And I'd still be grateful for his blowing of the whistle. This is stuff that needed to be exposed, and the USA will be a better place for it. You are right, in time people will understand what a favor they both did us.

K&R

"Edward Snowden blew the whistle on some seriously illegal practices by the NSA and the government of the USA. "

...disagree. Even in his interview, Snowden could not produce any examples of anything "illegal." His own lawyers recognize that he has no standing in that regard.

was NOT torture just because John Yoo said it wasn't? That was apparently legal too.

Remember when slavery was legal too

nm

fun of watching Snowden fans yell: Leave Snowden, hero, alone.

i want you to have the jury cause i want to say.... i am really really tired of certain posters thinking that there are a few duers with a target on their back, and that is ok for target shooting.

On Thu May 29, 2014, 07:54 AM an alert was sent on the following post:

Hopefully you're getting time and a half today
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=5017735

REASON FOR ALERT

This post is disruptive, hurtful, rude, insensitive, over-the-top, or otherwise inappropriate.

ALERTER'S COMMENTS

This "paid poster" attack is getting ridiculous, and should qualify as disruptive, insulting, and inappropriate. Rewarding personal attacks just encourages this behavior.

JURY RESULTS

You served on a randomly-selected Jury of DU members which reviewed this post. The review was completed at Thu May 29, 2014, 08:11 AM, and the Jury voted 6-1 to HIDE IT.

Juror #1 voted to HIDE IT
Explanation: Sick of this crap.
Juror #2 voted to HIDE IT
Explanation: 2008 called, it wants its joke back.
Juror #3 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE
Explanation: No explanation given
Juror #4 voted to HIDE IT
Explanation: This is calling someone a troll and is unacceptable personal attack. Take it over to the Discussionist, we're trying for civility here.
Juror #5 voted to HIDE IT
Explanation: This comment serves no purpose other than to be a jerk for the sake of being a jerk. ProSense annoys me too but I am tired of the general lack of civility on DU.
Juror #6 voted to HIDE IT
Explanation: There are posters that think insult is ok for a few. Wrong.
Juror #7 voted to HIDE IT
Explanation: No explanation given

Almost all of them agreed with each other!

I have to admit, I miss talking to you gals daily about these issues.
But, I haven't been as active as I would have been normally lately.

Frankly, I'm really disgusted with the way this site is being managed.
Considering the fact that I voted for President Obama twice, it is hard to drag my mouse's pointer over a harsh thread about him just to read the same lame comments that have been made here for the last 5 or 6 years about him.

If I don't say hello to you before the 4th of July, just know that I think that you're the greatest!
You, she, Cha, Prosense, Tex4Obama, Whisp, freshwest, all of the gals from the BOG, and so many other wonderful ladies that have posted here these last few years.
You've all really been an inspiration to me.

on the internet I would include a lot of links to my own words and reclaim what I had already written a second, third, and even a fourth time. Quick money, not that I could name anyone that does that.

one of their employees blows the whistle (as it were), it is one hell of a spurious argument to suggest that there are no whistle blower protections when it is government illegality that is being exposed. What a great way to circumvent the law.

In the story you quote, the *NSA* said they were legal, and that may have rendered the statutory protections for whistleblowers unavailable to Snowden. The WB protections in the US have been criticized by experts such as Devine, Dworkin, Moberly, and others as weak, too limited, and full of holes, for a long time.

The NSA is hardly the best arbiter of whether they or their agents and contractors engaged in wrongdoing.

There are stories all over the web describing independent findings of wrongdoing, concerns about questionable, immoral practices, etc. here is just one:

http://m.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-broke-privacy-rules-thousands-of-times-per-year-audit-finds/2013/08/15/3310e554-05ca-11e3-a07f-49ddc7417125_story.html

I thought I had politely explained the logical errors you made in your jumps from one claim to another.

--Martin Luther King, Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Seriously? Even if we accept for a moment, the worst conspiracy theories about what the NSA is doing, reading emails, listening to phone calls etc., that compares to beatings and lynchings and segregation for you?

I am comparing police state tactics, such as mass surveillance of citizens, to police state tactics used by police states of the past to subjugate citizens and even in support of worse things than our government is presently doing, such as genocide. The systematic extermination of 11 million non-combatants, including six million Jews simply because they were Jews, was not possible without police state. That is what Dr. King was referring in that passage. Otherwise, the only comparison he was making to the Holocaust and the beatings and lynchings and segregation of the Jim Crow South is that the laws that gave form and authority to such oppression were unjust.

There is movement afoot in America to promote income inequality as a positive good, or at least a necessary consequence of an unbridled free market, which is viewed by many as a positive good. I simply observe that inequality at that level cannot be maintained without a police state protecting the elites from the oppressed masses. This kind of mass surveillance is the kind of power the state should never have. Indeed, I maintain that our state doesn't have that power under the Constitution; it is prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.

Would the government use police state tactics such as mass surveillance against those who might rise against the injustice of income inequality? Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I think it would. Perhaps it already has.

Don't give in to sophistry!

Do you wish that the extent of the NSA spy program was never uncovered?

He was the real hero. The REAL whistleblower.

Snowden revealed everything Drake did, except Snowden's revelations had the warrant. The warrant that everyone was pissed was NOT being pursued is now there.

Aside from that, Snowden released sensitive state secrets, and military documents. That, my friends, is NOT a whistleblower. That is a shit weasel.

Thomas Drake is a hero and a patriot. Drake was prosecuted under Bush, but the Obama DOJ dropped the charges. Why? Because this administration supports whistleblowers. Not media-leaking shit weasels.

going on here... a runaway spying program targeting innocent people. Drake obviously didn't have the impact Snowden did because it didn't change anything or bring it to the forefront of our collective attention. That's the kind of whistle blowing that a government can live with; no skin off their teeth to forgive that. But the person isn't the issue, the issue is the unwarranted, over-reaching, unconstitutional spying program at the NSA. Letting this devolve into a personality circus works just fine to get their program back on track without anyone noticing is just what they need.

or military secrets. He also didn't flee to Russia and sign exclusivity deals with journalists.

Nor did he try to appear on TV as much as he could. Snowden is the one who makes this about Snowden.

Drake is a real hero. Snowden is a piece of shit.

Sadly, celebrity is so much more important to our culture than the issues that really make a difference to our lives.

And I think Snowden's critics are "on the wrong side of history."

Things have changed. We are in the midst of an elaborate ruse, a masquerade.

And all you need is some good actors...well they don't really have to be that good...and many will believe.

So many things done by both the government and the private sector are shockingly immoral and unethical, yet still 'legal', that I don't really care if something horrible somebody is doing is technically 'legal'. Yes, we should be working to make such things 'illegal', but we need to start voting to people out of office who are perfectly happy to continue to do anything and everything as long as they can torture an interpretation out of some 'memo' from a sleazy lawyer to protect the 'legality' of whatever horrific thing they want to do.

So many things done by both the government and the private sector are shockingly immoral and unethical, yet still 'legal'
-

'memo' from a sleazy lawyer to protect the 'legality' of whatever horrific thing they want to do.

just because something is declared 'legal' does not mean it's ethical or moral

of 'justice' and 'the rule of law' goes back to Roman times, when everything simply rested on how good an orator your advocate was. We've gotten a little better on things like evidence, but far too often the least ethical lawyers win by using sleazy tactics like smearing the victim or repeatedly saying things they know the juries will remember, even if they're ordered to ignore them by the judge.

People who have lied in the past, committed crimes in the past, can still be victimized like the rest of us, but the mere fact that they have a 'past' is used to write off crimes committed against them - that 14 year old whose case against her rapist was in the news recently, for instance, in which the judge gave the rapist a 'pass' because the girl had had sex before.

People in 'white collars' destroy far more lives than any mass murderer with a gun, yet the suffering they inflict on millions is ignored when it comes time to penalize them even in the rare occasions when they are taken to trial.

The lawyers and the judges, since they collectively operate (and game) the system. It's all but impenetrable to non-lawyers, and the lawyers and judges want it that way, and they deliberately keep it that way.

It starts with the legislators who are lawyers (most of them), writing the laws, rules and regulations. Then the lawyers who further abuse the system by lobbying for businesses to get sweetheart laws and tax breaks at the expense of the rest of the populace. To the judges who do not seek to get unethical lawyers disbarred, because after all judges are lawyers first, and its just a "black wall of silence" similar to the "blue wall of silence" which protects unethical police.

then it will be legal. Weird to see how people are trying to make "illegal" have to do with their desires rather than the law. If you think it's bad even though it' legal, why not say so rather than trying to misuse a word?

Greed is immoral. But until your greed causes harm to others, there is no need to legislate against it. When your greed crashes the entire economy and plunges millions into unemployment and raises the poverty rate, then YES we should 'legislate' against it. Not the greed, but the results thereof.

The law should serve all of society, not simply specific groups of privilege, whether by wealth, race, or gender.

I count one so far: ex's listening in on their ex's. Have their been others?

Damned Nazis!
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Aspire to inspire.[/center][/font][hr]

Such meticulous attention to legality obviously breaks the fourth amendment and there we go. Thanks, Eddie!

which has relevance on whether the NSA practices were 'legal' after all:

Specifically, what makes "neither of those statements true" and what evidence did Snowden supply to prove them false?

I thought the final paragraph including 'Snowden' might have given a clue.

There was also, of course, lying to Congress: http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/19/5228672/lawmakers-slam-intelligence-chief-james-clapper-for-lying-to-congress

I quoted the 1st 4 paragraphs of the article. The 4th reads: "It turns out that neither of those statements were true – but it took Snowden's historic whistleblowing to prove it. " . Subsequent paragraphs go on to expand on Snowden's disclosures, which have exposed the government lies (whether or not the Solicitor General knew he was passing on lies to the SC).

So, now you know. The government lied to the Supreme Court to cover up the NSA program; the SC, having been lied to, said they weren't breaking the law, and, now we have evidence that they lied, 2 Democratic senators want the government to acknowledge the lies. And, of course, Clapper lied to Congress. This is pretty important - the executive misleading the other 2 branches to cover up an illegal program.

In any case Snowball admitted in his NBC interview that the NSA is operating legally so there goes that fond wish. I heard him say it last night.

Obviously you didn't want an answer to your question, since all you've done with my answer is ignore the article, rather than considering what it says. It'd be better if you said something like "don't bother answering, I won't pay any attention" in future, rather than wasting our time.

I am that way at times.
-
but sometimes trolls are trolls
-
your decision

Sometimes posters make things up and try to pretend they didn't.

You want to use the Supreme Court - with the most conservative justices since the 1940's - as the arbiter on this?

No thanks.

"Lying to the Supreme Court."

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=5018336

The general idea is that something Snowden said would have caused the SC to decide a case differently so it would have to be be a lot more watertight than anything he's said so far.

What it's saying is that it's not a question of noting who a foreigner under surveillance is in communication with; here's more of the NYT article:

in the American courts of law.

There are many supporters of Edward Snowden here for his heroism in what he revealed about our Government data-mining spying on it's own US Citizens. I don't know if you've watched PBS FRONTLINE's Excellent Documentary (3 hours) on the Whistleblowers before Snowden and how they tried to out Bush's illegal spying after "9/11" and the continuation and expansion by President Obama or the interview with Snowden on NBC last night. It's been posted many times here at DU and if you didn't watch it I hope you will find the time at some point to do so. didn't.

This name calling would be better suited to a Conservative Website where name calling and distracting from message is the chosen way of communicating.

That kind of name-calling is vomit-inducing, and not at all progressive.

there was actually a lot of support for the right to call those types of names.

The standard had been set.

Do whistle-blowers upset your denial bubble? It's not very liberal to give up your rights to privacy for a weak promise of security. But some choose to stand behind the biggest bully and shout insults.

Do whistle-blowers upset your denial bubble? No

It's not very liberal to give up your rights to privacy for a weak promise of security. Now you're just making up shit, I'm pretty sure I've never said one word of support fo NSA's actions especially when it comes to my rights to privacy. I'm even more sure I've never said anything about giving up my rights to privacy for the sake of security

But some choose to stand behind the biggest bully and shout insults. Heaa haa haa, yet you don't respond to the actual insult hurled at Obama, "piece of shite,m used car salesman"

your come back is pretty pathetic. Perhaps you should quit trying to read the minds of others, you're not very good at it.

As far as Will's post, I never approved of it, but moved on. Obsessing about it is not very liberal. You are liberal arent you?

If whistle-blowers dont upset denial bubbles, why does a specific group here in DU hate them so? Seriously? It's one thing to hold the opinion that Snowden broke the law. But to obsess over it and call him childish names is very odd. It's as if some dont want to deal with what's really happening so they seek diversions.

because you been throwing out the "rules" a lot lately.

You continue to pass negative, and erroneous, and assumptive judgements on others...is that being liberal? Is that in your handbook?

conservative agenda. I dont like it when those that pretend to be liberal and disparage the left and post hatred of whistle-blowers and protestors. I dont like the conservative agenda and will speak out as such.

i would hate to see you fall into self loathing because your judgmental attitude and assumptions are just like I'd expect an Conservative to be like.

liberals. They arent here to discuss issues like fracking, Wall Street corruption, net neutrality, indefinite detention, the Patriot Act, etc. I should avoid the "Whistle-Blower and OWS hate threads."

We shouldn't allow the lowest common denominator to dictate our standards.

sometimes giving others carte blanche, permitting rhetoric without consequences feels very impotent.

I have not advocated, "flinging poo," as you put it. Quite the opposite.

to end up in Russia. Only an idiot would suggest Snowden voluntarily went to Russia. Of course there are many idiots here and else where.

cry me a tear about your hero being called Moscow Eddie. His name is Eddie and he's in Moscow because he "heroically" fled there.

It's not at all "Progressive" to give up your right to privacy for a mere promise of security. Your blinded trust of the NSA/CIA/FBI is misplaced and sadly naive. But it is the easy road. Stand behind the big bully (NSA) and shout absurdities at "Eddie" or any whistle-blower that may stand up to the bully.

Kind of like the children in the back seat that keep complaining "Daddy, Susan's looking at me, make her stop."
Evidence collected illegally cannot be used in a court. That is all that the Constitution guarantees. If you have been harmed by the illegally obtained information, then you can sue.

are contending that all information they obtain is by definition "legal". Another concern is that information can be used to ruin people without exposing where the information came from, making it impossible to get rectification via courts.

Progressives are concerned with violations of our right to privacy and I find it very strange that someone calling themselves a Progressive, would side with the NSA/CIA Security State against the rights of citizens.

courts continue to throw them out for not having been harmed. Which people are you contending have been ruined by the NSA using illegally obtained information?

But I'm sure you find that perfectly fine, right?

Name calling, misrepresentation, and outright lying about Democrats is as much a part of the anti-Democratic left as it is the Republican right. It's hardly unique to right wing sites. You see it every day on the DU.

- C.D. Proud Member of the Reality Based Community

the American kangaroo courts of law.

with real justice, like Eddie did. LOL

like him to come back and face trial.

He did. He also exposed perfectly
legitimate foreign intelligence operations, and has expressed a willingness to continue to do so. The one does not excuse the other, though it does mitigate it. I'm with Bernie Sanders on this one.

Edward Snowden did not blow the whistle on any illegal activity.

When asked to give an example of the NSA violating the law, both he and Greenwald were unable to do so.

Last edited Thu May 29, 2014, 11:14 AM - Edit history (1)

legal.

Legal doesn't mean American law.

The only thing at issue in Snowden's revelations are any NSA spying on American citizens.

Spying on other nations is the job of the NSA, and I am grateful we have organizations doing this.

Will you be able to find a treaty under which it is illegal?

Throwing around the term "illegal" without regards to the law is meaningless.

just as torture was made legal by a dubious legal (political) opinion, and as protests were made illegal in some states. The worst part of all this is that so many sheeple are unaware of this creeping totalitarianism.

Which goes back to what most who understand that Snowden is a traitor and a coward have said all along, we need to repeal the USA PATRIOT Act, or at the very minimum severely curtail the powers granted by that abomination.

and thank you.

But I am happy that he brought information to light that we as a country would not be discussing otherwise.

and that is all that matters to me

when the Patriot Act was passed in the Senate by a vote of 98 to 1. Where have you been?

Yes we've been complaining about spying since then but I don't think we were aware it was continuing to the extent it was under the current government. And I am a strong supporter of Obama, but I appreciate all politicians - including those I support - having public pressure leading toward transparency.

So I'm not sold on the big revelations defense. As far as I can tell it's pure theater in the interest of smearing Democrats, produced by the same crew that brought us Swiftboat Veterans for Truth.

That happens.

If you want me to feed the canine a bit more, the message would be that one can think whatever of Snowden and Greenwald, and one can certainly think that people who support what they did are wrongheaded to one degree or another.

However it is totally wrong to compare a guy who basally has forced himself into exile to reveal what he thinks is a gross overreach by the National Security State and a bunch of right wing nut-jobs who made up a bunch of lies and smears about a democratic Presidential candidate, egged on by Karl Rove's tactic of taking an opposing candidate's strength (Kerry's war record) and twisting it against them.

The revelations may be peripherally embarrassing to President Obama, but the overall issue is much bigger than he or any individual president, and goes to the heart of our system and the collective sacrifice of our privacy and freedom that has kicked into high gear since 9-11.

He's somebody's puppet, I don't know exactly whose, but whoever they are their agenda mirrors the GOP's, specifically the neocons.

I don't think believing that privacy and civil liberties are important is limited (or even reflects) the GOP agenda.

And, if you want to get technical about it, massive and intrusive spying under the guide of National Security is part of the neo-con agenda. So I'm not sure how undermining that is furthering their goals.

It isn't about the NSA either. That's been clear all along, but became even clearer during the NBC interview. Benghazi isn't about what happened at Benghazi on 9/11/12, either. The NSA is worthless to the neocons as long as Dems control it, and they'd prefer to weaken it as much as possible so as not to help Obama. Once they get Dems out of office, they can do whatever they want with it again, like they did during Bush-Cheney, so swiftboating Obama is job one.

Others have just enough to follow.

Because you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a thread about Edward Snowden. Funny how over the past few months, we see nothing on him, suddenly he pops up with Brian Williams and he the toast of the town.....

Are necessary. Agee 100%.

to investigate and report on our government. They used to do a fairly good job (think of Watergate) and the number of news outlets were fairly limited.

Today the major outlets in terms of television and print media are consolidated under corporate ownership. They don't want to spend any money on actual journalism.

The internet offers so many other options but the news becomes diluted across all the various sources.

Because journalism is no longer playing its role we have to rely on whistleblowers and others to disclose our government's actions.

The only way we can avoid becoming another Soviet Union or North Korea is to expose the illegal or questionable actions of the government.

To that end Greenwald/Snowden have played an important role in exposing the massive spying on the American people. Whether the spying was legal under current law or not it is something our Congresscritters and Presidents have enacted. We need to know what they are doing whether it is legal or not.

Perhaps, someday in the future, Snowden will be viewed as a hero for exposing the rot within our current system.

as long as he's outside this country he's a traitor. China to Russia and possibly Cuba smh

Chelsea Manning is here... and going on with her life. get over here Ed..