Snowden didn't take an "oath of secrecy"

[jberryhill]

100. Um....

"how can we have a law that requires secrecy outside the military environment?"

That's not a serious question, is it?

I'm not sure you understand the point of my observation. Taking a violation of the Fourth Amendment as a given, you are still left with the sequence of actions which Snowden undertook, which were certainly not, in sum, the full range of options available to him, including many legal ones.

But as far as "a law that requires secrecy outside of the military environment", I'm flabbergasted you believe that, say, theft of trade secrets should not be a crime. You think your doctor should be free to hand out your medical records? Really?

As far as a First Amendment violation goes, you can certainly sign a contract which lawfully requires you to speak or not speak on a given topic. Are you going to tell me that if I sell tickets to one of my singing performances, that I am entitled to keep the ticket sale revenue if I don't show up and sing?

In a surveillance state, which Snowden revealed ours to be, a subjective political and value judgment must be made in order to identify those to be watched or placed under surveillance. That is where the constitutional violations are most obvious.

That's all well and good. That has nothing to do with whether the affirmative defense of justification applies to everything that Snowden did.

And, once again, could you remind me of the penalty for "violating the Fourth Amendment"? What sort of maximum jail sentence does a government official get for that?

Because the ordinary penalty (absent physical damage incident to unlawful searches) is the exclusionary rule of evidence.

Okay, so, do people who believe abortion is murder have the First Amendment right to protest by blocking access to abortion clinics. Yes or no? And if your answer depends on whether you agree with them on the underlying issue, which I certainly do not, then the upshot is that:

Anyone who believes there is a Constitutional violation has the right to do anything they want, so long as I agree with them.

Is that it, in a nutshell?

And, I should add, there's nothing wrong with holding that as a position. But if your position is that application of the law should exonerate Snowden, then what is the problem with running that experiment?