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House Committee: Edward Snowden's Leaks Did 'Tremendous Damage' (nbcnews.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: The U.S. House intelligence committee on Thursday unanimously approved a blistering report on the activities of Edward Snowden, saying his disclosures of top-secret documents and programs did "tremendous damage" to national security. "The public narrative popularized by Snowden and his allies is rife with falsehoods, exaggerations, and crucial omissions," said the report by staff members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Contrary to Snowden's statements that he intended to reveal programs that intruded on the privacy of Americans, the House report concluded that the vast majority of the 1.5 million documents he stole "have nothing to do with programs impacting individual privacy interests. They instead pertain to military, defense, and intelligence programs of great interest to America's adversaries." The report said Snowden did not, as he claimed, try to express his concerns about potentially illegal intelligence gathering in a way that would qualify him as a whistleblower. The report was disputed by Snowden's ACLU-provided attorney. "This is a dishonest report that attempts to discredit a genuine American hero," said Wizner. "But after years of 'investigation,' the committee still can't point to any remotely credible evidence that Snowden's disclosures caused harm. The truth is that Edward Snowden and the journalists with whom he worked did the job that the House Intelligence Committee was supposed to do: bring meaningful oversight to the U.S. Intelligence community. They did so responsibly and carefully, and their efforts have led to historic reforms."
Former CIA Officer: President Obama Should Pardon Edward Snowden
Barry Eisler spent three years in a covert position in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations and is the author of 12 novels, including The Detachment
He let Americans evaluate omniscient domestic surveillance for themselves
This week, Edward Snowden, multiple human rights and civil rights groups, and a broad array of American citizens asked President Obama to exercise his Constitutional power to pardon Snowden. As a former CIA officer, I wholeheartedly support a full presidential pardon for this brave whistleblower.
All nations require some secrecy. But in a democracy, where the government is accountable to the people, transparency should be the default; secrecy, the exception. And this is especially true regarding the implementation of an unprecedented system of domestic bulk surveillance, a mere precursor of which Senator Frank Church warned 40 years ago could lead to the eradication of privacy and the imposition of “total tyranny.”
That today we are engaged in a meaningful debate about whether such a system is desirable is almost entirely due to the conscience, courage and conviction of one man: Edward Snowden. Without Snowden, the American people could not balance for themselves the risks, costs and benefits of omniscient domestic surveillance. Because of him, we can.
For this service, the government has charged Snowden under the World War I-era Espionage Act. Yet Snowden did not sell information secretly to any enemy of America. Instead, he shared it openly through the press with the American people.
For this service, Snowden has been accused of having “blood on his hands“—the same evidence-free cliché trotted out every time a whistleblower reveals corruption, criminality or anything else the government would prefer to hide. That this charge is being aired by the very people responsible for wars that have led to thousands of dead American servicemen and servicewomen; hundreds of thousands burned, blinded, brain-damaged, crippled, maimed and traumatized; and hundreds of thousands of innocent foreigners killed, is more than ironic. It’s also a form of psychological projection, or propaganda, intended to distract from where true responsibility for bloodshed lies.
And for this service, the usual suspects have claimed Snowden has caused “grave damage to national security.” As always, the charge is backed by nothing but air, and ignores—in fact, is intended to distract from—the real damage caused by metastasizing governmental secrecy. This includes not only disastrous government mistakes and cover-ups (see the Bay of Pigs, the “missile gap,” the Gulf of Tonkin, Iraqi wea
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I mean, _really_ read it and considered all the implications of how it sets up our system of government? The entire thing was built from the ground up to protect the interests of wealthy land owners. I'd say they're doing a fabulous job of uphodling the Constitution.
Now, if you mean the parts of the Constitution that have no legal meaning I guess I could agree. But they're meaningless fluff. Want a real government by the people for the people? Then you want a parliamentary system. Not a Representative Democracy with branches structured to prevent populist uprisings. This is why we can't have nice things.
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Mogadishu has not government to speak off. There's a group who claim to be the government but since they have no more power than any of the other corporations^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hwarlords around this claim is fairly meaningless. There's no official taxation or law enforcement to speak off anyway.
What there is, is everything the world has always had before there was taxes and police and will always have where those are absent - warlords, slavers and absolute-rule-by-the-richest - the only thing making things slightly bearable to the average person being the amount of time the rich spend fighting each other - which would be even more useful if the bullet-fodder in their wars were not you.
That said there is actually an entire continent with no government at all - not even one that only exists on paper. It's called Antarctica. Not a lot of resources, terrible farming conditions... oh and there's that international treaty to ban anybody from claiming ownership of it or try to rule it but if you can get there, it's isolated enough nobody's going to bother to come take you away by force. At least if you stay far from the few research stations in the are. You'll pretty much have to hunt penguins and seals for food and how you're going to avoid scurvy I have no idea.
So year, places without government do exist. If you can't handle them - then what makes you think everybody^H^H^H^H^H^Hanybody else wants that ?
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I suspect piano wire will be a valuable commodity in some places, soon...
Well, they're right in that it did great damage: To their reputations, which in fact does hurt national security, but not in the way they want you to think.
It means their careers are harmed, and people are less likely to trust us, such as when negotiating treaties. Not everyone was around, but the finding of the wireless microphone in the state seal hurt Russia's reputation immensely. It also taught the USA how to be better at counter-intelligence. Now we're in their shoes. XD
"So how the fuck did you arrive on that conclusion is beyond me. " Easy, they're gullible or think we are. Actually, correction. It's quite possible to think in terms of black and white when dealing with law and order. Either full-blown feudalism, or being abandoned in the Antarctic. Of course that tends to fall under "believes anything". Only reason a lot of people support libertarians and anarchists, is because the state has gone so full-blown regressive spyocracy (LOL, swear I didn't know Alex Jones uses that term before searching for the spelling). Black mail for all!
It's also weird that me, an African, seem to understand EU structures better than the parent poster
That's the power of the alt-right. They are quite literally insane. Yesterday, we had somebody with a UID disputing that smoking tobacco causes cancer. They believe the idea that cannabis has medicinal uses is nothing more than political correctness. I wouldn't be surprised to read that the idea that the Earth is older than 6,000 years is now just politically correct nonsense as well.
I haven't been able to nail down the year that they want to return us to, but I'd hazard a guess of somewhere around 1950, possibly right before that 1951 date.
This is the end of Western civilization. When this many people decide to reject any ideas that have happened since 1950 as "political correctness," it's the end. It's the insatiable desire to repeal any and all progress, and while 1950 may be a good estimate of where they're going now, they won't be happy until slavery is instituted again and women don't serve on juries or own property. They won't get that far by the time it all collapses, but they are the unaware architects of the coming shitstorm, culminating in nuclear war some time around 2025, followed by the year from hell.
Read this essay about a phenomenon the author calls thar. It's beyond authoritarianism, beyond machismo, beyond honor, beyond all sense. It's what's wrong with Middle Eastern cultures and why migrants are failing--refusing--to integrate in Europe.
Abandon all hope that this will turn around. There's no need to fear a Muslim invasion. This mental illness is contagious and spreading, and the alt-right will be happy creating a thar society to call their very own or at least rabidly rioting and killing to try to make it happen. Muslim? Christian? Does it matter whose Sharia law?
It's quite a lot like watching a zombie apocalypse start. First it's a few people here and there. "Boy, that AC has some strange views," one thinks to oneself. "Wow, that guy at the gas station was a nutter! Why does he obsess about the government tracking sexual orientation instead of talking about the whole panopticon?" But it spreads and spreads. British people harassing and assaulting other UK citizens because Brexit passed? They seriously thought that Brexit was going to cause Muslims and blacks with UK citizenship to get rounded up and deported the next day??? People who had rational opinions begin to turn. Once somebody has been infected with the T virus and turned, they are no longer capable of rational thought, and I mean that in a very clinical sense. Then one day, one realizes that this is the new normal. One is surrounded by bloodthirsty intellectual zombies. Either kill zombies or be killed.