I spent the weekend discussing Edward Snowden with many of my conservative friends. The principal feeling that came from their circle was that Edward Snowden was a traitor because of the revelations that he has made to date and those that he potentially can make at a later date. A lot of others, even some who backed his play thought that he should not have fled the U.S., but should have stayed and faced his detractors. This is, to my mind, a very naïve attitude. It’s like blaming the guy who throws the Molotov cocktail for not continuing to stand in front of the advancing tank. There was noting to be gained by Snowden staying here. There would be no fair trial. The government is proving that with Bradley Manning and Barrett Brown. But more important, the act of surrendering to government authorities would in effect silence him and that would be the end of his whistleblower activities, activities that we are now seeing are an essential part of revealing the illegal duplicity of NSA and by extension a government that has spoken to transparency but has acted in quite another manner.
An angry Congressional panel leaned this week that the NSA has far over-reached its Patriot Act mandate by exponentially broadening each intercepted phone call to include second and third generation calls related to it. For example; the NSA gets permission from the FISA court to record calls from A who they think might be a terrorist to B who they know nothing about. They then, on their own, record all calls from A and B to anyone else they call. That’s step two. Then they record all calls from those that A & B called to anyone else that they call. . They have now created a giant octopus of recorded calls. The one call including two persons allowed by the FISA court has now ballooned to potentially hundreds of calls to thousands of people, all without legal certification.
NSA cheated and Snowden caught them and told the American people. That’s it. That’s the whole game but NSA, angry at being caught creating their own law and embarrassed because they were breaking an already too generous law, had to strike back. That’s just the kind of people they are. They’re a bunch of petty bureaucrats who have overstepped their mandate and been caught red-handed and they are like a bunch of bees after someone shook the hive. Unfortunately, once again, Obama is backing the wrong horse and he is destined to look like a fool when this all unravels.
John C. Inglis, deputy director of NSA appeared before an angry House judiciary committee last Wednesday and tried to lie his way out of the deep shit that his agency is wading in. He did admit to the three step expansion described above, called it a Hops query and tried to make it look like anything but the exponential expansion of power that it is. He was met with angry reactions from many of the congressmen who listened, unbelieving, to his pathetic attempt to crawl out from under the clearly illegal use of a legal program.
Even James Sensenbrenner the author of the Patriot Act warned that the NSA’s actions have brought up the distinct possibility that the legislation will not be renewed when it comes due in 2015 and several members of the committee, on both sides of the aisle voiced concern, not merely about the analysis of the phone records but simply about NSA’s collection of millions of American’s phone data without sufficient cause.
Is it credible to call Edward Snowden a traitor or a spy because he saw NSA using a legal maneuver in an illegal way and reported it to the American people who were being robbed of their privacy on a scale so monumental that it almost defied description? And where does honesty come in.
A traitor is someone who acts against the best interests of his country. Read on and you will see that is exactly what Snowden wasn’t doing. The only thing that Snowden acted against was an organization that was supposed to serve the people of America and instead was selling out their right of privacy. Was he a spy? Not unless he was spying for the American people because that’s the only group who are benefiting by his act. But let’s take a look at the other players in this game.
This past Sunday I watched Mike Rogers, ® Michigan, of the House Intelligence Committee as he shouted to the heavens, on national TV about the 54 terrorist attacks that had been stymied by NSA through their collection of phone data information. 54 he claimed over and over until it became a mantra. 54. Can we take a chance on any of those 54 terrorist attacks being successful? 54,54,54.
Then on Monday James Clapper Jr. the Director of NSA admitted that the real number was 1. One single case. So it turns out that Snowden didn’t lie to the American people. Our elected representative from Michigan did. Why did this man lie? To protect one of our intelligence agencies from the American people, the ones who authorized that agency and who expect it to serve them when it is only serving itself? This just isn’t the way functional governments work.
Congressman Ted Poe ® Texas, a judge, said: “I hope as we move forward as a congress, we rein in the idea that it’s OK to bruise the spirit of the Constitution in the name of national security.” That’s a hell of a rational thought for a Texas Republican and it illustrates the fact that all the hatred and bile aimed at Edward Snowden is truly aimed at the wrong target. NSA is the villain here. Snowden has just provided a service to the American people.
One of the people I referred to above just couldn’t get past the fact that Snowden has fled the country and kept calling him a traitor for what he had done. I finally gave up because there was no logical argument that he seemed capable of understanding so I simply told him that leaving the country had nothing to do with revealing the NSA information and that he should think of it as James Cagney fleeing after blowing up the Gestapo headquarters in 13 Rue Madelaine, or Jimmy Doolittle’s pilots not landing to discuss the results of their bombs after the raid in 30 Seconds over Tokyo.
Then on Wednesday of this week the Obama administration released documents, which stated that NSA had violated secret federal court orders authorizing collection of email and telephone data. The documents stated that the FISA court had imposed restrictions on the programs after it learned of these violations.
Interestingly enough, this hadn’t been a big secret even before Snowden revealed it. Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, like Ron Wyden (D) Ore. had said previously that violations existed that endangered American’s privacy and freedom but that they were blocked from speaking, specifically about them because of secrecy oaths that they had taken prior to their induction onto the Committee.
But I still couldn’t get my conservative friend to understand anything as complicated as the concept that NSA works for the American people, not the other way around and that they are responsible to the American people, and that when Snowden revealed that they were doing something that was invading the privacy of every American and violating the Constitution, that he was acting as a patriot not as a traitor. Unfortunately, this was too deep a concept for the Republican thought process, which seems to have run aground at the earth may not be flat after all, to absorb.
With almost half our population continuing to think this way and with many of them continuing to breed, all I could think of was, that we are in desperate straights.