“The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of ‘liberalism’ they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”

Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas


Monday, December 30, 2013

I'm still on Ed Snowden's side

Until I hear about some actual damage or loss of American life due to the Snowden leaked documents, I believe him to be a whistle-blower rather than a traitor. Of course the government hacks will call him unpatriotic and criminal and treasonous, but as far as I can tell all he did was expose practices that the US government shouldn't have been doing....and that is spying on American citizens by collecting communications data without a specific reason to do so.

The US government has been hiding behind "counter terrorism" for too long as an excuse for the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretapping, and phone call collections. The potential for abuse far outweighs the possibility of stopping a terrorist act.

There isn't a politician or government hack alive that would hesitate for one second if plowing through a private citizen's phone records gave him a political advantage somehow.

Here's how I see the results of the Prism program in the future: Some citizen exposes a President, Senator, or CEO who's the friend of the President as a criminal of some kind and in order to shut him up and discredit him, the President's chief of staff tasks the NSA to plow through this poor guy's phone records for the past 20 years and then expose any questionable patterns they find.

That's how it'll happen. Pretending that there are rules in place is self-delusional in the extreme. If the Clinton's and Obama's can sick the IRS on political enemies, you don't think people like them in positions of power would hesitate to use the NSA to intimidate critics?

Here's Snowden's Hong Kong interview.......click on over to the 6:00 mark...or watch the whole thing and see if you don't agree.....

                       .

2 comments:

David said...

Ed, I'm with you.

Bill said...

I completely disagree. Snowden took an oath. He may well have been a plant from the start, but let that bide. He saw what he considered wrong. Did he go to his superiors? We have no evidence. Did he go to Congress? He did not. He went to a known anti-American journalist and fled to first one, then another totalitarian country, taking his country's Crown Jewels with him. He has given our enemies, both states and terrorists invaluable aid while seeking asylum in a country where Putin's thugs do all the things he only imagines America does. Some whistle blower! He is a traitor.