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Civil Liberties Expert Argues Snowden Was Wrong (usnews.com)
An anonymous reader writes that in 2014, Geoffrey Stone was given access to America's national security apparatus as a member of the President's Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies. Last week Stone, a staunch civil liberties supporter, moderated a live discussion with Edward Snowden from Russia, and this week he actually praised the NSA in a follow-up interview:
"The more I worked with the NSA, the more respect I had for them as far as staying within the bounds of what they were authorized to do. And they were careful and had a high degree of integrity... I came to the view that [the programs] were well intentioned, that they were designed in fact to collect information for the purpose of ferreting out potential terrorist plots both in the U.S. and around the world and that was their design and purpose...
"I don't doubt that Snowden was courageous and did what he did for what he thought were good reasons. But I think he was unduly arrogant, didn't understand the limitations of his own knowledge and basically decided to usurp the authority of a democracy."
Meanwhile, a new documentary about Julian Assange opened at the Cannes film festival this week, revisiting how Wikileaks warned Apple that iTunes could be used as a backdoor for spies to infiltrate computers and phones.
"I don't doubt that Snowden was courageous and did what he did for what he thought were good reasons. But I think he was unduly arrogant, didn't understand the limitations of his own knowledge and basically decided to usurp the authority of a democracy."
Meanwhile, a new documentary about Julian Assange opened at the Cannes film festival this week, revisiting how Wikileaks warned Apple that iTunes could be used as a backdoor for spies to infiltrate computers and phones.
First they go after the outsiders, the foreigners, and the "illegals"... then they go after you.
Exactly and +1 to you.
It doesn't matter how well-meaned or "in the letter of the law" the things the NSA does, as long as it flies in the face of the spirit of the Constitution they are wrong.
> There is substantial academic literature suggesting that smaller government units are easier for small, concentrated industries to capture than large ones. For example, a group of states or provinces with a large timber industry might have their legislature and/or their delegation to the national legislature captured by lumber companies. These states or provinces then becomes the voice of the industry, even to the point of blocking national policies that would be preferred by the majority across the whole federation. Moore and Giovinazzo (2012) call this "distortion gap".[7]
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>The opposite scenario is possible with very large industries, however. Very large and powerful industries (e.g. energy, banking) can capture national governments, and then use that power to block policies at the state or provincial level that the voters may want.
This is from your wikipedia link on regulatory capture. Basically, small and large governments both vulnerable to corruption. So small government is clearly not the solution anymore than large government is. And since governments are typically broken up into compartmentalized units, then it's worth looking at the individual units, rather than the government as a whole. Some units will behave, some will not. Some will be broken, useless in its current form, and some will be providing a net gain to society.
Fix what needs fixing.
heh, captcha: paranoia
And how exact is the definition of "unreasonable"? And while we're at it, what is "speedy", "unusual", "cruel"?
You need to ask the GOVERNMENT what those words mean.
And we can TRUST our government, no doubt...