Edward Snowden made a calm, compelling case for clemency last night. He's a patriot.

[JDPriestly]

177. If you can't kill the message, kill the messenger.

That trick goes all the way back to Greece.

Snowden detractors know very well they cannot argue against him on the merits. So they argue against him ad hominem. He's a bad guy.

We should be talking about whether the FISA courts should exist. Based on the orders I have read, they should not. We need to remodel the FISA courts so that innocent individuals can question FISA orders permitting the surveillance of the individuals' communications. It should not be some anonymous, government-appointed lawyer. The government should not only get a warrant based on probable cause for every item, place, person or thing it wishes to place under surveillance. Further because of the excesses that have taken place, the FISA court should issue orders that require the warrant is revealed to the individual under surveillance if and when the claim of probable cause has been proved to be bogus.

Regardless of anything that Snowden has done or said, there is neither a defense nor an excuse for the NSA spying on such a massive scale. Nixon left office for spying on a few people but the extent of his surveillance was nothing compared to what the NSA is doing.

As for Snowden, the US should do the pragmatic thing. We should make a deal with Snowden like the deal we made with the banks. A deal that protects our most important interests -- our survival.

We kept the banks above water and basically gave them amnesty even though they nearly and maybe actually did bring down the world economy.

If we want to do what is best for the US, we will strike a similar deal with Snowden. It's the pragmatic, smart thing to do.

Think it through without emotion. Snowden is a smart guy. In his area of expertise, he is clearly brilliant.

What's more he has knowledge and ability that could be very dangerous to us if used against our interests. He knows how our intelligence and surveillance systems work. In addition, his personal intelligence and specific knowledge potentially make him dangerous to us.

(Compare him to the banks. They know where the derivatives are and what the magic formulas are the prevent the derivatives from killing our economy. There knowledge could pose a threat to us and the world economy. We have basically granted them amnesty and even bailed them out financially letting them grab people's homes and throw people into bankruptcy. They posed at least as great a danger to the US as Snowden if not a greater danger. Yet the heads of the banks are for the most part enjoying their wealth and freedom. Very, very few landed in prison.)

Snowden has stated that he does not have access to the many documents he carried away from the NSA and took to Hong Kong. Let's say we don't believe him. That makes him all the more dangerous. He could give his documents to Russia. We should prevent that by giving him amnesty and getting him to come home or to a safe third country. The likelihood is that he is telling the truth and that he doesn't have the documents. That means that Russia does not have them either.

But we should still try to get him out of Russia and into a country that is allied with us because even without the documents, what Snowden does have, as I mentioned above, is knowledge of how our intelligence system and in particular how our computer system works. We don't want the Russians to have that. The best way to prevent them from getting that is to offer Snowden immunity and bring him home. We could make a deal with him that would require him to be quiet and not use computers for a while, a sort of house arrest or probation deal. He should not go to prison. It would not be smart on our part to insist on imprisoning him. He would never accept such a deal, and we would make him angry. Don't anger someone who knows your most embarrassing secrets. That's a lesson every teenager has to learn.

It is in our interest to bring Snowden out of Russia maybe even home along with his excellent hacking skills and his knowledge of our intelligence system. It is in our interest to prevent Snowden from hating the US.

Sorry this isn't well written but it is very late.

The US should do the smart thing, the pragmatic thing and offer Snowden a deal that will give him a way back to the US and out of Russia provided he lives in peace and does not make speeches or use computers.

If I were Snowden, I would not want to come back here yet. There is far too much hostility here.

I will admit that I am grateful that Snowden revealed to us just how corrupt our country really is. The NSA is worse than Nixon's surveillance and break-in fantasies every were.

But the person who took away his passport should be fired. What is done is done. At this time the US should forget its pride and try to prevent Snowden from offering his skill and intelligence to some other country.

In addition, we need to make sure that intelligence agents and security agents who blow the whistle are protected. And the congressional committees that oversee our intelligence community need to get on the ball. Feinstein should not be on the Senate Intelligence Committee. She is completely unsuited for that kind of work. It's understandable. She suffered terrible trauma in San Francisco before going to the Senate. But she should not be on that committee. Congress needs to take care of the issue of over-reaching by the NSA and make sure that whistleblowers in the intelligence community are not abandoned in the cold or harassed or imprisoned or even threatened with imprisonment.

Mold grows in dark, secret places behind the walls. We need to tear down the walls and get rid of the mold before it kills our Constitution.

And if we truly believe that Snowden poses a threat in Russia, we need to help him get out of there to a safe haven. We should not kill him because if we do, the rest of the world will see us as morally suspect. Sure, the corrupt leaders in the world would love to see Snowden dead and gone. But the people of the world would see the US as an untrustworthy and morally corrupt nation.