Edward Snowden & The N.S.A Revelations

peacefrompaul

Byrnzie wrote:

mickeyrat wrote:

...dude by his actions appears to believe in the rule of law, so come back and face it. You never know, you could just be judged by sympathetic people.

Yeah, sure.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/ju ... stleblower
'Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have said Snowden has a good prima facie case for asylum, based on a well-founded fear of political persecution. Snowden's public statement at Sheremetyevo, couched in the language of the US constitution and international law, will have served to entrench that case.

Human rights lawyers say those grounds have been strengthened by the extraordinary lengths to which Washington has gone to try to get him back, as well as the lack of whistleblower protection for national security officials in the US under the Espionage Act, the brutal treatment of the soldier behind the WikiLeaks revelations, Bradley Manning, and the prospect of long-term incarceration before trial, possibly in solitary confinement.'

Interesting since we admit refugees of persecution in this country.

peacefrompaul

Guitar92player wrote:

That guy is bullshit. If he believes he has done nothing wrong, he should come back here, regardless of what's going on.

The fact he is hiding is making people think he has done something wrong.

Personally, I bet he gave intelligence to other countries. If not, he has no reason to run.

Perhaps we should also tell people that seek asylum here to go back to their country's and face the music?

I would wager he would be thrown in prison or killed regardless of whether he passed on intel or not.

Guitar92player

Guitar92player wrote:

That guy is bullshit. If he believes he has done nothing wrong, he should come back here, regardless of what's going on.

The fact he is hiding is making people think he has done something wrong.

Personally, I bet he gave intelligence to other countries. If not, he has no reason to run.

^^ I love how people have quoted me on this. I said this a long time ago. Since then my position on him has changed a bit:

1. I do not think he is bullshit anymore once I found out more.
2. I still think he should come back. I do not know anything about the whistleblowers hiding here from their countries, but I know enough about this guy.

peacefrompaul wrote:

Perhaps we should also tell people that seek asylum here to go back to their country's and face the music?

I would wager he would be thrown in prison or killed regardless of whether he passed on intel or not.

So I hope I answered your comment now. I bet whistleblowers here are in extreme danger if they return home. At least in America we have fair trial. I only want him to come back if the gov't accept his conditions that he won't be harmed, he gets to choose his own venue for trial, etc. If not, then he can stay in hiding.

mickeyrat

Byrnzie wrote:

mickeyrat wrote:

...dude by his actions appears to believe in the rule of law, so come back and face it. You never know, you could just be judged by sympathetic people.

Yeah, sure.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/ju ... stleblower
'Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have said Snowden has a good prima facie case for asylum, based on a well-founded fear of political persecution. Snowden's public statement at Sheremetyevo, couched in the language of the US constitution and international law, will have served to entrench that case.

Human rights lawyers say those grounds have been strengthened by the extraordinary lengths to which Washington has gone to try to get him back, as well as the lack of whistleblower protection for national security officials in the US under the Espionage Act, the brutal treatment of the soldier behind the WikiLeaks revelations, Bradley Manning, and the prospect of long-term incarceration before trial, possibly in solitary confinement.'

Umm, protesting that the government may be doing this is political in nature. Hiring in with the express purpose of stealing this information is in fact a criminal act, although I would agree it was right that we as citizens now know. He still broke the law. He IS guilty, by his own admission to being the person behind this. Contracts are signed, oaths taken, etc. This wasn't political.

He committed a crime to expose one or many crimes.

peacefrompaul

Guitar92player wrote:

Guitar92player wrote:

That guy is bullshit. If he believes he has done nothing wrong, he should come back here, regardless of what's going on.

The fact he is hiding is making people think he has done something wrong.

Personally, I bet he gave intelligence to other countries. If not, he has no reason to run.

^^ I love how people have quoted me on this. I said this a long time ago. Since then my position on him has changed a bit:

1. I do not think he is bullshit anymore once I found out more.
2. I still think he should come back. I do not know anything about the whistleblowers hiding here from their countries, but I know enough about this guy.

peacefrompaul wrote:

Perhaps we should also tell people that seek asylum here to go back to their country's and face the music?

I would wager he would be thrown in prison or killed regardless of whether he passed on intel or not.

So I hope I answered your comment now. I bet whistleblowers here are in extreme danger if they return home. At least in America we have fair trial. I only want him to come back if the gov't accept his conditions that he won't be harmed, he gets to choose his own venue for trial, etc. If not, then he can stay in hiding.

My apologies... I was not sure when you wrote it... I tend to say what I need to say and leave threads for a while in the AMT.

Guitar92player

peacefrompaul wrote:

Guitar92player wrote:

Guitar92player wrote:

That guy is bullshit. If he believes he has done nothing wrong, he should come back here, regardless of what's going on.

The fact he is hiding is making people think he has done something wrong.

Personally, I bet he gave intelligence to other countries. If not, he has no reason to run.

^^ I love how people have quoted me on this. I said this a long time ago. Since then my position on him has changed a bit:

1. I do not think he is bullshit anymore once I found out more.
2. I still think he should come back. I do not know anything about the whistleblowers hiding here from their countries, but I know enough about this guy.

peacefrompaul wrote:

Perhaps we should also tell people that seek asylum here to go back to their country's and face the music?

I would wager he would be thrown in prison or killed regardless of whether he passed on intel or not.

So I hope I answered your comment now. I bet whistleblowers here are in extreme danger if they return home. At least in America we have fair trial. I only want him to come back if the gov't accept his conditions that he won't be harmed, he gets to choose his own venue for trial, etc. If not, then he can stay in hiding.

My apologies... I was not sure when you wrote it... I tend to say what I need to say and leave threads for a while in the AMT.

No worries.

Byrnzie

dyaogirl wrote:

Guitar92player wrote:

That guy is bullshit. If he believes he has done nothing wrong, he should come back here, regardless of what's going on.

The fact he is hiding is making people think he has done something wrong.

Personally, I bet he gave intelligence to other countries. If not, he has no reason to run.

Agreed. In fact he gave his intelligence to other countries.

No he didn't.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... n-s-switch
'The oft-repeated claim that Snowden's intent is to harm the US is completely negated by the reality that he has all sorts of documents that could quickly and seriously harm the US if disclosed, yet he has published none of those. When he gave us the documents he provided, he repeatedly insisted that we exercise rigorous journalistic judgment in deciding which documents should be published in the public interest and which ones should be concealed on the ground that the harm of publication outweighs the public value. If his intent were to harm the US, he could have sold all the documents he had for a great deal of money, or indiscriminately published them, or passed them to a foreign adversary. He did none of that.

He carefully vetted every document he gave us, and then on top of that, asked that we only publish those which ought to be disclosed and would not cause gratuitous harm: the same analytical judgment that all media outlets and whistleblowers make all the time. The overwhelming majority of his disclosures were to blow the whistle on US government deceit and radical, hidden domestic surveillance.

My point in this interview was clear, one I've repeated over and over: had he wanted to harm the US government, he easily could have, but hasn't, as evidenced by the fact that - as I said - he has all sorts of documents that could inflict serious harm to the US government's programs. That demonstrates how irrational is the claim that his intent is to harm the US. His intent is to shine a light on these programs so they can be democratically debated. That's why none of the disclosures we've published can be remotely described as harming US national security: all they've harmed are the reputation and credibility of US officials who did these things and then lied about them.'

Byrnzie

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/01/this_ma ... o_america/

James Clapper is still lying to America

A smoking gun shows Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is a big liar -- and it's not the first time

David Sirota
Tuesday, Jul 2, 2013


“James Clapper Is Still Lying”: That would be a more honest headline for yesterday’s big Washington Post article about the director of national intelligence’s letter to the U.S. Senate.

Clapper, you may recall, unequivocally said “no, sir” in response to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asking him: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper’s response was shown to be a lie by Snowden’s disclosures, as well as by reports from the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Associated Press and Bloomberg News (among others). This is particularly significant, considering lying before Congress prevents the legislative branch from performing oversight and is therefore a felony.

Upon Snowden’s disclosures, Clapper initially explained his lie by insisting that his answer was carefully and deliberately calculated to be the “least untruthful” response to a question about classified information. Left unmentioned was the fact that he could have simply given the same truthful answer that Alberto Gonzales gave the committee in 2006.

Now, though, Clapper is wholly changing his story, insisting that his answer wasn’t a deliberate, carefully calibrated “least most untruthful” response; it was instead just a spur-of-the-moment accident based on an innocent misunderstanding. Indeed, as the Post reports, “Clapper sent a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 21 saying that he had misunderstood the question he had been asked” and adding that “he thought Wyden was referring to NSA surveillance of e-mail traffic involving overseas targets, not the separate program in which the agency is authorized to collect records of Americans’ phone calls.” In his letter, Clapper says, “My response was clearly erroneous — for which I apologize,” and added that “mistakes will happen, and when I make one, I correct it.”

So Clapper first says it was a calculated move, and now he’s saying it was just an innocuous misunderstanding and an inadvertent error. With that, the public — and the Obama administration prosecutors who aggressively pursue perjurers — are all supposed to now breathe a sigh of relief and chalk it all up to a forgivable screw-up. It’s all just an innocent mistake, right?

Wrong, because in this crime, as Clapper’s changing story suggests, there remains a smoking gun.

Notice this statement from Sen. Wyden about Snowden’s disclosures — a statement, mind you, that the Post didn’t reference in its story yesterday (emphasis added):

“One of the most important responsibilities a Senator has is oversight of the intelligence community. This job cannot be done responsibly if Senators aren’t getting straight answers to direct questions. When NSA Director Alexander failed to clarify previous public statements about domestic surveillance, it was necessary to put the question to the Director of National Intelligence. So that he would be prepared to answer, I sent the question to Director Clapper’s office a day in advance. After the hearing was over my staff and I gave his office a chance to amend his answer."

So Clapper had a full day’s notice of the specific — and impossible to misunderstand — question Wyden asked, and is nonetheless now claiming that in the heat of the moment he spontaneously misunderstood the question. In other words, he’s not coming clean, as the Post story seems to imply. On the contrary, he’s lying about his deliberate lie, which should only make a perjury prosecution that much easier, for it shows intent.

The importance of such a perjury prosecution, of course, should not be lost on our constitutional law professor-turned-president.

Out of all people, he has to understand that equal protection under the law means treating Clapper (and Alexander, who also lied to Congress) exactly the same way his administration treated pitcher Roger Clemens. Otherwise, the message from the government would be that lying to Congress about baseball is more of a felony than lying to Congress about Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights. Such a message would declare that when it comes to brazen law-breaking, as long as you are personally connected to the president, you get protection rather than the prosecution you deserve.

Byrnzie

vant0037 wrote:

Look, I'm very inclined to agree with you about the program being really, really scary, but you still have not articulated how it's illegal.

This NYT article goes some way towards answering your question. I won't post the whole thing as it's quite long. Here's the link http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/opini ... =all&_r=1& and a summary:


'We may never know all the details of the mass surveillance programs, but we know this: The administration has justified them through abuse of language, intentional evasion of statutory protections, secret, unreviewable investigative procedures and constitutional arguments that make a mockery of the government’s professed concern with protecting Americans’ privacy. It’s time to call the N.S.A.’s mass surveillance programs what they are: criminal.'

ajedigecko

Clapper gets away with perjury...

Holder gets to investigate himself...

Clinton gets to yell "what difference does it make"

Lerner gets to issue a statement on her innoncence and plead the 5th...

I honestly do not know what it will take to unite us?

Whichever game both d's and r's play...they are good at keeping us divided.

JimmyV

Byrnzie wrote:

JimmyV wrote:

Worth pointing out here that Webster's definition of Patriotism is "love for or devotion to one's country". Not love or devotion to one's government and not love or devotion to the constitution of any government. People can show that devotion in a variety of ways. Wanting to see their country be kept safe and secure is one. Wanting the government to be held to both the letter and spirit of all laws is another. That one person feels more strongly about one and another feels more strongly about the other makes neither more or less Patriotic.

Except spying on every American has nothing to do with keeping the country safe.

If you want to play up the possibility that these programs could be abused, go ahead. I will not argue to strenuously against you. To say, however, that these programs have NOTHING to do with keeping the country safe is an overstatement. This in a nutshell is why I have pushed back against the Snowden myth making machine. There is plenty of hyperbole and disinformation on both sides.

JimmyV

Sludge Factory wrote:

Without the constitution America would be a very different country and was prior to it when we operated under the Articles of the Confederation. The fact that you believe otherwise indicates to me that I may as well stop discussing this issue with you.

Also, I reiterate, I did not declare those who disagree with me as being unpatriotic. That was something you conjured up and applied to my statement. I understand that many will disagree with me. What actually occurred; however, is I declared and commended one individual who I felt was displaying a good amount of Patriotism and lamented that all too many from this country and in this thread are not; that all too many don't question things. This is the key difference between what I actually said and what you believe I said.

You declared that someone whose opinion you agreed with was showing more U.S. Patriotism than others in the thread, the flip side being that those who disagree are showing less. You then repeatedly refused to identify who these others were. If you did not intend to attack their Patriotism, fine, but you did and that is the danger when one sinks to Rovism. Much easier to end the discussion than to own up to that I imagine.

Of course America would be quite different without the Constitution. Nowhere did I argue otherwise. However, as has now been mentioned repeatedly, love of Constitution is not the definition of Patriotism. My point - that you steadfastly refuse to acknowledge - is that it is quite possible to love America just as much as the next person and to hold a different opinion about what is best for America. This is over and above the NSA issue. It applies in every instance and is exactly why we should be able to disagree without attacking each others Patriotism.

Jason P

Guitar92player

Jason P wrote:

Byrnzie

JimmyV wrote:

If you want to play up the possibility that these programs could be abused, go ahead. I will not argue to strenuously against you. To say, however, that these programs have NOTHING to do with keeping the country safe is an overstatement. This in a nutshell is why I have pushed back against the Snowden myth making machine. There is plenty of hyperbole and disinformation on both sides.

Then go ahead and tell us how they've kept the country safe?

Byrnzie

JimmyV wrote:

Of course America would be quite different without the Constitution. Nowhere did I argue otherwise. However, as has now been mentioned repeatedly, love of Constitution is not the definition of Patriotism. My point - that you steadfastly refuse to acknowledge - is that it is quite possible to love America just as much as the next person and to hold a different opinion about what is best for America. This is over and above the NSA issue. It applies in every instance and is exactly why we should be able to disagree without attacking each others Patriotism.

He didn't say that love of the Constitution was the definition of Patriotism. You really need to quit putting words in peoples mouths in order to try and win an argument.

Sludge Factory

Byrnzie wrote:

JimmyV wrote:

Of course America would be quite different without the Constitution. Nowhere did I argue otherwise. However, as has now been mentioned repeatedly, love of Constitution is not the definition of Patriotism. My point - that you steadfastly refuse to acknowledge - is that it is quite possible to love America just as much as the next person and to hold a different opinion about what is best for America. This is over and above the NSA issue. It applies in every instance and is exactly why we should be able to disagree without attacking each others Patriotism.

He didn't say that love of the Constitution was the definition of Patriotism. You really need to quit putting words in peoples mouths in order to try and win an argument.

Thank you. It is hard to acknowledge a person's points when said person continues to make leaps of logic when addressing your own points.

JimmyV

Sludge Factory wrote:

Byrnzie wrote:

JimmyV wrote:

Of course America would be quite different without the Constitution. Nowhere did I argue otherwise. However, as has now been mentioned repeatedly, love of Constitution is not the definition of Patriotism. My point - that you steadfastly refuse to acknowledge - is that it is quite possible to love America just as much as the next person and to hold a different opinion about what is best for America. This is over and above the NSA issue. It applies in every instance and is exactly why we should be able to disagree without attacking each others Patriotism.

He didn't say that love of the Constitution was the definition of Patriotism. You really need to quit putting words in peoples mouths in order to try and win an argument.

Thank you. It is hard to acknowledge a person's points when said person continues to make leaps of logic when addressing your own points.

Your response to the definition of Patriotism I posted was:

Sludge Factory wrote:

Ah! You did eventually look it up. "Love for, or devotion to one's country": Excellent and absolutely correct. The government of this country is but one facet of the country. The definition is not "love for, or devotion to one's government".

The Constitution is the document that lays out the protections in place the citizens of the country are supposed to have from the government. It is the chain that is supposed to bind the government, the law of the land. It is basically the blueprint for our country. The government swears an oath to uphold the Constitution, not the other way around. It would be more correct to give more credence to this document than to a government that is continually caught lying regardless of the political affiliation of the person in power.

Knowing all that should tell you that being more devoted to the blueprint of the country is more along the lines of Patriotism than to a government that continually breaks its oath. Again, it does not say "love your government". How can one love it's country and the ideas the country was founded on without being able to healthily question its government?

You talk about this notion of safety and security. The greatest potential for safety and security to exist is when our personal liberties are protected to their fullest extent. That includes protecting those facets of our society from an overbearing government as well! Liberty and freedom is perhaps the greatest potential form of safety and security there is. Look at what we have today, under the guise of safety and security we have a tyrannical aspect in our government. We have people who are arrested for victim-less crimes all in the name of safety. Sure our government says it keeps us "safe", but who is going to keep us safe from our government?

The NSA's operations simply use "security" as a guise to operate under, when the real goal is information gathering on a wide scale. It is security theater. The best interests and security of American citizens is not actually what is at heart here.

It almost immediately becomes a battle between government and constitution. Despite the fact that nowhere in my post did I allude to love of government having anything to do with the definition of Patriotism. You chose to make it a question of government vs. constitution. I have put no words in your mouth.

JimmyV

Byrnzie wrote:

JimmyV wrote:

If you want to play up the possibility that these programs could be abused, go ahead. I will not argue to strenuously against you. To say, however, that these programs have NOTHING to do with keeping the country safe is an overstatement. This in a nutshell is why I have pushed back against the Snowden myth making machine. There is plenty of hyperbole and disinformation on both sides.

Then go ahead and tell us how they've kept the country safe?

No, the overstatement was yours, not mine. The obligation to back it up is also yours and not mine. As the overstatement was yours, perhaps you can go ahead and, in your own words, tell us how these surveillance programs have nothing to do with keeping the country safe?

Byrnzie

JimmyV wrote:

Byrnzie wrote:

JimmyV wrote:

If you want to play up the possibility that these programs could be abused, go ahead. I will not argue to strenuously against you. To say, however, that these programs have NOTHING to do with keeping the country safe is an overstatement. This in a nutshell is why I have pushed back against the Snowden myth making machine. There is plenty of hyperbole and disinformation on both sides.

Then go ahead and tell us how they've kept the country safe?

No, the overstatement was yours, not mine. The obligation to back it up is also yours and not mine. As the overstatement was yours, perhaps you can go ahead and, in your own words, tell us how these surveillance programs have nothing to do with keeping the country safe?

Well, considering they have thwarted zero terrorist attacks, including the Boston bombings, then it's fair to say that they have nothing to do with keeping the country the safe. If they wanted to prevent terrorism, then they'd focus on terrorists, or suspected terrorists, instead of spying on 300 million Americans, and millions of citizens of other countries.