I am very concerned about this.
Too many things about this episode have a smell. Snowden first runs to Hong Kong: hello, everyone, that is now known as China. He then chooses the odious, venomous, kooky Glenn Greenwald as his point man, and the hard-left Guardian as his venue, for revealing the information. It appears he never tried appropriate whistleblower channels. It appears that the Post and the Times took a pass. Wonder why?
I'll wait for more information to come out before I label him a hero. At the present time my instincts say that he's more interested in harming our country than he is in informing us about a dangerous problem. He comes across more as a Julian Assange, complete with Messiah-like complex, or as a uber-Bradley Manning. Neither Assange nor Bradley are heroes in any way, and that the same crowd is now comparing Snowden to these two tells me everything I need to know.
But here's the bottom line: when the Bush administration was pushing similar intel gathering programs, it wasn't at the same time using the IRS to attack its (many) political enemies. How many times did Cindy Sheehan get audited? None. How many progressive organizations were stymied in their applications for tax exemptions? None. How many times did Medea Benjamin get her passport yanked after flying off to a country that was hating on us? Zero.
In other words, we had some basic trust that the government, always bumbling and stumbling, at least understood the basic difference between right and wrong, and was trying to gather intel in an honest attempt to protect us. George Bush may have been inept but he had a decent moral core.
Perhaps the people at NSA still understand and believe in right and wrong. But what about Champ and his people? What about the Democrats who are running in 2016 (Hillary, Warren, Biden, etc). How many of them will respect the use of intel and not use government as a tool to strike at their perceived political enemies?
That trust is fragile. Now it's been strained and may be broken.
That is why so many people believe PRISM is automatically wrong, when perhaps it isn't. That is why no one really believes that the NSA is gathering data just to keep terrorists from attacking us -- after all, we've seen what the IRS is doing. And the lead person in that caper has just been promoted and runs the IRS office in charge of Obamacare.
Mr. Snowden and Mr. Greenwald are not heroes. Greenwald is a nasty, bigoted, hard-core leftist who wants America 'transformed' into a socialist (and perhaps Bolshevik) state. He's not my hero. Mr. Snowden either is a tool or is a traitor. I'm not sure which is worse this morning. |
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