Snowden did to the NSA what they have been doing to US citizens for years:
At several recent junctures, the U.S. government has publicly sought to expand its power and control over the electronic privacy of its citizens. At each point, the government was roundly foiled by the public and the majority of the political class, which rebuked it. But that has evidently never stopped the government from imposing its will surreptitiously. As the reporting of the New York Times, ProPublica, and the Guardian about the National Security Agency’s programs exposed by Edward Snowden showed once again yesterday, when the government really wants something, it can be temporarily denied but rarely foiled.
In the early 1990s, computer scientist and activist Phil Zimmerman created an encryption program called Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP for short, to block the government and other snoopers from reading the emails and files of users. To retard PGP, the government targeted Zimmerman with a criminal investigation for “munitions export without licenses” after the program appeared overseas, explaining that the program’s encryption exceeded what U.S. export regulations allowed.
Congress cut funding for the Defense Department office in charge of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, a massive surveillance database containing oceans of vital information about everybody in the United States. But the journalistic record proves we can’t trust government’s white flag of surrender. In the case of TIA, the government abandoned the program’s name but preserved the operation, as Shane Harris and others reported seven years ago, giving it new code names and concealing it in places like the NSA. The documents Snowden stole from the NSA show the government capturing and analyzing much of what TIA sought in the first place.
<snip> (more about programs)
Can somebody explain to the NSA that Snowden has merely done to the NSA what the NSA has been doing to U.S. citizens and business for decades? Snowden deceitfully ignored the legally binding promises he made to the NSA; the NSA similarly runs roughshod over both the letter and the spirit of surveillance legislation (and systematically lies about it, something Snowden doesn’t do). Snowden stole secrets; the NSA steals secrets (and encryption keys, according to yesterday’s reports), only at a more colossal level. Snowden took it upon himself that he, not the NSA or his government, knows best; the NSA and its governmental partners believe they know best; Snowden creatively exploited the technical weaknesses in the computer matrix to accomplish his goals; so does the NSA.
Everything Snowden knows about following the rules he learned from the NSA. Somebody, somewhere in the agency must be perversely proud of what he’s done.
http://blogs.reuters.com/jackshafer/2013/09/06/the-nsa-never-takes-no-for-an-answer/
Gravy for the goose.......
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