Will you all please make up your minds?
The defense of the NSA metadata gathering seems to follow two incompatible threads, here on the boards, and in the public domain.
1) Snowdon didn't do shit, because everyone knew about the spying, and all he did was confirm it to those who have no right to be shocked, because it all started under Bush.
2) Snowdon outed a successful and secret program that was administered by thousands of companies employing some four million top secret cleared people.
Look, to be a traitor, you have to let the enemy know something they didn't know. However the Government has used the phrase intercepted emails many times to describe how investigations got started. In fact, http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/09/28/1096137236562.html in 2004 the FBI complained ]that the couldn't cope with the numbers of intercepted emails.
So unless we are convinced that the Terrorists are not smart enough to read the news, and lets face it they have to be at least that smart, then we are left with this conundrum.
How could Snowdon have outed a top secret program that both the enemy, and the friendly knew about and therefore commit treason?
Even the idea of violating Top Secret is asinine. Again, if everyone knows it, then it isn't secret. It may not be moral, and it may be unconstitutional IMO, but it can't possibly be a secret much less "Top Secret".
This is a throwback to the asinine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian program Azorian] sometimes called Project Jennifer. When we spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build a ship to recover the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_submarine_K-129_(1960) K-129]. Once it had been printed in the paper, it was no longer a secret. Yet even today, forty years later, it is still classified Top Secret, and the truth shall never be known about this asinine program.
So defenders of the faith, make up your minds will you? Get back into chorus practice, and when you come out, come out singing from the same sheet of music. Either it is a program that everyone knew was happening, and thus could not be a big secret that Snowdon let out, or it was a closely guarded secret to which we limited access to a few million people with TS clearances and the enemy was too stupid to learn about from the many FBI public releases for intercepted emails being the basis for an investigation, like the http://www.scribd.com/doc/146422383/Zaz-i-Hearing Zazi case.
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