It's finally happened. This forum has become AM radio.
Please do proceed, gentlemen, and enjoy. I'm off to the NPR side of the FM band...
Always good to look at both sides.
WARNING: The above post may contain thoughts or ideas known to the State of Caliphornia to cause seething rage, confusion, distemper, nausea, perspiration, sphincter release, or cranial implosion to persons who implicitly trust only one news source, or find themselves at either the left or right political extreme. Proceed at your own risk.
"If you do not read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain
I apologize if this has been brought up before, but what keeps coming to mind are the Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg. One of the things that gives me pause before I label Snowden's actions is that we aren't really going to know the impact for years to come. Ellsberg's actions often are credited with helping to speed the end of the Vietnam War, even though what he did was potentially treasonous (I just read that his trial ended in a mistrial due to holes in the government's case).
I don't know what the effect of Snowden's actions will be, but considering "treason" is both a legal and a moral judgement it gives me pause.
I apologize if this has been brought up before, but what keeps coming to mind are the Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg. One of the things that gives me pause before I label Snowden's actions is that we aren't really going to know the impact for years to come. Ellsberg's actions often are credited with helping to speed the end of the Vietnam War, even though what he did was potentially treasonous (I just read that his trial ended in a mistrial due to holes in the government's case).
I don't know what the effect of Snowden's actions will be, but considering "treason" is both a legal and a moral judgement it gives me pause.
Good point of reference. What was Snowden trying to accomplish? Anyone know? I haven't put much time into following the whole thing, but what I've seen has been sketchy and sensationalized. I'm not sure anyone knows exactly what was leaked, what he has still, or what the plan was.
WARNING: The above post may contain thoughts or ideas known to the State of Caliphornia to cause seething rage, confusion, distemper, nausea, perspiration, sphincter release, or cranial implosion to persons who implicitly trust only one news source, or find themselves at either the left or right political extreme. Proceed at your own risk.
"If you do not read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain
2 cents:
1) America is atheist in the traditional sense. Not a theist state. Unfortunately some scientists who really wanted religion but couldn't cope with God took the term atheist and got all religious about it and started worshipping scientists (and themselves in the case of Dawkins and others), so many theists now seem to find atheism an offensive term. A similar thing happened to the term "marriage," which was hijacked by the legal system. But that's another thread.
2) True story. I often see a guy in the subway yelling about God. One day a man in an suit marched up to him and screamed "THERE IS NO GOD!!!" at the top of his lungs before stomping away. It was that day that I decided I was no longer atheist. Not because I believed in God with any degree of certainty, but because I find it equally impossible to disbelieve with the suited man's certainty.
2 cents:
2) True story. I often see a guy in the subway yelling about God. One day a man in an suit marched up to him and screamed "THERE IS NO GOD!!!" at the top of his lungs before stomping away. It was that day that I decided I was no longer atheist. Not because I believed in God with any degree of certainty, but because I find it equally impossible to disbelieve with the suited man's certainty.
People like Dawkins, Hitchens and your suited subway jerk give athiests and agnostics a bad name. The vast majority of non-believers don't go around prosletyzing their non-belief or publicly protesting the display of religious symbols and themes in public places (although they may be offended privately).
Personally I think that most people who say they're athiests are really simply strong agnostics like me. I don't think they completely deny the possibility of some higher power of some kind existing (because given our physiological imitations as human beings we can only experience a tiny spectrum of what actually goes on in our universe and can never personally experience what happens at the quantum level). What they do deny is the existence of an anthropomorphic deity that created and/or guides the universe and Earthlings in a purposeful way, using the very valid argument that there are thousands of religions in the world, each with its set of gods and each with its own creation stories and rituals, many of which contradict those of other religions. If such a deity truly existed there would be only one creation story and set of rituals for all humans, and these conventions would not have varied throughout the ages.
The didactic athiests--those who refuse to accept even the possibility of a higher power existing somewhere in the universe, even if that higher power bears absolutely no resemblance to anything we here on Earth could ever imagine--are just as stubborn and close-minded as the worst fundamentalists.
Though all my ribbing and trying to get under peoples skin here-----I agree with raisins last paragraph almost 100%. I will say fundamentalists scare me a little more though.
And as far as Snowden.......indeed a fine line between traitor and Patriot......and from what side you look at it on. I think we had a war about similar issues once.
I apologize if this has been brought up before, but what keeps coming to mind are the Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg. One of the things that gives me pause before I label Snowden's actions is that we aren't really going to know the impact for years to come. Ellsberg's actions often are credited with helping to speed the end of the Vietnam War, even though what he did was potentially treasonous (I just read that his trial ended in a mistrial due to holes in the government's case).
I don't know what the effect of Snowden's actions will be, but considering "treason" is both a legal and a moral judgement it gives me pause.
Now we're really dredging back through memory. But as I recall, Ellsberg tried and tried to get various congressmen and senators to bring this knowledge to the public, but they all refused. He would get arrested; they wouldn't; why wouldn't even one of them peep up? Even McGovern, who was a big anti-war guy at the time. There was some news about how Ted Kennedy and his staff helped get him the info in the first place. You would think Ted would be glad to stand up on his hind feet and speak. But no. So Ellsworth went to the papers. There was no alternative.
Perhaps Snowden took a cue from Ellsworth's ordeal.
“It has been a source of great pain to me to have met with so many among [my] opponents who had not the liberality to distinguish between political and social opposition; who transferred at once to the person, the hatred they bore to his political opinions.” —Thomas Jefferson (1808)
Bloomberg Business Week (yeah, I know) had an article on Snowden recently. From their perspective, at least, it seems that he didn't accomplish much. Apparently NSA at all levels has a lot of access to everything. What Snowden seems to have let everyone know, is that this is happening, although exactly what is going on remained rather obscure. I think the analogy made was "He knows where all the rooms are, but not how to get into them"
So, the big revelation is.....we're spying. Not news.
According to Grant Jeffreys, and I'm not vouching for his character, just noting the assertions made in 2000:
a "program" called Echelon utilizes the most advanced spy satellites, illegal wire-taps, and the fastest supercomputers in the world...to...monitor all global electronic traffic...all local, cellular, and long distance phone calls, fax and telex transmissions, Internet communications (of all kinds) and all global radio traffic...(as well as) interception of data from the series of twenty international telecommunications satellites...
the Echelon...system intercepts and then processes...utilizing NSA's computer analysis including sophisticated voice recognition, artificial intelligence neural networks, and Optical Character Recognition...searching for keywords
Flagged messages are then recorded and forwarded to intelligence agencies...millions of useless messages are erased and never listened to...
the justification is to protect us all from terrorists, drug dealers, sexual predators, and organized crime...using a giant vacuum cleaner approach.
My point is, Snowden seemingly didn't tell anything that wasn't generally known by anyone paying attention to such things. It seems he saw a chance to make a big splash, and did so, primarily for his own ego gratification. This does not make him a hero, to me.
In his defense, however, I have to add that maybe he was ignorant of all these things prior to his employment, and , as Jeffreys quotes:
"Simon Davies wrote, 'History demonstrates that information in the hands of authority will inevitably be used for unintended and often malevolent purposes.'".
Secrecy is at times necessary, as is compromise, but I'm left with the old question:
"Who will guard the guardians?"
WARNING: The above post may contain thoughts or ideas known to the State of Caliphornia to cause seething rage, confusion, distemper, nausea, perspiration, sphincter release, or cranial implosion to persons who implicitly trust only one news source, or find themselves at either the left or right political extreme. Proceed at your own risk.
"If you do not read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain
I agree...I don't think he revealed anything that could, say, put agents in the field in danger (although we don't know this). At worst, he revealed general practices used that, as you said, we could all have all guessed. From a security risk point of view, the worst that happens is that terrorists become more careful about how they use the Internet or their smartphones, and I would guess that most of them have already figured out ways to get under the NSA radar.
Interesting too that the military found Manning (the guy who gave all the stuff to Wikileaks) didn't commit any actions that would be constituted as "aid to the enemy." Espionage, revealing classified info, etc., for sure--but not anything that would be considered "treasonous." Of course, the Justice Department has a completely different point of view.
However, this does suggest that if Snowden is ultimately returned to the U.S. he won't be tried for treason since what he revealed is probably even less of a classified nature--he hasn't revealed specific names or processes of places--yet. Oh, yeah, he ain't never gonna escape his 6x6 cell, but he won't be dancing the hemp fandago either.
Comments
+1
+1
"If you do not read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain
I don't know what the effect of Snowden's actions will be, but considering "treason" is both a legal and a moral judgement it gives me pause.
"If you do not read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain
1) America is atheist in the traditional sense. Not a theist state. Unfortunately some scientists who really wanted religion but couldn't cope with God took the term atheist and got all religious about it and started worshipping scientists (and themselves in the case of Dawkins and others), so many theists now seem to find atheism an offensive term. A similar thing happened to the term "marriage," which was hijacked by the legal system. But that's another thread.
2) True story. I often see a guy in the subway yelling about God. One day a man in an suit marched up to him and screamed "THERE IS NO GOD!!!" at the top of his lungs before stomping away. It was that day that I decided I was no longer atheist. Not because I believed in God with any degree of certainty, but because I find it equally impossible to disbelieve with the suited man's certainty.
People like Dawkins, Hitchens and your suited subway jerk give athiests and agnostics a bad name. The vast majority of non-believers don't go around prosletyzing their non-belief or publicly protesting the display of religious symbols and themes in public places (although they may be offended privately).
Personally I think that most people who say they're athiests are really simply strong agnostics like me. I don't think they completely deny the possibility of some higher power of some kind existing (because given our physiological imitations as human beings we can only experience a tiny spectrum of what actually goes on in our universe and can never personally experience what happens at the quantum level). What they do deny is the existence of an anthropomorphic deity that created and/or guides the universe and Earthlings in a purposeful way, using the very valid argument that there are thousands of religions in the world, each with its set of gods and each with its own creation stories and rituals, many of which contradict those of other religions. If such a deity truly existed there would be only one creation story and set of rituals for all humans, and these conventions would not have varied throughout the ages.
The didactic athiests--those who refuse to accept even the possibility of a higher power existing somewhere in the universe, even if that higher power bears absolutely no resemblance to anything we here on Earth could ever imagine--are just as stubborn and close-minded as the worst fundamentalists.
Perhaps Snowden took a cue from Ellsworth's ordeal.
So, the big revelation is.....we're spying. Not news.
According to Grant Jeffreys, and I'm not vouching for his character, just noting the assertions made in 2000:
a "program" called Echelon utilizes the most advanced spy satellites, illegal wire-taps, and the fastest supercomputers in the world...to...monitor all global electronic traffic...all local, cellular, and long distance phone calls, fax and telex transmissions, Internet communications (of all kinds) and all global radio traffic...(as well as) interception of data from the series of twenty international telecommunications satellites...
the Echelon...system intercepts and then processes...utilizing NSA's computer analysis including sophisticated voice recognition, artificial intelligence neural networks, and Optical Character Recognition...searching for keywords
Flagged messages are then recorded and forwarded to intelligence agencies...millions of useless messages are erased and never listened to...
the justification is to protect us all from terrorists, drug dealers, sexual predators, and organized crime...using a giant vacuum cleaner approach.
My point is, Snowden seemingly didn't tell anything that wasn't generally known by anyone paying attention to such things. It seems he saw a chance to make a big splash, and did so, primarily for his own ego gratification. This does not make him a hero, to me.
In his defense, however, I have to add that maybe he was ignorant of all these things prior to his employment, and , as Jeffreys quotes:
"Simon Davies wrote, 'History demonstrates that information in the hands of authority will inevitably be used for unintended and often malevolent purposes.'".
Secrecy is at times necessary, as is compromise, but I'm left with the old question:
"Who will guard the guardians?"
"If you do not read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain
Interesting too that the military found Manning (the guy who gave all the stuff to Wikileaks) didn't commit any actions that would be constituted as "aid to the enemy." Espionage, revealing classified info, etc., for sure--but not anything that would be considered "treasonous." Of course, the Justice Department has a completely different point of view.
However, this does suggest that if Snowden is ultimately returned to the U.S. he won't be tried for treason since what he revealed is probably even less of a classified nature--he hasn't revealed specific names or processes of places--yet. Oh, yeah, he ain't never gonna escape his 6x6 cell, but he won't be dancing the hemp fandago either.