In this day and age how would one call blatant acts against the law and the Constitution? And to call protest of that absurd?
Despite being a government agency with a host of patriotic and law abiding personnel, they are still commanded by people of the Administration’s choosing. Commanded by people chosen by the same President that put IRS’ Koskinen in charge and allow operatives like Lois Lerner to fester. Look at DoJ - Fast and Furious, Eric “My People Holder”. Look at the FBI, DHS under Napolitano, look at DHS that has told the courts they will obey Obama’s orders instead of law when it comes to handling illegals.
There have been multiple scandals regarding NSA - they are highly incensed that Snowden brought even some of that to light.
I remember one of the NSA functionaries before Congress talking about “the program” and describing it as collecting just data (harmless, really - just ‘meta’ data) where they could just capture all that and IF they needed to, later on and go back and sift for more ‘detail’. What detail? The bits in between the metadata they already have? The actual call? You then see stories about new NSA and other IC works and efforts for even more advanced automated keywording and voice recognition - keywording metadata headers? Yeah. They didn’t build that megamemory Death Star out in Utah for just ‘metadata’.
They already have the capability to capture direct vendor feeds with all the metadata, in some cases they’ve coerced the vendors to supply their own streams and data so the NSA doesn’t have to go that added step to actually capture it somewhere else.
NSA has long been capable of capturing RF emissions from all over the world - they do it here, but that’s ‘just for foreigners, huh?’....in fact there is no way for them to know unless they’ve captured it all in the first place.
With regard to expectations of [ultra] privacy. No one said ‘ultra’. The Constitution just talks about certain basic rights that citizens should be protected from government infringement. To expect that your phone conversation and your comings and goings as a citizen under it not be stored and examined isn’t ‘ultra’. Further, to wrap today’s administration and underlings in the flag of 9/11 is an excuse. Some of that stuff it spawned is just plain wrong. Just like FDR’s internment program for Nisei was wrong. Just like the DHS (as it operates today) and its underling TSA is wrong. Just like coercing local gun vendors to sell weapons to obviously shady characters to spirit them across the border in F&F is wrong.
I don’t rejoice in it. I am saddened that the one true purpose for it was so badly abused and that it may prevent legitimate efforts to proactively prevent more terror.
I have this comment. All of this has worked well hasn’t it? We’ve caught so many acts before they were committed. Shoebomber was one - Underwearbomber was one? Boston was one, right? There are others, too - and they always said “we were aware of them, but.....”
We heard how those two nuts in Texas were under surveillance at some point....we even heard where the FBI or somebody called authorities several hours before with an alert. Before an event that was sponsoring contest drawings of Mohammed.....how difficult is that to figure out something might happen. Show me the time-relevant intel about the plans those two had and I’ll believe it.
My expectations for [ultra] privacy aren’t wild stretches of tortured legalese, interpretations, secrecy and legislation enacted in haste after a heinous act. They are spawned from the founding documents of this country. Documents, bruised, tortured, misinterpreted, and mistreated as they are whose words provide us with some pretty simple and basic affirmations of our rights. To expect those rights whose instantiation and continuance was bought at such dear price is not absurd.
Snowden brought to light only that which was of significant and even immense assistance to the very people, groups, and countries that want to destroy America and, yes, to kill every single American given the chance. He also tossed bones to the American public to turn that public against its own government.
The overwhelming material that Snowden stole was of top secret MILITARY INFORMATION involving, as much as anything, the coordinated activities of other, allied nations against totalitarian and semi-totalitarian regimes—such, as for instance, Sweden's formerly unknown and secret monitoring of Russian military communications.
Snowden did not try to flee to a single country that is considered a free country as represented by existing freedom of the press. They were all outright or de facto enemies of the U. S. He tried to go, in order, to Cuba, Ecuador, China, and ended up in Russia—where he may have intended to end up from the beginning. There he has served as a servile propagandist, emitting in his self-righteous and degenerate rants to the naive worldwide not a peep about the repression, the outright spying on , and the continual assassinations of Russians who publicly indicate opposition to the repressive and murderous Putin regime.
Snowden is a modern reincarnation of the infamous “Tokyo Rose” and “Lord Ha-Ha”, propagandists for imperial Japan and Nazi Germany in World War II. How anyone can make him a guiding star is a puzzle of psychological pathology. It's unfortunate his admirers can not spend just a little time with him in his chosen setting: they would quickly learn what freedom is all about and that, yes, a free country has the right to defend itself and damn well better do that if it wants to survive.