Look at the mountain, not the molehill. Most of what NSA does is spy on the bad guys and the facilities they have are worldwide and the data they collect is primarily and, IMHO, massively about non-USA citizens. The French get collected, the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, the Germans. They get it all. The Good Guys and the Bad Guys are all collected to any depth that NSA chooses. The rules they follow are not limited by the US Constitution nor should they be. Those rules only limit collection on US citizens and they are certainly worth scrutinizing. Yes, Snowden may have done us a favor in that area. But Rogers is talking about the 99% of the NSA business that is focused on the foreign threat and the collection of data about communications not involving US citizens.
We really don't know at this point what Snowden has divulged about the broad range of NSA programs and the related capabilities and methods. Those program directly affect National Security. They detect ship movements, troop movements, planning by our enemies, terrorist communications in Yemen, you name it. But Rogers probably does know what information about the NSA capabilities that have been given to the Russians. He is worth listening to. He is probably right.
Correct. NSA has been collecting massive amount of Intel on terrorist movements which obviously keeps terrorism checked.
Snowden and Putin are successful in making things appear as what they are not and even conservatives are calling these scum heroes.
I also believe you are correct and as ETL said what makes the media splash here is the misdirection, away from the fact that Snowden stole EVERY THING, not just what NSA does, but method and means - and names ...
It is one thing to say NSA collects meta data, texts, etc, and another to reveal how they do it - using X-band radar with double double-ganger sideband attachments, running Wake-me-when-its-over code through a supercomputer made by IBM in Austin, contract number 132YG, under the direction of Harry Houdini who lives at 1255 Noonehome Lane, Alexandra VA - see attached file for the other names involved in the effort - that is what the Russians, the Chinese, and AQ got, while the media focuses only on the sound bite goodness.
Method and means are a totally different kettle of fish that a simple seeming announcement of the abridgment of some putative Constitutional right. Method and means are the secret, not the action which has long been known and assumed - or should be. Revealing method and means gets people dead: our neighbors, cousins, and children, who, involved in this sort of work and are NOT going to talk about to anyone - they will just have ‘accidents’, curtsy of Snowden’s theft.
Most here seem to miss the point of what Snowden actually did. They are seemingly all hot about their so called Constitutional rights (which BTW have been declared by SCOTUS to be “mere privileges which can be revoked at any given time”). They fall for the intended misdirection, while missing the point. Instead, they fault those like Woolsey and Rodgers who have (or had) access to Eyes Only clearances (way above TS {code word}, which is a light year above mere Top Secret) and slam Snowden for a traitor, instead of praising Snowden for a hero.
There is no way Snowden, a pasty faced, lowly contract Admin, got what he did on his own - when I was at NSA in the 60s there were so many checks that even those who had the proper clearances had trouble getting all the data they theoretically had access to, and even then they were looked at hard. There is no doubt he had help - either internally from some other mole or externally from the Russians and/or the Chinese.
We no longer live in a country that is relatively safe or even in one that is risker, but in one that is now totally vulnerable to any outside enemy who choses to take advantage of Snowden’s theft. G_d help us.
My thoughts FWIW.