argument for getting rid of the police.
4) So because they were already spying on us, that somehow changes things? Are you the type of person that when something's screwed up, you throw your hands up and say "It was already like that!"
No, I try to fix it and, if it's the way it is because changing it would do more damage, I mitigate it and work around. That being said, the USG is not spying on you. Despite what the tinfoil-hat crowd is saying, no one is listening to your cell phone calls. Your point-to-point data,
which has been collected since there were phones, is being run through a search algorithm so that if you are calling or emailing or texting known terrorist contacts, someone
can start spying on you -
which they should.
5-6) I definitely don't fault him for not using the proper channels (whether they existed or not), because I know nothing would have come from it.
BS. You don't get any kind of excuse for going through non-proper channels unless you've first tried to do it right.
You like bringing up IG so much. Tell me about the last time an E-1 has called IG to challenge a presidential or congressional decision.
Snowden wasn't an E1, he was a civilian contractor with a TS/SCI clearance. And guess what, if the President and the Congress and the Judiciary all come to the same decision?
Snowden does not have the right to counter it.
7) I don't think it has anything to do with him wanting to be famous. People keep saying "He's just doing this for himself". Which makes no sense at all. Yes, he's completely ****ing himself over, ruining his own life, to benefit himself. He just might spend the rest of his life in a cage, which he's doing to benefit himself.
:lol: yes, things haven't worked out for ole snowden nearly as well as he'd hoped. It seems that once again the world has failed to appreciate how special and deeply insightful he is :roll:. Read the guys' ramblings, its' all about how nobody else around him understood what was going on, how he Understood At A Deeper Level, he was the Only One Who Saw, etc. :roll: the guy must have been an insufferable co-worker.
8) I feel like Snowden could know it wouldn't work, just as I can tell you it wouldn't.
BS. Snowden had no way of knowing the depth of the Congressional read-in.
I once called IG on my 1SG for trying to blackmail me into re-enlisting, and all they did was talk to him. I had to get a lawyer through JAG and fight for 6 months before I won. And that's just challenging someone a few spots over me. How serious do you think a battle between the president and congress vs a contractor would go?
Hopefully he would get crushed, given that it wasn't the President + Congress against him, but rather the President+Congress+Judiciary against him. Then he could go back to being a little IT guy handing out JWICS passwords to people.
but forgive me, I notice you've failed to answer that end point there. Under the system you've described where every individual has the right to nullify the law as passed by Congress, signed by the President, and cleared through the Judiciary, what is to keep me rightfully from deciding that I think the existance of undercover agents violates Search and Seizure, and out every one of them? What is to keep me from making life/death decisions for other Americans on their behalf against their will as expressed through their representatives Just Because I Say So?