51–60 of 510 posts
It’s a travesty that Edward Snowden is still a fugitive in the United States. James Clapper went in front of congress and lied about the scope of surveillance on US citizens. Snowden saw it as his moral obligation to expose those lies, and he did it in the least destructive way possible by leaking the evidence to qualified journalists.
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It gets a bit complicated with the whole 5-eyes mutual back scratching thing though.
What mutual backscratching? No such program was in the Snowden leaks. If you're claiming that the US gets other countries to spy on its citizens, that would be utterly illegal.
Essentially what they’ve done is commit treason by colluding with hostile foreign powers to mutually spy on each others citizens, bypassing the pesky constitutional/charter limitations in the process.
In the right political climate we could Nuremberg trial 5 levels deep into the organizations responsible, I’m hopeful for that outcome.
Reminder: “I was just following orders/policy” wasn’t a defense then and it won’t be this time either.
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I found the treatment of Julian Assange to be the disgusting poltics; after that its just more of the same, innit?
No, it’s not the same because it doesn’t benefit him this time. Leftists are like libertarians, if libertarians only applied their principles to themselves. Bodily autonomy, firearm rights, private property, taxation, misinformation censorship, death penalty, etc. Whether or not they support it depends not on what it does but who it benefits, and so a left winger can never truly take a concrete position like “I suppo…
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The program he was most interested in leaking (PRISM) wasn't illegal at all. He had plenty of time to figure that out, but he didn't. In order to leak this perfectly legal program, he tried to get asylum in Hong Kong by leaking Chinese systems the NSA had compromised.
PRISM was both illegal and unconstitutional. The leadership of these agencies and the congressmen that enabled them on the intel committee are traitors to the republic, plain and simple. Note to mods: I understand HN isn’t for “waging ideological debate”, but this is an inherently political topic and the discussion is on-topic
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He had to take a quick dump of whatever he could and filter through it later. It's not like he could leisurely spend weeks vetting the docs.
The program he was most interested in leaking (PRISM) wasn't illegal at all. He had plenty of time to figure that out, but he didn't. In order to leak this perfectly legal program, he tried to get asylum in Hong Kong by leaking Chinese systems the NSA had compromised.
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What mutual backscratching? No such program was in the Snowden leaks. If you're claiming that the US gets other countries to spy on its citizens, that would be utterly illegal.
You’re correct, it would be utterly illegal and they are in fact doing it via the five eyes program (FVEY) Essentially what they’ve done is commit treason by colluding with hostile foreign powers to mutually spy on each others citizens, bypassing the pesky constitutional/charter limitations in the process. In the right political climate we could Nuremberg trial 5 levels deep into the organizations responsible, I’m ho…
If they are doing it, where's your evidence? You don't have it because otherwise, Klayman would have filed a lawsuit.
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Agreed. He worked with journalists to try the make the leak safe. Let’s focus on impact- Now everyone is at least aware that digital activities are under surveillance including phone call metadata. We have made that trade off for some security. Thank you Snowden.
Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of the whole Snowden ordeal was not discovering hard proof we've been living in a borderline-Orwellian surveillance state, but the utter indifference of the American people at this revelation.
In the EU we already have a law for protecting whistleblowers: https://commission.europa.eu/aid-development-cooperation-fun... Also companies have emerged for providing secure platforms for whistleblowers. Though, as national security and related things are in the hands of the member states, I am not sure how well this EU law and its national adaptations apply to the cases discussed in this article (probably wholesal…
Yet the EU continues to make life very difficult for EU whistleblower Roelie Post [0]. Perhaps because she fought against child trafficking and US-based adoption firms are lobbying in the EU for adopting vulnerable children from countries like Romania. --- [0]: http://www.roeliepost.com/about/
https://www.transparency.org/en/press/un-whistleblower-expos...
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The program he was most interested in leaking (PRISM) wasn't illegal at all. He had plenty of time to figure that out, but he didn't. In order to leak this perfectly legal program, he tried to get asylum in Hong Kong by leaking Chinese systems the NSA had compromised.
Regardless of PRISM's legality, it's deeply unethical and immoral for a government to spy on their own citizens with nothing more than a permission slip stamped by a stamping body that approves 99.97% of the requests that cross their desk, which is exactly what the FISA court is.
If you are incapable of reading the documents yourself: if the company receiving the wiretap order has any reason to believe that an account belongs to a US citizen or a non-US citizen living in the US, they challenge the order. No warrant is needed in the US legal system or that of any other country in the world to wiretap a foreigner who is outside of the country requesting the data. The fact that the US requires a court order is rare, and by all accounts, including Snowden's documents, that procedure is followed.