Re: Edward Snowden... Let's Make It Simple

[gcomeau]

36. I think you may be confusing...

...impact among the members of a (relatively at least) paying attention political discussion forum and the impact on the nation as a whole.

Effectively, zip all has come out of this on the positive side if you get out of the DU bubble and look around the country.

There is some small chance they may actually make some rollbacks to the Patriot Act before re-authorization this time around, we'll see, but barring that it's really hard to think of any significant positive impact this has actually had.


As for those negatives, if all Snowden had done was "expose wrongdoing by the Govt" then I'd agree with you. No downside. But that most certainly isn't all he did. He didn't just grab a bunch of documents that showed some people doing bad things. He grabbed THOUSANDS of pages of documents that had everything from actual shady programs to legitimate foreign intelligence activities in them and just gave all of it up because he couldn't be bothered to screen it all himself first. He went to Hong Kong and *personally* gave the Chinese specific targets the NSA was penetrating in their networks. ON PURPOSE. That is not "whistleblowing" that is espionage. Information on how the NSA was penetrating ISIS got let out in the open by the Times.

Damage. Was. Done.

Turning a blind eye to that isn't treating the subject honestly.