NSA Says Snowden Took Documents From Internal Website: Report...

[MADem]

55. That's not the whole program, though.

Frankly, surveilling phone numbers is what the phone company does, so they know what to charge you. And look when they STOPPED doing it (that would be the year Obama took office)--it's not like they were doing it three weeks ago:

From 2006 to 2009, the NSA was found by its judicial regulators in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to be illegally surveilling thousands of phone numbers both inside and outside the United States without reasonable suspicion, according to documents released Tuesday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. On a daily basis, NSA analysts searched massive records of phone call metadata for matches with a so-called “Alert List” of 17,835 numbers, of which only 1,935 met the legal requirement of “reasonable articulable suspicion” necessary to track those numbers.

I'm not saying for a second that this isn't "an issue," and that there should not be more transparency with regard to some aspects of it, and that there shouldn't be considerably more judicial oversight over the whole process, but my hair is just not on fire.

Snowden had the No Fear Act and a load of avenues available to him if he truly cared about "the American people" and their privacy. None of his Ars Technica writings suggested that he gave a crap about anyone in that way--that would have been quite the epiphany. Instead, he job hopped to get "better stuff" and then took off to the Russian consulate in Hong Kong, after baiting a little mousetrap for Greenwald to muddy the waters.

I think he thought he'd be able to hang out in Iceland (didn't do the Wikipedia search on the change in government, I guess) or South America, playing the international bad boy. I don't think he counted on having to learn Russian and adjust to that society. If he doesn't like surveillance in the USA, he's going to HATE IT in Russia.

I think he sold the info he snatched to the highest bidder. I hope his asking price was high enough to support him in style in Russia--it's expensive there since the USSR fell. No more subsidies, no more social safety nets....it's like a society run by .... Republicans!