Take A Break From The Snowden Drama For A Reminder Of What He's Revealed So Far

[BrainDrain]

73. Couple of quick points....

First is Snowden does NOT have 4 laptops full of uber-secret data. That is just bullshit from the same people who want to arrest him and make him disappear.

Second, when I got my clearances I was 19, in the military, and I saw stuff before the president did.

There are literally tens of thousands of people out there who have the ability to see, on a daily basis, super-secret uber-classified material. For their entire careers, which in most cases spans decades and begin when they are either first in the military and then as a civilian or when they come directly out of college. Either way they begin their careers at what some would deem a tender age, late teens or early twenties. If you count all the people who have already retired from the intel community along with those that are still active within it now, that number is probably in the hundreds of thousands.

Out of ALL those people we have 2 that have actively come forward with information that some would consider detrimental to the interests of the government of the US.

In truth, what Manning has done is shed a very bright light on actual war crimes committed by US military personnel. What Snowden has done is shed a very bright light on a surveillance practice that is most definitely in violation of the constitutional rights of nearly every American citizen.

We have folks screaming and yelling that contractors are the problem. They are NOT. They just pay better than the government does, but the difference is only one of who signs their paycheck, Uncle Sam or a CEO, and in most cases it is both.

The hair pulling and chest pounding is all out of proportion to what is actually happening and is meant, IMHO, as a distraction from the real issues at play. It is NOT that we have young people (with or without collage degrees) being granted access to highly classified material.

The real issue is the material itself and what it contains. These people didn't compromise the military capability of the US, or the ability of the US to keep tabs on the world.

They compromised the ability of the US government to hide its crimes, and THAT, at least too many people both in the government and out, is much, much worse.