FNS panel
Pulitzer - Snowden.
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It is difficult to say whether Snowden is a villain or hero. He did explose another big lie of the Obama Administration [of a program that actually started under the GWBush Administration] about the government spying on US citizens. He did reveal some of how the government operates covertly.
Most other major nations also spy. Spying is as old as the history of mankind.
Too much information helps the national enemies.
Recall the day after the 9-11 attacks and Senator Orin Hatch rushing to a mic to tell FoxNews that ‘we’ were tracking Bin Laden’s satellite phone. Afterwhich, that phone went dead.
But when we see the militarily outfitted BLM challenging a rancher and his family over cattle grazing and a endangered tortoise, it causes us ‘domestic terrorists’ to reevaluate.
It is difficult to say whether Snowden is a villain or hero.
Those in the know might one day present direct evidence that an operation al Qaeda kept offline succeeded for going dark in response to Snowden’s revelations.
As an illustration, the Chechen Boston bombers certainly succeeded in part by remaining offline as they plotted their attack. I doubt they’d have succeeded otherwise.
But I’m fairly sure they were specifically trained to stay offline back in Chechnya. Most “smart” terror operations understood long ago that NSA was listening in.
What I can’t do is feel any empathy for the Obama admin when it lamented the loss of assets Snowden caused.
If Obama wanted “intelligence victories” he’d have left it out of the public record that bin Laden was dead. He would have wiped out him and his Paki base, grabbed the computers, and started “running” al Qaeda from Langley.
A president who thinks and acts THAT way is welcome to my phone records.
I’ll give them up (happily) if the cause is victory. It’s not as if anyone is asking us to work third shift in a munitions plant.