Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 9:57 AM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #145

CamperBob2 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Snowden was such a hero, why did he take Russian citizenship What choice did he have? Do you think he'd receive a fair trial if he came back to the US? and not oppose the invasion of Ukraine? Did he actively support it? I hadn't heard that. Major bummer, if so. Otherwise, he didn't oppose it for the same reason very few other Russians opposed it. I'm sure the reason will occur to you if you think hard enough.

> Do you think he'd receive a fair trial if he came back to the US? Honestly, yes. He was extremely visible and it was the Obama administration. I think it was well-understood how much damage it could have done to Democratic party interests if they nailed him to a wall for exposing behavior that was extremely unpopular among their constituents. Manning did far worse with far less duty-of-care and received a pardon af…

Post by lern_too_spel » Mon, Mar 24, 2025, 4:05 PM UTC

somenameforme wrote: post #381

lern_too_spel wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After the Church Committee, it is very difficult for the government to do illegal things and for it to remain a secret. That's why in all of Snowden's leaks, he revealed only a single extant illegal program, and its legality wasn't so clear that it couldn't be argued in court. Beyond that, you ignored my previous argument. If they were already doing this, why bother to collect metadata from taps?

Oh this is such absolute misinformation. The reason court cases against the NSA spying (and other related issues) fail is because you need to prove standing which means you need to not only prove you were spied on but that it also 'materially' affected you. And in order to do so you generally need to have reasonable justification to engage in discovery - in order to get the data from the NSA themselves. At that point…