EUGENE ROBINSON: America Should Thank Snowden For Revealing NSA Snooping

[RC]

90. It does not matter what Snowden's or Greenwald's political views are.

That is totally immaterial. It is doubtful either are DU'ers either, so why would it matter?
What does matter is what they did. They brought to everyone attention, i.e., the world, what our government is doing on a very large scale, in secret. Collecting our meta data, Internet, E-mails, and phone calls and storing them in a huge data base for later combing through, looking for who know what.
Snowden and Greenwald are believed over everyone else because what they say checks out. Unlike our own government, they are telling the truth. Remember the least untruthful statement in front the Senate Intelligence Committee, on March 12, 2013?

Clapper indicated that he skated close to the line.

In an interview with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, he said that “I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner, by saying no,” though he also called his answer “too cute by half.” He indicated that his response to Wyden turned on a definition of “collect:” “There are honest differences on the semantics of what -- when someone says ‘collection’ to me, that has a specific meaning, which may have a different meaning to him.”

One wonders why Clapper or his staff did not seek a clarification, given the apparent heads up by Wyden. Clapper apparently thinks the NSA “collects” only on specific targets — what he called, in the interview with NBC, “taking the book off the shelf and opening it up and reading it.” But that is a rather slippery answer.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/james-clappers-least-untruthful-statement-to-the-senate/2013/06/11/e50677a8-d2d8-11e2-a73e-826d299ff459_blog.html

All the NSA needs to do is in type in a name, IP address, phone number and all the information they have hoovered up concerning the search terms comes up on the screen. A few more key clicks and they can listen to the phone calls, or read the E-mails. That is what Snowden exposed.

If Snowden had little to nothing, then why does our government want him so bad? They want him so bad precisely because he has some very damning and embarrassing information, taken from the inside. Our government wants him so they can make an example of him, as they did Manning.