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Tace

(6,800 posts)
Tue May 12, 2015, 06:17 AM May 2015

The Vindication of Edward Snowden | The Atlantic


Mark Blinch / Reuters

A federal appeals court has ruled that one of the NSA programs Snowden exposed was illegal.

Conor Friedersdorf
-- The Atlantic

May 11, 2015

Edward Snowden’s most famous leak has just been vindicated. Since June 2013, when he revealed that the telephone calls of Americans are being logged en masse, his critics have charged that he took it upon himself to expose a lawful secret. They insisted that Congress authorized the phone dragnet when it passed the U.S.A. Patriot Act, citing Section 215, a part of the law that pertains to business records.

That claim was always suspect. The text of the law does not seem to authorize mass surveillance. A primary author and longtime champion of the law avows that Congress never intended to authorize the phone dragnet. And nothing like it was ever discussed during an extensive, controversy-filled debate about its provisions.

Now the wrongheadedness of the national-security state’s position has been confirmed.

A panel of judges on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last week that the program Snowden exposed was never legal. The Patriot Act does not authorize it, contrary to the claims of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Michael Hayden, Keith Alexander, and James Clapper. “Statutes to which the government points have never been interpreted to authorize anything approaching the breadth of the sweeping surveillance at issue here,” Judge Gerard E. Lynch declared. “The sheer volume of information sought is staggering.”

Other conclusions reached by the three-judge panel include the following:

more

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/05/the-vindication-of-edward-snowden/392741/
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The Vindication of Edward Snowden | The Atlantic (Original Post) Tace May 2015 OP
Friedersdorf, being the good little soldier he is... Blue_Tires May 2015 #1

Blue_Tires

(55,445 posts)
1. Friedersdorf, being the good little soldier he is...
Tue May 12, 2015, 10:07 AM
May 2015

It goes without saying that if Snowden is vindicated *now*, then he hasn't been vindicated for the preceding two years...

So which is it?

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