Earlier quoted context omitted.
He leaked a lot more US government programs than that one, and all of those were legal. Had he only leaked phone metadata collection, he would have a case.
It took 7 years for the courts to finally figure that out even though it seemed like ridiculous overreach to everyone. Off the top of my head I recollect they were intercepting hardware like switches and compromising it, inserting spying equipment in Google data centers forceing them to now to end to end encryption and many other shady things. Not to mention the collection of zero days that almost certainly will get…
Time to Pardon Edward Snowden?
101–110 of 131 posts
Re: Time to Pardon Edward Snowden?
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disagree. I think he’s a tool of Russia and got paid to tarnish America and diplomacy worldwide.
He simply tarnished certain federal bureaucracies, not America at large.
Re: Time to Pardon Edward Snowden?
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
The American government tarnished itself, Snowden just revealed it to us all (at great personal sacrifice). I consider him a patriot.
Again, I disagree. He exposed what basically any G20 nation does and lives pretty damn well by virtue of doing the bidding of a foreign government that seeks to undermine democracy in the world. Somehow that makes him a patriot.
Re: Time to Pardon Edward Snowden?
#104The reason he will never be pardoned has nothing to do with if his leaks were merited or not merited (they clearly were as the activities of the govt were proven illegal). Its because then you green light a govt leaker in critical programs you open pandoras box for govt secrets spilling out and you can lose control. Keeping employees/contractors in fear that they will never stop chasing you is a good way to stop peop…
> Keeping employees/contractors in fear that they will never stop chasing you is a good way to stop people from doing this. This is contradicting to the idea of government existing for people and serving people. If government uses fear to reduce accountability, it needs to be changed.
Re: Time to Pardon Edward Snowden?
#105Three bipartisan legislations were introduced yesterday related to this. https://mobile.twitter.com/_nalexander/status/13124054429251...
Re: Time to Pardon Edward Snowden?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you actually believe it was news that the NSA is intercepting signals from and in Syria, I may have a bridge for sale you'd be interested in.
How about a list of compromised Chinese telecommunications systems? It's not surprising that the NSA would infiltrate those systems in order to complete some of its objectives, but the list of which systems were compromised when is sensitive information that Snowden leaked right after revealing he was in Hong Kong in a misguided attempt to gain asylum there.
Re: Time to Pardon Edward Snowden?
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
This assertion is counter to the core principles of the nation's founding — that one's rights are innate, and the constitution simply places limits on the government regarding what can be regulated and to what extent. That means we recognize that every person of any nationality has the right to free speech, fair and speedy trials, no torture, etc. If you mean other nations don't recognize the same rights, then I gran…
That's your interpretation, but the same text has been considered perfectly compatible with chattle slavery for more than a hundred years, starting immediately as it was written. So I don't think it's as clear cut as the text might make you think.
Re: Time to Pardon Edward Snowden?
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
> only American citizens have rights protected by the US constitution. Untrue, though this is a popular myth. There are a few Constitutional rights explicitly restricted to citizens (voting is the big one), but pretty much all the rest are rights of people generally that the government (either federal or state, depending on which Constitutional provision is involved) is restricted from intruding on. Both the plain te…
The NSA was not allowed to spy on US citizens. >U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said that the U.S. surveillance of phone records was indeed illegal. The U.S. surveillance
That's because of statutory restrictions (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) on surveillance of citizens adopted in the wake of the foreign intelligence apparatus being broadly used against domestic opposition, not Constitutional limits on rights to citizens.
From the ruling at issue: «We conclude that the government may have violated the Fourth Amendment and did violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”) when it collected the telephony metadata of millions of Americans»
Re: Time to Pardon Edward Snowden?
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Defecting against everyone you meet is a losing strategy in an iterated multi-actor prisoner's dilemma. Establishing and maintaining mutual trust, to cooperate with those who are willing to cooperate with you, is in a nation's interests.
> " ...everyone you meet... " As the old joke goes "Don't anthropomorphize countries; they hate it when you do that." There is no guarantee of continuity in leadership or national policy because of periodic leadership turnover (elections, etc.) so exactly what would a country be extending trust to?
Re: Time to Pardon Edward Snowden?
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
It took 7 years for the courts to finally figure that out even though it seemed like ridiculous overreach to everyone. Off the top of my head I recollect they were intercepting hardware like switches and compromising it, inserting spying equipment in Google data centers forceing them to now to end to end encryption and many other shady things. Not to mention the collection of zero days that almost certainly will get…
You make it seem like they’re just hitting Googles hardware randomly. It’s been postulated publicly that spies have been found at Google that facilitate information to the CCP. If I were a defense organization this would concern me and I believe they have legal clout to act. Liberal does not mean lawless. You expect USA to do nothing but sit back and accept it’s just a part of doing business to get spied on and IP th…
My point was they were essentially MITM'ing all traffic in google data centers. I fail to see how that "makes the US more secure".
"The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials.
By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-i...
Hacking private companies and spying on Americans seems outside their charter IMO.