The WashPo article is pretty powerful. I’m sure Julian Assange is sitting in his room, jealously wanting to trade places with monklike Snowden, so he can go out on the town…
Snowden is a true patriot. That’s more that I can say than those traitors in the military and government.
I think he really has himself to blame for making it about him rather than the documents he leaked. Of course, with the fear of a corrupt world power angry at you, a few mistakes can be understood.
what a fantastic quote in the piece -
“I don’t care whether you’re the pope or Osama bin Laden,” he said. “As long as there’s an individualized, articulable, probable cause for targeting these people as legitimate foreign intelligence, that’s fine. I don’t think it’s imposing a ridiculous burden by asking for probable cause. Because, you have to understand, when you have access to the tools the NSA does, probable cause falls out of trees.”
It really is an interesting character study, isn’t it? You don’t see Snowden “starting a revolution” in the Assange sense, building a website, setting up paypal donations, creating a larger-than-life caricature of himself, embroiling other people unwittingly, or generally stirring up that sort of trouble. It’s different. Snowden is a completely different kind of revolutionary.
Not that I’m panning Assange for what he did when he did it. The type of digital counter-culture Assange was starting up was all so new at the time. How could that have gone any differently than it did? Probably most people thought you’d have to shout down the Iraq warmongers, to get anything to change, because their voice was so strong at the time.
I’m sure Julian Assange would have done things differently, been a little smarter about his physical movements. But, overall, could it have been different and more productive? You tell me, because I honestly don’t know how it could have been different than it is.
The media and government puts the focus on him. He released the docs months ago. He’s part is this is mostly done and has been for some time.
I think the commenter was talking about Assange (?)
I took it to mean Assange, in that context. But I dunno. MyopicHumanist should clarify since I wrote a big treatise in response. Ennywaze…
I don’t think Snowden called attention to himself. He seems to be responding, in a sense, to being called a traitor and people calling for his death. Assange wanted the notoriety more.
this isn’t comprehensive, but it’s pretty close.
from the article:
“the NSA had learned to capture enormous flows of data at the speed of light from fiber-optic cables that carried Internet and telephone traffic over continents and under seas.”
the phone calls being recorded.
“Each year, NSA systems collected hundreds of millions of e-mail address books, hundreds of billions of cellphone location records and trillions of domestic call logs.”
the necessary index to the recorded calls.
Snowden isn’t safe. The Russians could give him up to the US at any time.
It is possible that he played a ruse on WashPo, made it seem like he is unprotected and just a lonely little boy in a studio apartment somewhere in Moscow. But I bet he’s a lot smarter than that.
Dunno. His China idea died fairly quickly. Russia is a bad place to be by any measure. Activists are not prized for their principles there.
Rarely do people have strong principles and Bond-like spy skills. I doubt Snowden is one of them.
More likely he is a smart person with (demonstrably) strong principles that is doing his best to survive after having made a highly controversial principled choice. Outcome to be determined later. If he was my son I would be bursting with pride.
This makes Robert James Woolsey, Jr. - who called on the government to hang Snowden for treason - look like the psychopath he truly is. A good article.
Why is he so scared of Snowden releasing these secrets? Has he got something to hide?
He doesn’t have to have Bond-like spy skills. All he has to do is be reasonably clever to put up a public ruse and be doing something else through his lawyers and supporters quietly in the background. That’s all I’m saying.
Well said, Ed!
