Posted on 08/04/2013 5:50:39 AM PDT by Timber Rattler
With his slow, steady stream of leaked NSA documents, Edward Snowden is offering a glimpse into what President Obama's pledge of transparent government might have looked like -- had he chosen to deliver on it.
When he arrived in office, Obama declared that his administration would be "the most open and transparent in history" and rolled out a series of historic declassifications, including the Bush administration's legal justifications for so-called enhanced interrogation tactics and the size of American nuclear stockpiles. Each of these decisions broke with long-established precedent and seemed to signal a new era of government openness.
Now, by contrast, Obama's record on transparency is coming to be defined by his aggressive pursuit of whistleblowers under the Espionage Act.
But in his war on leakers, Obama is also a victim of his circumstances. The U.S. national security establishment reflexively classifies information; in an apt metaphor for the problem, the exact number of classified documents is itself classified. As the number of secret documents balloons, the chances of classified information being made public increases, putting more pressure on the president to figure out a way to cap the geyser of unauthorized disclosures. Call it the perpetual classification machine of the surveillance era: As more information is classified, more documents leak, and as leaks increase, the instinct to classify grows stronger, which only leads to more classification, which leads to ... well you see where this is headed.
(Excerpt) Read more at blog.foreignpolicy.com ...
You might find this piece interesting, considering an earlier discussion from last week on the subject.
And our government seems to be addicted to the collection of data and full of excuses about why it has to continue.
Does anyone else find it odd that the crescendo of the leaks regarding privacy, Manning, Snowden, and the NSA plus the IRS, DHS, and every other department concludes with this “terror imminent” warning?
Also, I find it terribly disconcerting that we are arming Al-Queda in Syria, but Al-Queda is the factor behind the prison breaks and the current threat.
We either have THE MOST INCOMPETENT bunch of boobs running the country, or we have the most venial, or we have the most clever enemy in the history of the world confounding our bureaucrats and Mr. Feckless.
I originally wanted Manning to get the death penalty until Snowden came along - the combination of what they did opened some gaping wounds in the government's tyranny plans. The question is whether the wounds can be kept open long enough to have a positive effect on Freedom.
What we have is the most transparent and openly anti-Constitutional criminal Administration in the history of our country, and a Congress that is allowing it, and a Judiciary that reminds me of Hitler’s German Judges of the Third Reich.
Those who study history will know of what I speak, when German Judges started taking orders from the Regime.
terror imminent warning?
Is this prep for the coming ME showdown?
Run, Forrest, Run!
We no longer need the foreign oil.
The policies in place at State will take a long time to adjust.
The inertia there at State is like that black hole on the edge of the Milky Way. It cannot be stopped.
Kinda like the judge here in Michigan declaring that the Detroit bankruptcy didn’t honor Obama.
It immediately brought to mind video I’ve seen of nazi judges screaming at and berating defendants accused of plotting against the reich.
There was an EO describing the process how and when a document is to be classified. If there is any doubt regarding classification, the document should remain unclassified.
bookmark
One wishes Snowden would have amassed a trove of information regarding the dear leader which could trickle out.
There have to be two serious things that the President now worries about with Snowden. The guy obviously knows the entire story of what happened at Benghazi....from start to finish, and he likely knows the real life-history of the Obama years in Occidental and Columbia....with data files on some hard drive. I’m shocked that the media hasn’t figured the other angles to the amount of knowledge this guy carries around.
He might even have a list of donors to various Republican Senators....the inside story to the ObamaCare bill....and favors for dollars story on the current administration. I would imagine a lot of people are sitting there in a state of anxiety....what else does the idiot know?
He's no idiot if he knows everything or some of what you listed. If he has lots of goods on Dear Leader and spills it he's an idiot's delight.
Leni
Suppose Snowden doesn’t have everything on his laptop.
He might have a number of websites or blogs that he set up previously with all encrypted data with no connecting links on his laptop or other drives.
Would they waterboard him to reveal it. /s
If he has information like that, why would he send it to Republican high-ups? The Republican party is in collusion with the Democrat party, to deny this is to hold a religious-faith in the GOP: look at how the GOP constantly, consistently fails to push for any of its platform planks, look at how it bows and bends to virtually every Democrat whim putting only the barest show/play of resistance. The only way they could fail at everything like this is if they were collaborating with the Democrats.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.