Posted on 06/14/2013 4:19:50 AM PDT by Kaslin
After a week of enduring the crossfire over the relative benefits and dangers of the deeds of NSA leaker Edward Snowden, I am left wondering whether this has been good or bad for our nation.
The answer depends on the lens we use for viewing America and the world.
I belong to two groups that are not large enough. The first is the portion of America that is very, very serious about fighting terror. I have not forgotten 9/11 or the fact that its hatchers would love to do it again.
Stopping them has been an all-consuming pursuit for our intelligence gatherers and analysts, and their success rate has been positively stunning.
I also belong to the segment of America that has had it up to the eyeballs with the Obama administration, from the bad policies to the dishonesty to the weak foreign policy to the targeting of political enemies. 2016 cannot get here fast enough for me.
Added up, my result is a general willingness to allow wide latitude in surveillance, tempered by concerns over its possible abuse.
I had the very same position as the Patriot Act was being hammered out while smoke still rose from Ground Zero. The deciding factor in my decision to support it was the faith I placed in George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to use that information to catch terrorists without spying on my phone calls and e-mails.
In the wake of the IRS disaster, the Benghazi deceptions and the basketful of other scandals-in-waiting, it is very hard to similarly trust this administration as it holds that intelligence apparatus in its hands.
But I will. For now.
I am able to do so because unlike the IRS, which was easily corruptible with its ranks of employees eager to please a boss who demonized Tea Party groups at every turn, our intelligence services operate in another landscape. They are not so easily tainted.
Unlike Snowden, who decided to recoil at tactics that have kept us safe, the average NSA analyst is proud to be part of the effort that has prevented further 9/11s. They are not a lock-step gung-ho robot army, but few are the ones who awaken to suddenly shudder at procedures laid out and practiced for a dozen years.
But Snowden did, and rather than step with courage into an American courtroom to make his case and dare our system to punish him for his perceived heroism, he hunkers in Hong Kong, happy to let its people and its justice system handle his fate.
He is missing out on a certain love-fest he would receive here from Americans more worried about potential Orwellian nightmares than the real threat of Jihad.
There is no doubt that a government that can dig into our phone calls and e-mails can surely ruin our lives if it has a mind to. But the police department that arms its officers can also wantonly kill us. The military that fights our wars could also order us into concentration camps.
Here’s an idea: How about if we wait for abuse to occur before we lament it?
The IRS story is a blatant example of government overreach brought to bear to the detriment of a president’s political enemies. It happened. All we have to do is get to the bottom of how.
The NSA panic is all based on what people with all of those security clearances could do, might do, if their motives turned dark.
Show me a litany of people whose lives have been needlessly assaulted by NSA snoopers, and I’ll jump onto the indignation wagon with Snowden, Rand Paul and his Dad, and anybody else up there weaving stories of “turnkey tyranny.”
Until then, the only thing I want to say to Ed Snowden’s besmirched colleagues is: thank you.
Thank you for the painstaking work you do every day on the off chance that a call that looks innocent today looks very different when a number shows up on the phone of the terrorist we catch tomorrow.
The voices raised in alarm over this practice either don’t know or don’t care that dots cannot be connected unless you have all the dots.
This is not to say that their concern is without merit. Privacy is a basic demand of citizens overseen by a powerful government, and it is useful to debate how to balance it against security interests.
But that debate should not be started by an activist narcissist who has soured on his NSA job.
Know who could have started the debate? Our Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper. On that fateful day in March when Oregon Democrat Senator Ron Wyden asked if government were collecting “any type of data” on millions of Americans, the answer should have been: “Senator, as you know, I can in no way comment on the degree or specifics of the methods we use to gather information in our effort to stop terror attacks.”
At that point, Wyden, or Snowden, or anyone in between could have tried to raise a chorus of dissatisfaction with the fact that secret things need to remain secret.
So as I restrain myself from faulting surveillance tactics under Obama that I favored under Bush, I join the call for similar consistency from the left. Any liberal defending these practices today owes Bush an apology. Joe Biden can start.
Meanwhile, we should all retain our vigilant alertness to misuse of power.
My mistrust of this White House runs deep. But I retain my belief in the countless men and women of the NSA, CIA and other intelligence agencies. Their pursuits are within both reason and the law.
If anyone were to subvert their tasks -- if anyone in authority were to try to use anti-terror investigative tactics to unduly spy on the innocent, we would then have genuine violations of law, and they would be called out by a genuine whistleblower, which Edward Snowden decidedly is not.
In roughly a hundred days...the bulk of the American population has gone to distrust of the federal government....rather than trust. I don’t see anything being supported much...from immigration reform, to tax reform. Firing people....wont’ change that prospective either.
If there was any doubt left that the federal government was not our enemy...........
Snowden is a nobody. The real story is a massive domestic spying scandal and the utter stupidity that allows thousands of people like Snowden to have access along with unknown numbers of Chinese nationals with that same access.
This get Snowden crap is like bad soviet propaganda.
What it all comes down to is TRUST. As long as people trust in something, Government, patriotism, the dollar, etc. all is fine, but trust has an implicit factor in it, FIRST do no harm to those who trust in you to do the right thing.
Like ALL tools the NSA and their wide gathering of data is trusted not to harm the average citizen of the country. In return they are given willful ignorance and acceptance that the information so gathered will not be used to harm them capriciously. It’s meant to guard us from the Wolves that want to prey upon us.
But also like ALL tools it can be misused and harm the very people who trusted the tool to do only good things. And that’s where we are at now, many if not most people do NOT trust this government and fear that these tools are being used to not protect us from the wolves but to protect the wolves from us and to allow the wolves to prey upon us at their pleasure.
Swowden is a media squirrel. Look Squirrel!!!
Anyone that doesn’t thing Snowden was a good thing must be a government troll. I am far more afraid of this government than some supposed terrorist from wherever. Let’s just compare the firepower and influence. Everyday a new story breaks that further makes me ashamed to live in the usa and be a CITIZEN (not that that matters)
Sometimes we have but one chance to speak up for right. The warnings were there when Bush 2 continued down this slide. It is a terrible burden to carry for the person who has the information Snowden had. I believe his intentions were only honorable and done with every good intention.
“These are not the droids you are looking for, now move along.”
That one movie line is so apropos to the entire litany of scandals we are being barraged with. BENGHAZI is ground zero folks. I would even wager that Snowden is another plant just like Manning, seeing he was at CIA before going over to NSA. People like this would have never gotten close to a comm center much less known where it was when I was a part of the intelligence apparatus. They are the droids, we must endeavor to find out who the droid master are.
How are we supposed to know when that abuse has occurred?
There are some other issues about the NSA and alphabet agencies that need to be addressed as well. The fact that this one company that Snowden worked for made some $6 billion off the American taxpayers and has many Chinese nationals working for them that have the same access as Snowden. There are hundreds of companies doing the same all at taxpayer expense.
The next act in this charade is the Unbelievably Large Terror Event(s), in which the cry for government to ‘do something’ drown out any analysis of ‘how the hell did this happen?’.
That’s when the IRS and NSA converge, and the circle is complete.
The only question is... how long will it take?
In other words, this hack is perfectly fine with living in a neo-stasi police state but only if the thug ruling it has an R next to his name.
There are merits to both sides of that argument but the real unanswered and un pursued question is : why did Snowden get access to that information in the first place?”
Why did a GED level IT specialist have a ‘need-to-know’ to get access to it anyway?
That is the problem congress should be fixing first.
NSA is far less of a threat than the IRS.
Why did Snowden think he had access to ALL the information ~ .... ~ little evidence that he did. Lots of claims but where’s the data?
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.