PRISM was an effective program and a good balance with civil liberties. Snowden should go to jail. [View all]

[BrentWil]

It always strikes me as an interesting PR position the government is in when stuff like this brakes. If you believe that talking about something actually puts people in danger, how do you defend a program like PRiSM when they are leaked? Not that too many will take too much pity on the PR for the government, but it is an interesting point of view to take in mind. This story somewhat reminds me of the AP leak story. Yes the government seized records of journalist. However, it was in response to a leak on human intelligence in terrorist organizations. In other words, we had real people, with real families, that were inside terrorist organizations. Talented people with real families. If you were the President and in charge of protecting those people, how far would you go? And once the story is leaked, how do you protect yourself without further undermining those people's safety. We often think of these problems from the side of the civil libertarian. However, it is an interesting perspective and one every President has to deal with.

That brings us to PRiSM. From what I can gather from the news sources, this was basically a program used data from various sources (cell phone companies, internet companies) to look for connections to known terrorist sources. In other words, they were mining the data to see if a certain number called someone. If they wanted to go further and listen, they had to attain a further warrant. Moreover, the program itself was covered by a warrant and legal. The program apparently had pervious success. There are very few things that Saxby Chambliss and Dianne Feinstein agree on. The effectiveness of the program seems to be one.

Given that a majority of internet traffic passes within the United States, there are both legitimate privacy and security concerns. What the program was designed to stop are not just crime. They are events that could undermine our civilization. However, this also has to be weighted against privacy concerns. With that being the case, I don't see anything particularly wrong the arrangement that a democratically elected government came to. Moreover, there was oversight from both the Congress and the courts.

What Snowden did is throw out all these considerations and decide he had the right to make these judgements, not the lawfully elected representatives of the people. I am for more transparency in government. One of the reasons we have problems keeping secrets is because we over classify. That said, he had no right to undermine what was the will of a democratically elected government that was reviewed by the courts. There are actual security concerns and he could have very well undermined those concerns.