State Department Brief Today on Snowden. Unbelievable

[JDPriestly]

148. They already named a reporter as a co-conspirtor in espionage.

The Washington Post published an explosive story about the Justice Department's monitoring of James Rosen, a Fox News reporter based in Washington. Rosen allegedly spoke to Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a State Department contractor, for a story about North Korea's nuclear program. The Justice Department charged Kim with violating the Espionage Act for his contact with Rosen.

Kim's case has already been condemned by critics of the White House's hyper-aggressive approach to leaks, but the details of the DOJ's tracking of Rosen have not been known until now. The Post's Ann E. Marimow laid out the intensity of that monitoring in her article:

The Justice Department used security badge access records to track the reporter’s comings and goings from the State Department, according to a newly obtained court affidavit. They traced the timing of his calls with a State Department security adviser suspected of sharing the classified report. They obtained a search warrant for the reporter’s personal emails.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/20/james-rosen-justice-department-co-conspirator-obama_n_3305857.html

They have the metadata. They only have to subpoena the records of the contents of the communications.

Once they have the metadata, the contacts and whistleblowers are forced to leave the country in order to speak out about excesses or corruption in the government.

Snowden sees himself as a dissident, as a political refugee. It's a matter of the point of view you choose.

I met people from Eastern Europe who fled and who had worked for the intelligence in Eastern Europe. They were just ordinary-seeming people. I did not know them through any official link, just socially and based on religious affiliations. Should they have been pursued?

Snowden should be permitted to live in peace in an asylum country. We have given asylum to people who killed to make a political point. We are an asylum nation.

Snowden is a rare case of an American seeking asylum, but we should respect his right to do so. I don't know whether the people from Eastern Europe that I knew took any information or documents with them. I did not know them in any capacity that would have caused me to be interested in that.