NSA WhistleBlower Outs Himself 860
An anonymous reader writes "The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell. The Guardian, after several days of interviews, is revealing his identity at his request. From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity. 'I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong,' he said."
This guy needs a legal defense fund (Score:5, Informative)
This dude has balls of steel and I think deserves our help. If a fund is established, I'll gladly chip in a few bucks.
Re:Modern Jesus (Score:5, Informative)
This man may well be our Jesus. The government is going to crucify him in their fury.
Except, of course, he's unlikely to come back from the dead, or for his death to provide a means of eternal life.
But if you mean he's inspirational, no argument.
Re:Modern Jesus (Score:5, Informative)
You can blame Bush for the PATRIOT act, but that was just another step down the road we've been on for a long long time.
Re:Modern Jesus (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Modern Jesus (Score:5, Informative)
It may lead to protesting in the streets. From the Snowden interview:
"It is not like Occupy Wall Street but there is a grassroots movement to take to the streets on July 4 in defence of the Fourth Amendment called Restore The Fourth Amendment and it grew out of Reddit. The response over the internet has been huge and supportive."
Re:Why Hong Kong, China? (Score:4, Informative)
China doesn't, but Hong Kong does. They retained roughly 90% of everything they had when the British owned the island, and there's protests if not small scale riots every time China tries to do something to change well...anything.
Re:This guy needs a legal defense fund (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Modern Jesus (Score:5, Informative)
Obama's had 4.5 years now to fix Bush's problems
He's also had Bush's Congress to work with. As much as I wish he'd done better, I look at the GOP and it's fixation on introducing bills to ban abortions and I understand why the country is so fucked up. The folks making the laws are morons.
Bush's Congress? You mean control of both chambers of Congress with supermajority control of the Senate?
Sorry, Jack. That don't fly. Obama had absolute control of Congress and chose not to touch this issue.
Re:Modern Jesus (Score:5, Informative)
George W. Bush may well have been a terrible President. The world may have been a better place had he not been President.
But you're reciting the stupid mythology made up by the Democratic party 13 years later.
Well, we did have 8 years of President Bush as a result of a third party candidate bleeding votes away from Gore...
Newsflash: Gore and Bush both made numerous decisions during their campaign that had greater impacts than anything Nader ever did. Blaming the loss of an election on a 3rd party is just buying into the two-party BS rhetoric that's trying to trick you into voting for them.
Just for one example, take the Democrats in Florida who voted for Bush. Approximately 12% of registered Florida Democrats voted for Bush -- roughly 200,000 voters. This is a significantly larger number than all of Nader's votes combined, including Democrats, Republicans, and independents who voted for him.
When a greater number of your own party defects to vote for "the other guy" than all of the 3rd party voters combined, I don't think you get to blame the 3rd party voters. You blame the guy who lost for not being a better candidate and for failing to convince members OF HIS OWN PARTY to vote for him. You blame the voters who actually voted for Bush. The 3rd party voters were a much smaller effect than anything done by the two major parties here.
(Granted, Bush was more the GOP members of the Supreme Court being corrupt and helping Bush out,
Good lord. This nonsense again. The actual situation is complicated, and thus the Democratic spindoctors have convinced people like you of a false narrative even 13 years later. Here's what actually happened.
The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 (including two "liberal" justices) that the recount in Florida had Constitutional problems. The only place where the five "conservatives" come into it is in the remedy. The five "conservatives" looked at a ruling by the liberal Florida Supreme Court just made a few days earlier, where the Florida Supreme Court interpreted state law to say that all recounts should be finished by date X. Given what the liberal Florida court said, the US Supreme Court decided that it was impossible to complete a recount according to Florida law since it was already date X.
Now, from a technical legal procedural standpoint, the appropriate thing to do here would have been to send the case back to Florida and let the Florida court say, "Yeah, we can't do any more recounts now," even though they had already effectively set the date. Instead, the US Supreme Court set the remedy themselves, which is a bit unusual.
Nevertheless, the US Supreme Court then remanded the case back to Florida. The Florida Supreme Court could have turned around and said, "Well, no, actually our ruling didn't mean to set date X." The Florida court did no such thing.
Gore's lawyers could have requested another hearing and made arguments that Florida law didn't say that and the Florida Supreme Court's ruling on date X was wrong. Gore's lawyers did no such thing.
A week or two later, instead, the Florida Supreme Court actually dismissed the case, thereby officially ending any recounts. The US Supreme Court did NOT "decide the election" or even officially "end" it.
Given that Gore and the liberal Florida court didn't contest the US Supreme Court's citation of the Florida court's ruling about date X, we can safely assume that Gore and Florida didn't think there was any legal argument to stand on in disputing the US Supreme Court's ruling.
In other words, while there were a couple procedural oddities about the actions in this case, the actual liberal parties involved chose not to contest the ruling... and, in fact, it was originally the liberal Florida court's interpretation of Florida law that set the deadline the US Supreme Court followed.
and G
Re:Modern Jesus (Score:2, Informative)
If Obama wanted to touch this issue, he wouldn't have been able to.
You are mostly correct. Obama is in charge of the Executive Branch, which includes the IRS, EPA, NSA, FBI, CIA and so on. All it would have taken is a phone call to whoever is in charge of the NSA to say, "stop doing that", and it would be done.
He would need Congressional action to prevent the next president from doing it, however, but there is nothing in the PATRIOT act mandating that the NSA snoop on US Citizens.