Edward Snowden - Hero or Traitor? (POLL RE-OPENED)

[fdimike]

Lil Red

"I read Ms. H's opinions. I notice she is a yellow dog republican"

There is no need to label anyone anything. Incidently she worked for Oregon Sen Ron Wyden Dem.

"Like the cites our constitutional fundamentalist so voluminously posts, these sites really contain very little factual information, and a whole bunch of misleadin stuff. I checked a number of her cited sites. All, bad, very bad..."

I don't have a clue as to what you're talking about. The only links in her article lead to the actual information the point was extracted from.

"Checking Mike's last post, I note that Mike's post does NOT QUOTE President Obama as saying anything like this, and, again, refers us to ANOTHER site: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/obama-ne ... ying-power... Which also does NOT quote President Obama..."

The link crossed to an Associated Press report. I'm not sure I understand your objection.

"These are the OPINIONS of conservative pundits"

Would you please cite where you are coming up with this info.

You appear to be hung up on racial issues even though none have been raised during this discussion. Additionally, to the best of knowledge no one has referred to president Obama as "boy". I'm not sure where you dug this up from but maybe you can enlighten us all as to where it appears in this discussion so the poster can be properly chastised.

[dcmark]

A different perspective....

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/com ... 0260.story

[fdimike]

interesting opinion. However, all he's doing is spouting the party line and backs none of what he's saying with any verifiable data. In this passage he says " the U.S. government truly does make strenuous efforts not to violate privacy" but does not say what those efforts consist of. The writing is along the lines of a novel vs a footnoted essay.

The author goes on to say:
"First, though many things need to be kept secret in today's dangerous world, the line between "secret" and "not secret" is fuzzy rather than stark, and if the goal is security, the harsh truth is that we should often err toward more secrets rather than fewer."
Apparently the Obama administration has taken this concept to heart reversing what he originally said about open government - "In 2009, President Obama famously promised “an unprecedented level of openness” in his administration, and a lynchpin in his open government plan was an overhaul of the government’s bloated secrecy system."
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/d ... fying-news

I fully agree with his final sentence - "But the intelligence community — always a less sympathetic protagonist than a self-styled whistle-blower — actually has a good story to tell about how seriously the government takes privacy issues. We should tell it." - and can hardly wait to hear it. I'm sure it will be an interesting tale.

[bumper]

You know I agree with his Dad on this one.

Lawmakers: Deal to spare Snowden from espionage charges unlikely
By Alexander Bolton - 08/11/13 04:10 PM ET

Privacy advocates and some lawmakers hailed Edward Snowden as a whistle-blower when he revealed details about classified surveillance programs but it is becoming increasingly unlikely that he’ll avoid trial for espionage if returned to the United States.

Federal officials have expressed interest in a possible deal to bring Snowden back to the U.S. from Russia, where he has received temporary asylum.

But on Sunday, senior lawmakers from both parties suggested Snowden had waived his whistle-blower defense by fleeing instead of staying in the country to defend his actions, as Daniel Ellsberg did more than 40 years ago when he leaked the Pentagon Papers.

“I think we have existing whistle-blower capabilities here in the United States. On a regular basis, whistle-blowers come forward, give information to Congress, and we attempt to address those issues,” said Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on ABC’s “This Week.”

“Going to China and going to Russia was not the solution to the problem. It compounds our difficulties in the United States with respect to al Qaeda,” he added.

Snowden’s leverage to negotiate a favorable deal with the Justice Department is undermined by the expectation that his asylum will likely last only one year. And security experts believe whatever national intelligence secrets he possesses are now likely in Russian hands.
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Lawmakers: Snowden would get fair trial

Lon Snowden, Edward Snowden’s father, on Sunday urged his son not to cut any deal with U.S. authorities that would spare him from a trial on espionage and theft charges.

“What I would like is for this to be vetted in open court for the American people to have all of the facts,” Lon Snowden told ABC’s “This Week” in an interview. “What I have seen is much political theater.

“The only deal will be true justice. You know, justice should be the goal of our government and is also the goal of a civil society,” he said.

Lon Snowden plans to travel to Russia “very soon” in hopes of meeting with his son and has already obtained a visa, according to his attorney Bruce Fein.

Snowden has his defenders on Capitol Hill, such as Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (Calif.), a senior Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, but they are in the minority.

In a C-SPAN interview Friday, Rohrabacher said Snowden’s critics were wrong. He even tried to paint Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to grant him asylum as verging on benevolent.

“Snowden was just alerting us to our government getting out of hand. Russia accepting him for asylum. I think was not as hostile an act as was being portrayed,” Rohrabacher told C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers” program.

Most lawmakers in recent days, however, have been sharply critical of Snowden.

Royce pointedly disagreed with Rohrabacher on Sunday.

“We have to keep in mind here that the conundrum we're in is one in which al Qaeda is first trying to learn how we track them,” he said.

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Snowden did not have to go public with classified information and hurt U.S. national security as a result of his actions.

“The reality is, I don't think he needed to undermine America's national security to pursue whatever he thought his conscience led him to do,” he said. “And I do believe there's a process by which he could have ultimately pursued his interest in a way that doesn't undermine the national security of the United States.”

Menendez said Snowden revealed intelligence sources and methods to the nation’s enemies.

There is more concern in Congress over how Snowden, a relatively low-level federal contractor working for Booz Allen Hamilton, had access to sensitive secrets than over the scope of the spying programs he made public.

Rep. James Clyburn (S.C.), a member of the House Democratic leadership, expressed confidence in President Obama’s management of domestic surveillance and raised greater concern over what he called “bad actors” such as Snowden.

“The president can do a lot of things, issuing orders to make sure that these contractors, for instance, are going through a process that would allow us to know what kind of people they're hiring and to weed out these bad actors because that's what happened in this particular case,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), a senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said: “We need to ask questions, like, why did Mr. Snowden have access to the information he had? It couldn't have been part of his job.”

McCain, who appeared on “Fox News Sunday,” said he didn’t disagree with any of the proposals Obama made Friday for greater transparency and oversight of the domestic spying programs.

Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, faulted Obama for not adequately explaining and defending the surveillance programs to the American public. And he dismissed Obama’s proposed reforms as “window dressing.”

But McCaul also rejected a proposal by privacy advocates that public defenders should be allowed access to proceedings of courts set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to object to surveillance requests.

He said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that it “would slow down the efficacy and efficiency of our counterterrorism investigation.”

There is little that President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) agree on, but they share the conviction that Snowden undermined national security without justification.

“No, I don’t think Mr. Snowden was a patriot,” Obama told reporters Friday.

Boehner called Snowden a “traitor” in June, shortly after the former government contractor leaked classified information to the British newspaper The Guardian.

Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing- ... z2bq56y36o
Follow us: @thehill on Twitter | TheHill on Facebook

[parrot]

I reiterate my previous statement that I'd be far more concerned about my privacy (if I was) while living in Thailand that I would be living in the US. You can undoubtedly add China and Russia to the same list as Thailand.

http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/local/3 ... es-privacy

[WBU ALUM]

I reiterate my previous statement that I'd be far more concerned about my privacy (if I was) while living in Thailand that I would be living in the US. You can undoubtedly add China and Russia to the same list as Thailand.

http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/local/3 ... es-privacy

All of that may be so, but it's not about comparisons. It's not about them. It's about what is acceptable in America to Americans -- regardless of what any other country does or doesn't do. Those other countries don't have the US Constitution to follow, and liberty lost is rarely regained. The creeping crawling invasion of privacy affects freedom and liberty.

[fdimike]

WBU

I couldn't have said it better myself. The US Constitution along with its associated Bill of Rights has stood the test of time basically unchanged from when it was originally penned. It has done so because the American PEOPLE and not the American government protected it. We now have an over zealous government which has shown little regard for its (The Constitution) protections. The revelations Mr Snowden provided should be a wakeup call to all our citizens that this precious document is under attack by the current president and his administration acting under the guise of "protecting us". We now know that other government agencies to include the IRS, DEA and FBI among others are illegally using data being collected by the NSA surveillance programs and then falsifying the source of the information.
Thank you Mr. President. However, if I were one of your previous students studying constitutional law I think I'd ask for a refund of my tutition.

[fdimike]

Addendum to my previous post.

The following link should be inserted following the words "falsifying the source of the information" and prior to "Thank you Mr. President".

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphilli ... up-to-irs/

[bumper]

Thailand:

News > Local News
Police slapped down on Line monitoring plan

Published: 13 Aug 2013 at 23.47
Online news: Local News

The state's technology crime unit has "no authority" to trace people's Line messages, as that would breach the criminal law, the Electronic Transaction Development Agency (ETDA) says.

A Line message warns about the Technology Crime Suppression Division's plan to trace the chat logs of people using the smartphone app. (Photo by Patipat Janthong)

The warning came after the Technology Crime Suppression Division (TCSD) outlined a policy to monitor Line messages in the wake of recent rumours on social media about a possible military coup d'etat.

Earlier report: Police plan to monitor Line app

Line Corporation said it has not received an official request for message tracing from the Thai police. The company declined to elaborate.

Line also insisted that it does not collect or store any users' information or messages, as it protects users' privacy.

Line is a smartphone app which allows users to make free voice calls and send free emails and instant messages.

As of July 21, up to 15 million users in Thailand had signed up for the Line service.

Thailand is the world's third-largest Line user, after Japan and Taiwan. Line has reached 200 million users worldwide.

The ETDA is a unit under the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) set up to develop, promote and support electronic transactions or electronic transaction services.

ETDA director Surangkana Wayuparb, who drafted and amended the Computer-Related Crime Act, said tracing chats on social media networks would violate Section 157 of the Criminal Code.

Pol Maj Gen Pisit Paoin from the Technology Crime Suppression Division has unveiled a plan to keep tabs on Line app users who pose a potential threat to national security. (Photo by Kitti Woraranchai)

The code prohibits state officials from carrying out acts that may cause damage to the state.

Under the act, Ms Surangkana said police must ask a court to order social network providers to give them access to messages.

Paiboon Amonpinyokeat, founder of law firm P&P Co, said monitoring people's Line messages would violate Section 8 of the act, which prohibits the illegal interception of data. "This move by the police is simply a political threat," he said.

Mr Paiboon also said clicking "Like" on social media posts is not considered unlawful, as long as those messages do not contain content deemed as lese majeste or are related to terrorism.

Human Rights Commissioner Nirand Pitakwatchara called on the TCSD to be extremely careful when seeking to trace Line application chat messages or it would be in violation of the charter.

He said a line must be drawn between national security and government stability following concerns that the measure could be used as a political tool.

TCSD chief Pol Maj Gen Pisit Pao-in insisted the policy would not affect "law-abiding" citizens.

He said that the policy targeted only violators of national security, public safety and order, and public morality.

People who share the messages are initially not the main target. "We focus on those using social networking to break the law," he said.

He said the agency has approached several chat service providers such as Facebook and WhatsApp but they refused to cooperate, citing US laws.

Pol Maj Gen Pisit said he will travel to Japan on Aug 16 to discuss further cooperation with Line Corp executives. The TCSD team went to Japan from Aug 5-9 to seek cooperation from the developer.

Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra said she did not know the details of the TCSD policy but assured it did not threaten individual privacy.

Democrat leader Abhisit Vejjajiva slammed the measure, saying the government was trying to create a "climate of fear".

[RLTrader]

Thank you Mr. President. However, if I were one of your previous students studying constitutional law I think I'd ask for a refund of my tutition.

Me too, so that I could repeat the course with a competent law professor, who has read the constitution.

[bumper]

Pvt Mannings statement prior to sentencing which seem to be set for next week. This kid had a lot of issues, probably not meant for the military in the first place.

http://news.yahoo.com/u-soldier-manning ... 27069.html

[RLTrader]

NSA, DEA, IRS Lie About Fact That Americans Are Routinely Spied On By Our Government:

Time For A Special Prosecutor

By Jennifer Stisa Granick and Christopher Jon Sprigman

It seems that every day brings a new revelation about the scope of the NSA’s heretofore secret warrantless mass surveillance programs. And as we learn more, the picture becomes increasingly alarming. Last week we discovered that the NSA shares information with a division of the Drug Enforcement Agency called the Special Operations Division (SOD). The DEA uses the information in drug investigations. But it also gives NSA data out to other agencies – in particular, the Internal Revenue Service, which, as you might imagine, is always looking for information on tax cheats.

The Obama Administration repeatedly has assured us that the NSA does not collect the private information of ordinary Americans. Those statements simply are not true. .....

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennifergra ... secutor-2/

[WBU ALUM]

Time For A Special Prosecutor

Truth.

But we are depending upon Liars and Cowards to do it.

[fdimike]

And all this from a professor of constitutional law. It sure doesn't say much about the US educational system. How lucky we are to have such a shining star as our president. A special prosecutor is long overdue along with some really serious inquiries by congress!!

[fdimike]

This from Obama: Dead in the Water. Thanks to Papaguido for this one.

http://blackrepublican.blogspot.com/201 ... icles.html

One can only hope our congress will take notice and begin a formal investigation with a special prosecutor. Mr Obama can join hands with his predecessor Mr Bush and go down in history as Americas two worst presidents.

[fdimike]

Why Lavabit closed down rather than comply with the US Government. A real American hero.

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/8/13/e ... il_service

[RLTrader]

NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year, audit finds.

So how does NSA square 2776 privacy violations last year w/ notion that they did fewer than 300 searches the last year?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/nat ... story.html

[fdimike]

Short answer is "They can"t". They're really hoping this will all go away so they can just back to busines as usual. Alexander needs to be fired and the sooner the better.

[RLTrader]

Here is a report on their answer and WH.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/nat ... story.html

[jackspratt]

For those who believe there is any real legal oversight of the NSA:

...........The chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said the court lacks the tools to independently verify how often the government’s surveillance breaks the court’s rules that aim to protect Americans’ privacy. Without taking drastic steps, it also cannot check the veracity of the government’s assertions that the violations its staff members report are unintentional mistakes.

“The FISC is forced to rely upon the accuracy of the information that is provided to the Court,” its chief, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, said in a written statement to The Washington Post. “The FISC does not have the capacity to investigate issues of noncompliance, and in that respect the FISC is in the same position as any other court when it comes to enforcing [government] compliance with its orders.”..............

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ ... story.html