General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Ok, I'm stepping into the Snowden discussion for the first time... [View all]Benton D Struckcheon
(2,347 posts)It's what he disclosed to foreign countries that makes some of us uncomfortable.
And the timing of those disclosures.
And the implicit assumption on the part of his boosters that every act of spying by the US on foreign countries is immoral, an attitude that certainly was NOT shared by, say, Patrick Henry. George Washington was our first spymaster, and he considered spying to be extremely important. There's a statue by City Hall in NYC to Nathan Hale, who was a spy for the US in the Revolutionary War. Nathan Hale would certainly not have approved of Snowden.
There is a very deliberate conflation of what he revealed about domestic spying with what he revealed about our foreign intelligence and its capabilities, as if they are the same issue and as if both are unconstitutional. This betrays a bottomless ignorance or, more likely, a deliberate intention to disable the US's spying capabilities by people who think everything the US does is wrong. There is no question that what Snowden has done has accomplished the latter. He ran because he KNOWS that what he did was completely illegal and would land him in jail, and he is depending on people not being able to distinguish the one from the other.
The way the debate is framed in the tech world especially, which is infested with libertarians, is that everything the NSA is doing is wrong. This is plainly ridiculous. We would never have won WWII in the time it took without the ability to crack both German and Japanese codes. That's signals intelligence. That's what the NSA does. Distinguishing that from code-cracking to hack domestic transmissions over the Internet doesn't take a big intellectual effort, but it certainly takes a little more than that displayed by those who indiscriminately give Snowden and everything he has revealed a big fat endorsement.
I have said before and will say again: his domestic disclosures are a deliberate distraction from what he revealed about the US's foreign spying. The former are a cover for the latter, which was always the real point of what he did, and the reason he is now in Russia as a "guest" of the FSB.
He's a defector, pure and simple. If he is returned to the US it will be in handcuffs, and he will never spend another day of his life in freedom if he does. He knows it, and he knows why, and he knows it has precisely nothing to do with the NSA's domestic spying or its constitutionality.