- Red and Black
- Sep 5, 2011
-
|
That's disagreeing with the law, not if his trial is fair or not.
The American public
|
#
¿
Jan 18, 2017 12:35
|
|
- Adbot
-
ADBOT LOVES YOU
|
|
|
#
¿
May 14, 2024 20:57
|
|
- Red and Black
- Sep 5, 2011
-
|
Trump may grant your silly wish
Don't worry you sweet, sweet child, Trump isn't nearly principled enough to do that.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 18, 2017 21:29
|
|
- Red and Black
- Sep 5, 2011
-
|
The NSA's programs were actually illegal under US law, and whistleblowers who had tried to work within the govt before Snowden had their lives destroyed, forcing his hand. These facts are convienently ignored by his opponents.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 19, 2017 00:33
|
|
- Red and Black
- Sep 5, 2011
-
|
and if he'd only revealed those programs, perhaps you'd have a point
|
|
#
¿
Jan 19, 2017 00:43
|
|
- Red and Black
- Sep 5, 2011
-
|
nope, my point is still valid either way, while yours relies on ignoring the rest of that
|
|
#
¿
Jan 19, 2017 01:42
|
|
- Red and Black
- Sep 5, 2011
-
|
Also I don't have time right now to read that article and see if it's accurately portraying Greenwald's statement, but if Snowden was put in a position where he had to disclose secrets to a foreign government to avoid imprisonment and torture, that is still a systemic failure. Because in such circumstances the US govt would be forcing Snowden to choose between committing a crime and having his fundamental human rights violated. Although I understand why you'd still want to push the blame onto an individual rather than take a hard look at the much deeper moral failings of the US govt as a whole.
e: Furthermore, from a broader moral perspective anything that it's wrong to do to a US citizen it's wrong to do to a Chinese citizen. Human rights don't depend on Nationality and Nationalism is a cancer on humanity hth
Red and Black fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Jan 19, 2017
|
|
#
¿
Jan 19, 2017 01:59
|
|
- Red and Black
- Sep 5, 2011
-
|
that's a dumb argument by a dumb person
who cares what my interests are, regardless of if you know them or not, they don't change what's right or not it just lets you try to weasel out of being wrong
I don't personally care if the NSA surveillance program was legal under US law or not because I look at the matter from a moral, not a legal perspective. I do however find it ironic that people like you will call for Snowden's prosecution but show no interest in holding anyone involved in crimes exposed accountable. It's pretty clear hypocrisy from my perspective
|
|
#
¿
Jan 19, 2017 02:23
|
|
- Red and Black
- Sep 5, 2011
-
|
Before Snowden: The Whistleblowers Who Tried To Lift The Veil
quote:
For Binney, the decision to quit the NSA and become a whistleblower began a few weeks after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when he says he discovered the spy agency had begun using software he'd created to scoop up information on Americans — all without a court order.
"I had to get out of there, because they were using the program I built to do domestic spying, and I didn't want any part of it, I didn't want to be associated with it," he says. "I look at it as basically treason. They were subverting the Constitution."
Binney says he and two other NSA colleagues who also quit tried sounding the alarm with congressional committees. But because they did not have documents to prove their charges, nobody believed them. Snowden, he says, did not repeat that mistake.
"He recognized right away, it was very clear to me, that if he wanted anybody to believe him, he'd have to take a lot of documentation with him — which is what he did," Binney says.
quote:
Others have tried to work within the system. For example, computer expert Thomas Drake thought blowing the whistle on what he considered unconstitutional NSA programs would shake things up there. Instead, what got shaken up was his own life.
"The only person who was investigated, prosecuted, charged in secret, then was indicted, then ended up facing trial and 35 years in prison was myself," he says.
Drake had taken his case both to the NSA and to Congress. After concluding his complaints were going nowhere, he showed unclassified information from the NSA to a newspaper reporter. For that he was charged with violating the Espionage Act. The FBI raided his home, too — four months after Binney's.
"Your life's never the same. All your colleagues and people you used to work with all disappear. You're persona non grata, you're radioactive," he says.
"On top of that, you're spending tens of thousands of dollars defending yourself with a private attorney. So now you're practically bankrupt, you're declared indigent before the court, your family's questioning who you are and what you're up to and why you brought all this on us."
The case against Drake fell apart days before he was to go to trial in 2011; he got off with a misdemeanor plea bargain and these days works at an Apple store. Like Binney, Drake thinks what happened to him was a cautionary tale for Snowden.
How the Pentagon punished NSA whistleblowers
quote:
During dozens of hours of interviews, Crane told me how senior Defense Department officials repeatedly broke the law to persecute Drake. First, he alleged, they revealed Drake’s identity to the Justice Department; then they withheld (and perhaps destroyed) evidence after Drake was indicted; finally, they lied about all this to a federal judge.
The supreme irony? In their zeal to punish Drake, these Pentagon officials unwittingly taught Snowden how to evade their clutches when the 29-year-old NSA contract employee blew the whistle himself. Snowden was unaware of the hidden machinations inside the Pentagon that undid Drake, but the outcome of those machinations – Drake’s arrest, indictment and persecution – sent an unmistakable message: raising concerns within the system promised doom.
“Name one whistleblower from the intelligence community whose disclosures led to real change – overturning laws, ending policies – who didn’t face retaliation as a result. The protections just aren’t there,” Snowden told the Guardian this week. “The sad reality of today’s policies is that going to the inspector general with evidence of truly serious wrongdoing is often a mistake. Going to the press involves serious risks, but at least you’ve got a chance.”
quote:
After Drake was indicted in 2010, his lawyers filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain documents related to the investigation Crane’s office had conducted into the claims of the NSA whistleblowers. According to Crane, he was ordered by his superiors in the IG’s office to delay releasing any documents – which could have exonerated Drake – until after the trial, which was expected to take place later in 2010.
Crane alleges that he was ordered to do so by Shelley and Lynne Halbrooks – who had recently been named the principal deputy inspector general (in other words, the second-highest ranking official in the IG’s office). Crane protested but lost this skirmish as well. (Halbrooks did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.)
In December 2010, nearly five years after the Pentagon’s inspector general’s office had apparently given Drake’s name to FBI investigators, Drake’s lawyers filed a complaint with the inspector general, alleging that Drake had been punished in retaliation for his whistleblowing. According to their complaint, the crimes Drake had been charged with were “based in part, or entirely, on information that Mr Drake provided to the [Pentagon] IG” during its investigation of the NSA whistleblowers.
Crane was at once alarmed and revolted. The complaint from Drake’s lawyers seemed to confirm his suspicion that someone in the IG’s office had illegally fingered Drake to the FBI. Worse, the indictment filed against Drake had unmistakable similarities to the confidential testimony Drake had given to Crane’s staff – suggesting that someone in the IG’s office had not simply given Drake’s name to the FBI, but shared his entire testimony, an utter violation of law.
Drake’s complaint demanded investigation, Crane told Halbrooks. But Halbrooks, joined by Shelley, allegedly rejected Crane’s demand. She added that Crane wasn’t being a “good team player” and if he didn’t shape up, she would make life difficult for him.
But there was even worse to come. As Drake’s trial approached in the spring of 2011, Crane knew that the law required the IG’s office to answer the retaliation complaint filed by Drake’s lawyers. But, Crane says, Shelley now informed him it would be impossible to respond – because the relevant documents had been destroyed. Lower level staff “hosed up”, Crane said Shelley told him: they had shredded the documents in a supposedly routine purge of the IG’s vast stores of confidential material.
Crane could not believe his ears. “I told Henry that destruction of documents under such circumstances was, as he knew, a very serious matter and could lead to the inspector general being accused of obstructing a criminal investigation.” Shelley replied, according to Crane, that it didn’t have to be a problem if everyone was a good team player.
On 15 February, 2011, Shelley and Halbrooks sent the judge in the Drake case a letter that repeated the excuse given to Crane: the requested documents had been destroyed, by mistake, during a routine purge. This routine purge, the letter assured Judge Richard D Bennett, took place before Drake was indicted.
“Lynne and Henry had frozen me out by then, so I had no input into their letter to Judge Bennett,” Crane said. “So they ended up lying to a judge in a criminal case, which of course is a crime.”
Red and Black fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Jan 19, 2017
|
|
#
¿
Jan 19, 2017 04:53
|
|
- Red and Black
- Sep 5, 2011
-
|
Oh, I see, you're not being edgy, you're actually that dumb.
American citizens have a right and expectation that they will be free from unwarranted government surveillance, irrespective of whether or not the government lives up to this standard. Foreign entities have no such right, nor expectation, and the U.S. Government has a duty to its citizens to assess and monitor the actions and decision-making of foreign entities by covert means. This is why non-stupid people object to the FBI tapping Martin Luther King's phone, but not the NSA tapping Xi Jinping's.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 19, 2017 11:34
|
|
- Red and Black
- Sep 5, 2011
-
|
bulk surveillance against china is absolutely the right thing to do, it's a territorially expansionist country and while we have been on relatively friendly terms with them, the more we know the better. given that it's a foreign country the concern about domestic bulk surveillance doesn't apply.
Also you may not have thought your argument through this far, but you're essentially giving countries like Russia and China a moral pass if they do the same thing to US citizens. Unless your angle is American Exceptionalism in which case holy poo poo
|
|
#
¿
Jan 19, 2017 21:41
|
|
- Adbot
-
ADBOT LOVES YOU
|
|
|
#
¿
May 14, 2024 20:57
|
|
- Red and Black
- Sep 5, 2011
-
|
You're advocating unilateral disarmament.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 19, 2017 22:28
|
|
#
¿
Jan 18, 2017 12:35
