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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.
Obviously not.
"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"
That argument fails basic logic.
Because of Snowden we know the NSA routinely misled and outright lied to the democracy it was supposedly acting under the authority of?
The "authority of the democracy" had been thoroughly undermined by the NSA. Snowden brought this fact to light.
He enabled democracy by telling voters what the government was doing. It's not democracy when leaders hide their actions from voters.
So, tell me, how exactly does 'the authority of a democracy' exist when dealing with a program so secret that even the bulk of the congress knew relatively little about it, never mind the electorate at large?
It is nice that his conclusion(and he doesn't think that he is being arrogant in assuming his carefully curated little field trip is sufficiently accurate and representative?) was that the NSA was mostly abiding by the rules they made up, rather than going mad with power; but it's simply smarmy nonsense to pretend that anything that clandestine has any meaningful relationship to democracy. On a good day, such an enterprise might be an unaccountable black box more or less attempting to do what they interpret a democratic society's mandate for them to be; but you could say the exact same thing about a hereditary despot who tries to govern more or less according to the interests of the population as he understands them: aligned with the objectives of a democracy only by their own preference, if at all.
"This is not to say that the NSA should have had all of the authorities it was given. [...] The NSA did its job -- it implemented the authorities it was given."
Just did its job. I've heard something like that before. If I can only remember where...
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
So why did Clapper commit perjury in front of congress to cover up these programs?
Because most people who work for the government do so out of a feeling of patriotism and seeking to improve the common good? Sure there are a88holes in every job, but government jobs traditionally pay less than the civilian sector, many have a higher level of personal risk and those that require security clearances require you to forgo many experiences that the average citizen indulges in without worrying about the risk to their job.
I really don't think the majority of government workers, including the NSA workers, originally took the job because they want to engage in either power trips or voyeurism. I feel fairly confident most just want to do a good job defending their country.
But the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Once you can look at everyone's data I imagine the temptation to shut down individuals and groups whose agendas you don't agree with are huge. And we can't for get the few a88holes who are in the system, who might rise to a position of power, as did J. Edgar Hoover.
These people generally aren't evil, they just are the victim of the boiling frog syndrome like the rest of us. In may ways they must be protected from themselves, for out sake and theirs.