John Nash's letters to the NSA (1955) [pdf]

An instructor of mine in college had attended Princeton, and thus the information came to me from him by word of mouth.

Are you talking about the justice systems before or after their tour?

The first independent justice system that the service(s) use is a concept from Roman times [0], that predates any form of 'Court of Justice' we have in the states, and is really just there to punish soldiers that rebel, not really anything having to do with a split between civilian and soldier.

The second form, post tour 'veteran's court', is really just a way to damage-control dependancy-stricken veterans from causing too much publicity in public courts, and as a way to fast-track such people into lighter sentences than their civilian counterparts.[1] 90 percent completion rate and zero percent recidivism! Remarkable, it must be those values instilled by the service(s).. (the same values that lead them to that court, by the way..)

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/11/opinion/11castille.html?_r... [0]: http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1940201,0...

That is not my claim, succinctly or otherwise. The fact that you believe my comment reduces to that claim means that you did not understand my comment. That may be my fault in making it unclear or your fault in not trying to read and understand what I was actually saying (instead of simply seeing what you thought I meant), but either way you're replying to something I didn't say.

My comment was in response to someone who felt mentioning essentially that why are we even mad at Snowden, it's not like anything bad happened. You seem to agree with me that his actions did result in real negative consequences, so in that regard you agree with me about the only substantive thing I mentioned in my own reply.

But to address what you brought up, let's say it's true that Snowden revealed government wrongdoing. I happen to be of the opinion that merely revealing government wrongdoing doesn't excuse every other possible wrong that may have been committed by a 'whistleblower'. Especially in cases like Snowden's where any "whistleblowing" portion of his leaks is dwarfed in magnitude by leaks that don't indicate any government wrongdoing at all, but still result in disastrous effects that you admit occurred as a result of his actions.

Otherwise a spy would be able to leak whatever they wished by simply throwing a scrap to the media while they tunnel the real secrets to their political masters. And at this point we still can't prove Snowden did something like this: The secrets he revealed to the world via the media were all (but one) stolen while he worked at Dell, but before leaving the NSA he deliberately took a position at Booz-Allen Hamilton in order to take higher-level ("Tier 3") secrets. That Tier 3 was the source of the "NSA spying on these specific Chinese IPs" story soon after Snowden landed in Hong Kong, but those Tier 3 secrets have been revealed to no other journalists (or even angry Internet bloggers...).

Why did Snowden need Tier 3 secrets if he wasn't going to give them to journalists? Who did he give them to, if not journalists?