Former Bush Official Lawrence Wilkerson Says Snowden Has Done a 'Service' (salon.com)

An anonymous reader cites an article on Salon: Lawrence "Larry" Wilkerson, former Bush official finds the revelations made by Edward Snowden a service. In 2013, Edward Snowden, a former contractor with NSA, worked with journalists to reveal a number of mass surveillance programs. In a recent interview, Wilkerson said, "I think Snowden has done a service. I wouldn't have had the courage, and maybe not even the intellectual capacity, to do it the way he did it. There's a logic to what he has done that is impressive. He really has refrained from anything that was truly dangerous, with regard to our security -- regardless of what people say. He has been circumspect about what he's released, how he's released it, who he's released it to."

Comments

The World Today

[Anonymous Coward]

“Don’t ever count us out, because we are the Greeks on Milos. We have the power, and we will do it.”

He added, “To hell with international law, to hell with human rights, to hell with human dignity.”

We live in a World that's falling apart now - some of it is even our fault (all those decades meddling in the Middle East over oil). China is now the largest economy in the World and with economic power, military power follows.

We have a very crowded World now and things are going to get worse as global warming takes its toll.

I'm afraid the human race will be going backwards in the sense that we'll be having more territorial and resource (fresh water, fishing rights, even arable land) wars. And we'll be dealing with more immigration from the poor countries who want a piece of our pie; which isn't growing fast enough to accommodate the great masses.

We're not headed for Star Trek type of future but a Mad Max one. And he who has the guns is going fare better.

Re:The World Today

[Maritz]

The US doesn't have a 'left' of note. You have right, and further right.

I couldn't agree more

[DaMattster]

Edward Snowden blew the whistle on a serious abuse by government. I believe Edward Snowden is a hero for it. Government should not be spying on people. People should not fear their government, their government should fear them.

Re:I couldn't agree more

[tinkerton]

Snowden is the best whistleblower one could hope for. He's bloody brilliant. On the other hand we shouldn't even care about the character of the whistleblower, it just deflects attention from the issue they're reporting about.

Re:I couldn't agree more

[rickb928]

Dead on, and absolutely correct.

Our government should be subject to both the rule of law and the will of the people, which should be either be the same or consistent.

Snowden exposed significant excursions of illegality, and did so in a less than most harmful manner. If by 'harmful' you would mean 'to have exposed what they are doing in secret', then yes, this is correct.

He didn't use insecure means, known to be subject to compromise, to disclose matters specific enough to risk the lives of intelligence operatives worldwide, nor to disclose precise methods. That was done by another government official, and so far they haven't been held to account. Mr. Snowden is not a criminal except in the strictest sense of having not been caught before he disclosed what he did. He is a whistleblower, and a genuine patriot. He is part of the process of restoring our government to a position of guarded trust it should occupy.

Re:Total bullshit

[Wycliffe]

Snowden wasn't at all circumspect. He took a huge data dump containing data dangerous to US national security

This is the quickest way to get everything. He didn't have the time to decide which pieces he needed. Moreover, the vastness is one of the things he was whistleblowing about. Without a ton of data it would have been hard to prove.

and handed it off to a foreign national.

Do you have proof of this? My understanding is it has mostly been very select reporters who have had access and the stuff that has been release has been screened prior to release.

And he did it all because he's an attention whore. If he had done it the right way, we wouldn't even know his name.

No, he did it because he was paranoid. He was scared that if noone knew his name then it would be easy for him to just disappear. It's not like the government wasn't going to figure out who the mole was. This way, everyone else knows who the mole is too so it's much harder for him to be eliminated. Also, having a name to face makes it more believable versus the standard tin-foil hat crowd that says "our sources" and rightfully noone believes them.