Anyone who bangs on about Snowden being a criminal, whilst ignoring the vast web of criminality and unconstitutionality that he’s uncovered . . . well, I just can’t take you seriously.
BTW, Snowden’s now been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and I hope he wins it! 
Not sure how to read you.
The government is bad, so no crime against it counts?
Rest assured, I’m not really eager to be taken seriously by anyone in particular, but your consideration hardly seems valuable for two reasons.
1: Nobel Peace Prize nominations aren’t exactly meaningful. Both Oprah Winfrey and George W. Bush have been nominated.
2: I said nothing at all about not taking a critical look at the information exposed, and fixing the system. You have imagined a fault about me, then tell me you can’t take me seriously because of it – presumably because you have low tolerance for ambiguity, and not because you read what I wrote.
While I’m sure that you’re proud of your clever tactic for not listening to anyone who doesn’t say exactly what you want them to say, I don’t feel especially moved to curry your favor. (That said, I do still grant you the respect to counter your argument with something other than “not worth my very valuable time”.)
edit: Sorry, the tone there is pretty mean. It’s pretty galling to be told “your opinion doesn’t matter because you believe X” in any case, moreso when you don’t believe X.
I think the question of whether Snowden is guilty of criminal disclosures that do not qualify as whistleblowing is very important – most especially when trying to paint the US Gov’t as charging onto the warpath over legitimate whistleblowing.
It is not at all clear to me why a person who performed one good action should have his bad actions overlooked.
Yeah, I know; I was teasing a bit there. :)[quote=“notnato, post:48, topic:3765”]
Sorry, the tone there is pretty mean. It’s pretty galling to be told “your opinion doesn’t matter because you believe X”
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Think nothing of it. Sorry if came across as a cheap shot. To be clear, though, I’m not saying your opinion doesn’t matter. It’s not the content I disagree with; it’s the inconsistency.
The cards are falling where they may fall in Egypt right now, let’s see how that works out for them and wonder if we shouldn’t be a little more vigilant before things get out of hand. I’ll see your “let the cards” and raise you “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
They should have recissions. I can think of at least 1 Nobel Peace prize that should be taken back.
This whole rant is very far-fetched.
Personally, where criminality and national security overlap, I advocate erring on the side of caution: meaning: expose the criminality. It’s no different than a cop doctoring a crime scene. There should be no wrongdoing committed in the name of justice. It isn’t justice if laws and morality were broken in its administration. That is the difference between good and evil.
Good old liberal echo chambers. Two replies so far to my suggestion that a guy who did good also did/ is doing bad, and they’re both “we don’t need to listen to you”.
This is what’s hard for me to respond to. But I will try.
Whistleblowers reveal lawbreaking in one’s own country. Outing someone is morally repugnant but not against the law in the USA, which extends to its embassies; although in civil terms in the USA, sure, a defamation lawsuit could be brought and possibly won against someone who outed a homosexual person who did not want that information revealed and can specify damages to his or her reputation as a result. But this would be as a civil matter of defamation, not as an illegal act in itself. And beyond that, all of it is on an individual level not a group or institutional or government level, which is what whistleblowing pertains to; whistleblowing does not pertain to employment of one person in an embassy, or a tattle-tale telling on a co-worker’s pile of parking tickets in Dubai. So your hypotheticals make me think you are not clear on what whistleblowing means and you’re stretching to find the line.
Here’s the line. The line on whistleblowing is simple. When a government breaks laws in order to perform a function that it has been mandated to perform, someone who reveals that systematic lawbreaking in detail is the whistleblower.
Jay Carney is saying point blank that Edward Snowden is not a whistleblower; that he is simply a lawbreaker. It stands to reason that, publicly, the Obama administration has effectively guaranteed that there is no chance in his own homeland that Ed Snowden could receive a fair trial. He has been judged and practically sentenced by the Executive branch.
Lots of people disagree with Jay Carney. I am one of them. Edward Snowden fits the classic profile of a whistleblower: revelation of systematic lawbreaking on a mass scale by the government. Many others have come before him. Many more will come after.
If he could have a fair hearing, I would say Ed Snowden should come back to the USA of his own free will and face down the evil that exists in our government. But it is increasingly clear that he could not ever have a fair hearing. With the highest power in the land proclaiming him guilty on TV, he has already lost a basic American right: innocent until proven guilty.
So, he has to remain outside the USA. May he find safe passage to a country that will take him. May he continue to shed light and not ever harm the USA, but make us better.
I think you misread me. I’m describing revealing PRISM as a good thing and a proper example of revealing governmental malfeasance == whistleblowing. But I’m also describing revealing some of the mechanisms that the US uses to spy on foreigners, and the imagined contents of the “kill switch” as a bad thing.
That some of his disclosures reveal programs that intentionally and illegally targeted Americans, I don’t think there’s room for debate. Those are legitimate whistleblowing. But his revelations about spying apparatuses that target foreigners and foreign nations, where we (and presumably he) do not have any special evidence that American communications are being unduly seized - I don’t understand how there’s any room for debate there either. They are not whistleblowing as I understand it.
It is not against the law in the US for the US to spy on foreign countries or foreign nationals. It’s only illegal on the other side. Likewise, when the US “harbors” homosexuals and Chinese dissidents, it’s only illegal on the other side. That’s what my examples were about.
When he “blows the whistle” on America breaking foreign laws, especially laws regarding espionage, he’s doing something very different from revealing governmental violation of US law. To me, he’s just revealing old-school spying – and I think that’s a bad thing.
(I suppose you could hold that all US overseas spying efforts should be stymied and be consistent. I’d just disagree so strongly that I’d expect to find no common ground.)
So you’re saying a whistleblower must not reveal how a complicated spying apparatus has morphed itself from a bygone era of spy vs. spy into a cumbersome, intricate, convoluted system of interlocking legal and illegal parts? That only the illegal pieces should be discussed openly? LOL. As if they can be teased apart.
If there is a significant portion of a system that is contrary to the 4th Amendment, then the WHOLE THING should be outed and up for revision. Whistleblowing applies to that situation too. It doesn’t cover Snowden if he’s revealing troop movements and attack/defense strategy, or the content of specific, ongiong, (and legal!) investigations.
People want to personalize this and make it be about Ed Snowden’s personal feelings, like he’s just interpreting the 4th Amendment for us. People always do this to whistleblowers. It’s the state of denial that the USA likes to live in. We’ve always lived this way. We denied for many years what Britain was doing to us, which is why we remained so poor, until we got smart and stockpiled arms and then took a stand to drive them off. They wouldn’t go away, either. They kept coming back for 40 more years and we had to keep beating them. If we hadn’t taken a stand THEN, when we did, it would have gotten much much worse.
I see a parallel here. Ed Snowden is giving us the opportunity to take that stand now, rather than in 40 years. He is not interpreting the 4th Amendment for us. You don’t need to interpret the 4th Amendment when as an analyst in the system you can just go read innocent people’s emails and listen to their phone calls. You don’t need to interpret the law when you see a guy standing at the 7-11 counter pointing a gun at the clerk. Snowden has seen the man with the gun and he’s letting us know.
So all this splitting of hairs is unnecessary. There is no illegitimate whistleblowing here. It’s all legit because the original sin was committed by the NSA, and the whole thing is so complicated that sunlight is the only thing going to fix it.
Trying to tease it apart so you can throw the book at him is like what the NSA is doing with all of your phone records: waiting for the right moment to pick some of your comments out of context so they can prosecute you for thought crimes.
But then above
I guess the difference between being told you are not terribly relevant, and utterly irrelevant, is what’s important to you? Do you actually mean to be saying that your opinion was discounted wrong, after discounting the opinions of others? Nice gig if you can get it.
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