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Is Snowden a patriot?

Is Snowden a patriot?

  • Absolutley! The people have the right to know!

    Votes: 37 56.1%
  • No

    Votes: 19 28.8%
  • NO WAY!

    Votes: 10 15.2%

  • Total voters
    66
There is a difference between knowing they can be tapped, and on what basis they may be tapped.

The "universal wiretapping" thing is a great strawman though. You should definitely stick to that, no one will notice the lack of foundation.

How is it a strawman if that's exactly what Snowden revealed?
 
A government of for and by the people should be accountable to the people and the people should know what their government is doing. I don't concede authority to the government to spy on me, it is the consent of the governed where our government is suppose to derive its authority. If this isn't the case than we are all living under despotic rule.
 
How is it a strawman if that's exactly what Snowden revealed?

Because Snowden revealed we have a program that tracks metadata, not a universal wiretapping program. Completely different things.
 
Yes he is a patriot. He is more deserving of the nobel peace prize than that asshole Obama.I do wonder if Obama wears it when he is droning little kids.
 
Yes he is a patriot. He is more deserving of the nobel peace prize than that asshole Obama.I do wonder if Obama wears it when he is droning little kids.

Read the following link to get a better understanding of the insidious nature of the threat that Snowden has revealed, and the NSA response that this surveillance was public knowledge (bullcrap). Like knowing your buddy caught a fish, but not knowing that the fish weighed 4,000 pounds, had nine eyes, sixteen horns and 32 rows of teeth. Be suspicious of posters who state that this was public knowledge as parroters of the NSA line.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/laura-poitras-snowden.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp

"This past January, Laura Poitras received a curious e-mail from an anonymous stranger requesting her public encryption key. For almost two years, Poitras had been working on a documentary about surveillance, and she occasionally received queries from strangers. She replied to this one and sent her public key — allowing him or her to send an encrypted e-mail that only Poitras could open, with her private key — but she didn’t think much would come of it. The stranger responded with instructions for creating an even more secure system to protect their exchanges. Promising sensitive information, the stranger told Poitras to select long pass phrases that could withstand a brute-force attack by networked computers. “Assume that your adversary is capable of a trillion guesses per second,” the stranger wrote. Before long, Poitras received an encrypted message that outlined a number of secret surveillance programs run by the government. She had heard of one of them but not the others. After describing each program, the stranger wrote some version of the phrase, “This I can prove.”
Seconds after she decrypted and read the e-mail, Poitras disconnected from the Internet and removed the message from her computer. “I thought, O.K., if this is true, my life just changed,” she told me last month. “It was staggering, what he claimed to know and be able to provide. I just knew that I had to change everything.”
Poitras remained wary of whoever it was she was communicating with. She worried especially that a government agent might be trying to trick her into disclosing information about the people she interviewed for her documentary, including Julian Assange, the editor of WikiLeaks. “I called him out,” Poitras recalled. “I said either you have this information and you are taking huge risks or you are trying to entrap me and the people I know, or you’re crazy.”
The answers were reassuring but not definitive. Poitras did not know the stranger’s name, sex, age or employer (C.I.A.? N.S.A.? Pentagon?). In early June, she finally got the answers. Along with her reporting partner, Glenn Greenwald, a former lawyer and a columnist for The Guardian, Poitras flew to Hong Kong and met the N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden, who gave them thousands of classified documents, setting off a major controversy over the extent and legality of government surveillance. Poitras was right that, among other things, her life would never be the same. "
 
When you delegate authority to the Federal Government, these are the types of activities that they engage in. I have seen many characterizations of this as wiretapping and it definitely is not that; however, it is keeping a massive index of linkages between phone numbers and presumably locations, etc. If this information is being accessed without controls, then that is definitely wrong. If it is being accessed with court approval in specific cases for any number that is associated with a specific number, then I see no objections.

Having a terrorist mistakenly call you is probably going to be very inconvenient. If this is everything that is being presented, then no, Snowden is not a patriot.
 
"If it is being accessed with court approval in specific cases for any number that is associated with a specific number, then I see no objections."

The FISA court is approving 3 month intercepts of ALL Verizon phone data. Not specific phone numbers, etc. It is doing the same thing with all carriers including ISPs, etc. They can listen to any or all of those calls and as I understand it, they can reconstruct any from the Utah storage depot.
 
"The FISA court is approving 3 month intercepts of ALL Verizon phone data. Not specific phone numbers, etc. It is doing the same thing with all carriers including ISPs, etc. They can listen to any or all of those calls and as I understand it, they can reconstruct any from the Utah storage depot."

You are mixing up the consolidation of the information (indexing and storage in a database) with accessing that information. You are making up the part about "listening to any and all of those calls". It is the accessing of that information which requires approval on a case-by-case basis and I've seen stories that indicate how many times that has happened--I don't have it handy.

I would prefer that it not be the government that is consolidating the information but I can understand their desire to do so. There are variances in formatting, differences in information captured and the logistics of having all the telco's and ISP's transferring the information. Data is powerful, but it is never pretty.

You should be more concerned about what each individual company does with that information and anything the government would do can't penetrate aluminum foil.
 
I believe Snowden is a whistleblower and a patriotic American and its almost criminal the way he is treated. The American people have a right to know all the corrupt decisions Obama and his administration are making.
 
Again, to examine information about American citizens, there is a process the NSA must go through. Obviously they've gone through the process more than once, and have done an in-depth examination of American citizens. But that process includes court approval.

If you can't prove that the NSA bypassed the approval process (I know for a fact that you can't, because it is something I'm interested in myself), then the constitutionality remains intact at the time being.

On a side note, I do think that the court process is the weak link in the chain. I have not been able to find information about the criteria the court holds a request to before granting it, and I do know they've granted above 90% of the 500 some odd requests made. But, there is a process for challenging the constitutionality of the program, and thus far, it is legal.

Maybe you don't like it, but that doesn't diminish the program or the US Constitution in the slightest.

The fact is we don't really know what the U.S. government is doing with this data. The Washington Post had a story about a week ago which showed that a special division within the DEA had been receiving tips from the NSA. The DEA would receive evidence from the DEA illegally and reconstruct their entire investigation to make it look like the investigation was done legally in their prosecution of drug crimes.

That is not legal, and it is an example where the NSA has went beyond just terrorism and into ordinary crimes by American citizens.
 
The fact is we don't really know what the U.S. government is doing with this data. The Washington Post had a story about a week ago which showed that a special division within the DEA had been receiving tips from the NSA. The DEA would receive evidence from the DEA illegally and reconstruct their entire investigation to make it look like the investigation was done legally in their prosecution of drug crimes.

That is not legal, and it is an example where the NSA has went beyond just terrorism and into ordinary crimes by American citizens.

That program is definitely illegal. Regardless of the illegality of specific uses such as this, the program itself is constitutional because the specific uses are different from the program.
 
Some of the conversations surrounding this amaze me, the reason being... We've had them all before.

First - We already knew the government was monitoring communications since 911. People who were surprised by this, AGAIN, were simply not paying attention.
This was a part of the old Patriot Act debates more than a decade ago.

Second - I am very close to someone with a security clearance. This person tells me NOTHING. And if this person did tell me anything at all of a secure nature, then this person would be breaking the law. Snowden broke the law. He is a criminal. PERIOD.

Third - Both Americans and Terrorists alike seemed to have forgotten that the Government monitors communications. For us Americans it has had zero effect. One thing you do NOT hear about is a situation where information was used to harm a normal American.
But for the Terrorists and other enemies of our Nation... the fact that they had forgotten was HUGE.
Now that Snowden has made a spectacle about it and made the news world wide, we no longer have this advantage towards our enemies. They are reminded and in some cases even have great detail as to the very method and type of snooping we perform.
So Yes, of course Snowden harmed our national security. There is no doubt about this.
 
Is Snowden a patriot for leaking that the NSA was tapping thousands of phone calls without warrants?

Yes.The government has absolutely no business spying on the people.
 
Some of the conversations surrounding this amaze me, the reason being... We've had them all before.

First - We already knew the government was monitoring communications since 911. People who were surprised by this, AGAIN, were simply not paying attention.
This was a part of the old Patriot Act debates more than a decade ago.

Second - I am very close to someone with a security clearance. This person tells me NOTHING. And if this person did tell me anything at all of a secure nature, then this person would be breaking the law. Snowden broke the law. He is a criminal. PERIOD.

Third - Both Americans and Terrorists alike seemed to have forgotten that the Government monitors communications. For us Americans it has had zero effect. One thing you do NOT hear about is a situation where information was used to harm a normal American.
But for the Terrorists and other enemies of our Nation... the fact that they had forgotten was HUGE.
Now that Snowden has made a spectacle about it and made the news world wide, we no longer have this advantage towards our enemies. They are reminded and in some cases even have great detail as to the very method and type of snooping we perform.
So Yes, of course Snowden harmed our national security. There is no doubt about this.


Sounds like you are real comfortable with the CIA up your arse. I do not want any "big brother" in my face, up my nose, around my house, in my phone, etc. The CIA is running armies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, etc., and operating drone programs, and its "support" administration (as opposed to Intelligence gathering) is ubiquitous. To me, it seems to be the largest problem in our Nation. It operates like a shadow gov't and even the President seems afraid to confront the agency. The NSA is just another CIA hub.
 



Sounds like you are real comfortable with the CIA up your arse. I do not want any "big brother" in my face, up my nose, around my house, in my phone, etc. The CIA is running armies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, etc., and operating drone programs, and its "support" administration (as opposed to Intelligence gathering) is ubiquitous. To me, it seems to be the largest problem in our Nation. It operates like a shadow gov't and even the President seems afraid to confront the agency. The NSA is just another CIA hub.

Whether I like it or not was never the subject.
Truthfully, I was severely opposed to it under Bush. I am much more relaxed about it under Obama.

The subject is about Snowden and whether or not he is a Patriot, however. Not about my personal hypocrisy.

Snowden told us things we already knew. Maybe he pointed to more direct instances, but under Bush we already knew these things were occurring.
If I am not mistaken, there are 10 year old debate threads in this very forum criticizing Bush for the same type things Snowden has presented.

Snowden broke the law and in the process he also shined a spotlight for our enemies on exactly how we have been catching them so well.
Information our enemies already knew, just as the American people already knew it. Yet it is also information the American people seemed to have forgotten, just as our enemies seemed to had forgotten.
This world wide reminder has harmed our security.
Snowden is a criminal and must be prosecuted as such or we can never again prosecute any traitor that breaches their security clearance.
 
Whether I like it or not was never the subject.
Truthfully, I was severely opposed to it under Bush. I am much more relaxed about it under Obama.

The subject is about Snowden and whether or not he is a Patriot, however. Not about my personal hypocrisy.

Snowden told us things we already knew. Maybe he pointed to more direct instances, but under Bush we already knew these things were occurring.
If I am not mistaken, there are 10 year old debate threads in this very forum criticizing Bush for the same type things Snowden has presented.

Snowden broke the law and in the process he also shined a spotlight for our enemies on exactly how we have been catching them so well.
Information our enemies already knew, just as the American people already knew it. Yet it is also information the American people seemed to have forgotten, just as our enemies seemed to had forgotten.
This world wide reminder has harmed our security.
Snowden is a criminal and must be prosecuted as such or we can never again prosecute any traitor that breaches their security clearance.


I certainly disagree. You are parroting the gov't line that everybody already knew about this, but that is not true. I remember my angst when the Patriot Act was passed, but it never was emphasized just how pervasive the eavesdropping on the USA public would be and that is the problem. Snowden has brought attention to our rights being violated on a grand scale, both the rights and the amount. Also, outright lying to Congressional committees questioning these activities. The lies are the flashing red lights that they all know that what they are doing is illegal. Beyond even the extreme activities legalized by the Patriot Act.
 
I certainly disagree. You are parroting the gov't line that everybody already knew about this, but that is not true. I remember my angst when the Patriot Act was passed, but it never was emphasized just how pervasive the eavesdropping on the USA public would be and that is the problem. Snowden has brought attention to our rights being violated on a grand scale, both the rights and the amount. Also, outright lying to Congressional committees questioning these activities. The lies are the flashing red lights that they all know that what they are doing is illegal. Beyond even the extreme activities legalized by the Patriot Act.

I find it ironic that Conservatives thought this was fine when it started 10 years ago under Bush, whereas I thought it was a horrific abuse bordering on treason at the time.
Now, under a Liberal President, Conservatives think its is a horrific abuse, and I think it is fine.
The only thing I am learning from this is that the entity in control seems to matter more than the actions, rules, laws or lack there of... to all of us.

Back to the actual topic though...
Whether you are only for this with Bush as the leader or you are only for this with Obama as the leader, what Snowden did was break the Law.
For the Leadership's opposition to call this man a patriot is on par with the far left Liberals calling illegal aliens patriots for breaking the law and doing something "they" agree with.
Just because a person stands up for something you personally agree with, it does not make them a Patriot. A criminal is still a criminal, even if you do agree with their crime.
 
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