Discussion: Snowden Gets Personal: Gov't 'Exploits' 9/11 To Justify Spying (VIDEO)

Traitor. This is nearly as bad as our evil former vice president and war criminal Cheney criticizing the current administration.

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yeah. Rand Paul to save the day. TerryMahoney will be here all week, folks! Tip your bartenders!

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tell the Rand Paul joke again!

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Um- DUH! I’m sorry, but I’ve been saying that since, I dunno, December of 2001? I’m sorry, but Snowden is not some kind of hero. Flat out, if you didn’t pay attention back then, yeah, you’re a tad surprised now. Back in about 2001-2005, we knew the government was spying on us. We knew about all these programs. We knew which room in which building the spy equipment was hooked up to the internet in.

If Snowden truly was a patriot, truly was not a double agent or a spy, he would never have cut and run. I also know I’m going to be getting a ton of crap from this, but it’s like the whole Manning thing all over again. Sorry, knew everything Manning released except the contents of the diplomatic cables, but I could probably have guessed those.

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Well, duh.

And Bob Cesca breaks it all down and explains how once again, Snowjob and his dudebro fans are full of shit:

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I think we’ve all known about the government exploiting us since before 1984.

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He said that he was at Ft. Mead, he didn’t state that he was working for the NSA on that specific date.

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No, you just perpetuate the implication that Russia was his actual destination, which is incorrect and misleading. It is a fact that he is there, but it is not a fact that he chose to be there. and that is the first thing cited by those who want to paint him as a traitor, even if you did not take that next step yourself.

Yes, he swore an oath and has broken it, although he has given reasons why he thinks that action was correct and necessary. Reasonable people can disagree as to his methods. But I notice that you don’t mention the broken oath taken by James Clapper or Keith Alexander to honor and protect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Or the oath not to lie to Congress. Why are you not holding them to the same accounting?

It is clearly a fact that he revealed violations of our rights made by the NSA, and changes are underway because of the widespread outrage over those violations. The only remaining question is will the changes be cosmetic or substantive, and whether we take to heart (once again) the knowledge that governmental secrecy begets violations of our rights, each and every time it is excused.

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My exact thoughts. It’s clear he was OK with Bush holding the reins, but that black man …

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Clapper couldn’t answer Wyden’s question the way it was worded, because Clapper would have been breaking the law to do so.

What violations? The “worst” of the Snowden document leaks revealed that the oversight was working. If you have an issue with the NSA collecting metadata, there’s a discussion to be had there, but the metadata is not private nor is it a violation of our rights.

Bullshit. There was NSA reform going on long before Snowden came on the scene, and incidentally enough, Snowden slowed down those efforts because President Obama had to explain to folks as stupid as Snowden is how all of the document dumps don’t reveal anything shocking or revealing, and how the NSA isn’t violating our civil liberties, not to mention all the hearings involving Clapper and such.

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“perpetuate the implication”

You pack a lot between my lines. Facts are facts, and the perception is accurate that he used our two biggest rivals to flee consequences.

As to Clapper or Alexander, this article is not about them.

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He certainly had an entirely different opinion of the NSA surveillance programs during the Bush Administration.

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I will. I don’t care for him, but with his and the ACLU’s help, this could have been a domestic affair. Pick another senator if you think my choice was beyond the pale.

Senators have real power to screw things up.

Snowden might be in jail, but he wouldn’t have been gagged, not with the Aqua Buddha having the opportunity to stick it to Obama.

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If it’s personal, he should come back home and plead his case to a jury. I don’t feel anything towards those that keep themselves aloof from the consequences of their actions whether they be private contractors or institutional spies. Enough with this “government” is the problem crap. We are the government, all of us.

I’m sick of celebrities trying to wring every last ounce of celebrity out of the media. There are some very important issues that need to be faced with regards to the NSA and Patriot Act. It’s not going to happen with the major player avoiding the consequences of his actions and refusing to take responsibility for them.

The longer Snowden stays in Russia with Putin invading Ukraine the less credibility he’ll have and the less this issue will seem important to the American public. It’s not. Snowden needs to get over himself. A court trial is exactly where this debate belongs.

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That is flat-out BS. BS. It has been shown that he did NOT realize half of what he stole. Much of what he grabbed had to do with America spying on other countries AND what America had learned about countries spying on each other. For ex., I believe it was China that was furious with learning of Australia’s surveillance of them. That had NOTHING to do with America

Why do you think much of Western Europe is in snit because of what was learned? Don’t peddle that garbage here.

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Please don’t be naive. He wasn’t going to Iceland because Iceland has an extradition treaty with the US. So does pretty much every South American country outside of possibly Cuba. It’s also damn near difficult to get from Russia to South America without a layover in the U.S. or a country without an extradition treaty because you need fuel. If they were going to use a private jet, they could have picked him up in Hong Kong BEFORE the U.S. cancelled his passport and transported him to whatever country he’s talking about. He’s lying. He was hoping to layover in Moscow long enough to get another country to take him. He gambled and lost. It’s horribly naive for him or anyone else to think that he’s protected whatever information he’s carrying with him. Even if he didn’t hand it over, they’ve seen it. Mr. I was trained as a spy and worked for the NSA ought to know better.

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I have been paying close attention. And he’s right. None of the stuff Snowden and Glennzilla exposed was illegal. Whether it should be illegal is another question, and a worthy one. Indeed, the fact that it wasn’t illegal is the real problem here. But nothing they indicated the NSA was doing programatically violated either a statute or a Constitutional prohibition as delineated by the federal courts.

There were many allegations by Snowden that procedures and safeguards intended to keep the use of the data within bounds of the law were insufficiently strong to keep someone from violating them, many complaints that there were “only” procedural safeguards rather than network security restrictions to enforce the procedures, and lots and lots of innuendo from Glenzilla that anything that was technically possible was necessarily being done, but if Snowden actually identified a violation of existing U.S. law, I missed it. And I was looking.

If you don’t get that the issue here is that there’s a lot of stuff that’s at least arguably legal that should be illegal, you’re the one who hasn’t been paying attention.

Or at least not sufficiently close attention to realize that Greenwald’s greatest fault as a journalist is his greatest strength as a persuasive writer. He has an amazing ability to lead the reader to draw invidious inferences that they invariably take as facts that they believe he told them, but when you call him out on it, he is able to accurately say “hey, I never said that.” Accurate, but disingenuous because he leads his readers to believe what he believes, and what he wants them to believe, without actually saying things he can’t prove.

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Wake up sheeple! /s

Like much of NBC’s programming, the Snowden interview failed to live up to the hype. Beard stubby and pale, the politically enervated Edward seems to cast himself for younger citizens as a romantically twilit vampire who did all he could before fate forced his delicate hand. Boo hoo, can’t wait for the sequal.

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