Snowden Says His Mission Is Accomplished 312
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Edward Snowden met with reporters from the Washington Post for fourteen hours and in his first interview since June reflected at length about surveillance, democracy and the meaning of the documents he exposed. 'For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission's already accomplished. I already won,' says Snowden. 'All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed. That is a milestone we left a long time ago. Right now, all we are looking at are stretch goals.' Snowden says that the NSA's business is 'information dominance,' the use of other people's secrets to shape events. But Snowden upended the agency on its own turf. 'You recognize that you're going in blind, that there's no model,' says Snowden, acknowledging that he had no way to know whether the public would share his views. 'But when you weigh that against the alternative, which is not to act, you realize that some analysis is better than no analysis. Because even if your analysis proves to be wrong, the marketplace of ideas will bear that out.' Snowden succeeded because the NSA, accustomed to watching without being watched, faces scrutiny it has not endured since the 1970s, or perhaps ever, and says people who accuse him of disloyalty mistake his purpose. 'I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA. I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don't realize it.'"
They could have listened to him... (Score:5, Interesting)
... when he was working there. According to Forbes, his coworkers report that he would wear a Electronic Frontier Foundation hoodie to work and have a copy of the constitution on his desk to argue when he was asked to do something against the constitution.
They just had to emulate him and he would still be in Hawai with his girlfriend and working for the NSA.
Re:They could have listened to him... (Score:4, Interesting)
... when he was working there. According to Forbes, his coworkers report that he would wear a Electronic Frontier Foundation hoodie to work and have a copy of the constitution on his desk to argue when he was asked to do something against the constitution.
Oh my goodness, they really were clueless then. Even though I agree he's a hero, from a commonsense standpoint, I'm not kidding - they had someone working in a spook agency literally wearing his feelings about freedom on his sleeve, arguing using THE CONSTITUTION, and they didn't watch him closely?
Whether you think the NSA is the devil, on the side of the angels, or somewhere in between, their inaction in the face of these clear signals an employee disagreed with how they conduct their business is extraordinarily incompetent.
Re:They could have listened to him... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Of course not! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:14.4 Sec. for Library of Congress (Score:5, Interesting)
The flow of data in was vast but not hard for the US and UK to balance for fast processing over a few sites around the world.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intelligence-laundering [eff.org] really shows the end game - decades of calls reduced to a usable size under just one simple program.
The next trick will be to have it made legal in US domestic courts, no more magical parallel construction needed
Re:What he said in the interview (Score:5, Interesting)
There are ways to address concerns about abuses of government power, he chose the nuclear route. Whether exposing the abuses of power that were happening is worth the side effects remains to be seen.
There are, but when you are likely to get brushed under the rug, other approaches need to be used. He essentially blew a hole through the rug, meaning there was no way to hide his message.
Was the way he did things the best way, it is hard to say, since I don't fully grasp the workings of the agency, but I suspect that there are too many people with vested interests in hiding their and the agencies failings? Sometimes in politics you need someone to put their neck on the line for the greater good, but it has to be done with care since otherwise to have collateral damage and possibly a miscommunicated message. IMHO Snowdon probably did something many people would have wanted to do, in the sense of causing change, but are too stuck in the political labyrinth to achieve anything. Don't underestimate the weight of government and bureaucracy to block real change. Too many stake holders who either have vested interests or don't want to experience change.
However you look at things, Snowdon was brave, but he did follow his convictions to the end. I think many of us would be too coward to do what he did.
How do you get the average person to care. (Score:4, Interesting)
Snowden sacrificed a lot for the world. I wish I knew of a way to get the world to care.
Re:Yep. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Right On (Score:5, Interesting)
I vote third party and if no third party candidate is available, for my cat. There is no other way to lodge a protest vote because we don't have a "none of the above" and not voting simply lumps you in with the apathetic.
I'm not so focused on picking a victor, because when the choice of Victor A (R) v. Victor B (D) results in exactly the same policies, I don't care which one wins and won't let my vote be seen as comprising some mandate for the asshole. Secondly, you simply cannot create change in a party by saying "I disagree with you, but I'll vote for you anyway." That's a sort of insanity. And as for creating some change within a party, look at how that worked out for the Kucinich people in the DNC or the Ron Paul people in the GOP. It simply doesn't work.
The deepest rot in American politics, is the voters' reluctance to vote their conscience and instead, feel like they need to be on a winning side. This is the sure fire way to lose in the end.
Re:What he said in the interview (Score:5, Interesting)
We've already suffered a soft coup by the Executive branch, I don't know why you think a different coup would make things better. One of the Unique things about the revolutionary period in 1700s and early 1800s, was the focus on liberty and democratic institutions of various varieties, but most coups are just about a different group of power hungry dicks taking power from an established group of dicks.
What we need is a judicial and legislative branch willing to step up to the role created for them in the Constitution -- to jealously guard their powers against Executive abuse rather than cede it, and to thereby ensure that no side gets too powerful. The mistake the founders made was in believing that politicians would consider it in their self-interest to protect their power areas and that this conflict would prevent the rise of one all powerful branch.
Over time, however, the branches got wise to this. For example, Congress figured out is was politically expedient to let the President "declare" war, or the Courts decided to defer to the Executive on anything labeled "State Secrets" and exercise no oversight -- now we have ideas such as the Unitary Executive, signing statements, extra-judicial everything. If the other branches got off their collective asses and protected their turf, a lot of these problems would go away. And note, this turf protecting presumes that they're all sociopaths -- it is the process of turf protection that was designed to protects us, not reliance that the people in the dirty fight would be good people. Our problem is that the politicians have figured out how to go beyond that level in furthering their self-interest and no longer engage in that internal war the founders envisioned, to our deep detriment.