"Greenwald is an advocate, not a journalist" This is important to remember.

[cascadiance]

135. What you say is precisely why we need a system of better protection for whistleblowers...

... since as long as we have the broken system we have, the only way that a whistleblower can effectively do something to try and help change this broken system is to go outside it as Snowden has done. Now technically they could have prosecuted Dan Ellsberg as well for breaking the laws when he released the Pentagon Papers. But we had some people that had sense enough to see that fixing the system was more important than persecuting someone who stepped outside it to tell us of its flaws. The problem is that today, we have too many people focusing on the latter rather than the former.

We are ignoring many of our forefathers like Ben Franklin who completely understood even then that sacrifice of civil liberties in the belief that they are less important that our "safety" (whether it has been proven that we are paying a cost in safety or not when we can't verify some of those claims), we deserve neither and WILL GET NEITHER if we move towards the police state that this is leading us to.

Those that really feel that these nuclear and other secrets are important (and I'm also one of them) understand the need for putting in a good system of checks and balances that is answerable to us (and not to a secret political elite whose agenda we really don't know about). Many like Wyden in congress feel that they've been left out of the loop as well in many critical areas. This IS broken, and needs fixing.