Snowden is a patriot and a hero. Our corrupt government only validates his claims by charging him with espionage.
This makes the 7th indictment brought under the controversial 1917 Espionage Act from this administration. It had been used
three times previouslyin the entire history of the nearly century old law. A law signed by a president (Wilson) who thought it didn't go far enough, reasoning quote: "
Authority to exercise censorship over the press ... is absolutely necessary to the public safety" After Wilson's overt press censorship language was removed from the 1917 bill, he got what he wanted when his congress passed the short-lived Sedition Act of 1918. It was repealed in 1920.
The claims made that the NSA are only capturing metadata are bullshit. You don't build a 1.5 million square feet datacenter with its own power plant just to store metadata. They are storing everything they can get their hands on, storing it in their own secret database, and pinky swearing to us that they don't take a peek at it without a secret FISA rubber stamp-- a stamp
denied 11 out of 33,900 times. The entire operation is administrated by Keith Alexander-- the 4 star general
with the nickname 'emperor'who was also the guy who ordered the original illegal wiretaps after 9/11 which Obama liked enough to give him star number four and that Obama made 'legal' instead of terminating after campaigning against it. It is conveniently difficult to challenge the constitutionality of secret laws, hence the quotes.
Secret laws were common in Soviet Russia btw. Here in the US, you're supposed to have the right to know what you are being arrested for. How contradictory laws like this can exist, I don't know. Probably similar to how full scale data collection and storage of every communication in a government database doesn't apparently technically count as wiretapping as long as they don't look at their own database. Somebody in court for piracy should just claim that they never watched the movie they downloaded and therefore it was not piracy.
The Director of National Intelligence is James Clapper, who just lied under oath to congress a few months ago, and will not be punished for it; just like Obama failed to punish anybody who tortured in our names, or any of the crooks for the financial crisis-- even though we have emails of bankers admitting guilt saying point blank "
Lord help our fucking scam". Of course Obama jails whistleblowers at rates never seen before in his self proclaimed 'new era of open government' and apparently has no problem executing American citizens without trial-- and oops! the 16 year old American son of one of the American citizens he authorized a kill order on, so it's not surprising he would care little about something as trivial as privacy.
Anybody who knows a goddamn thing about IT knows the admin has complete control. He has access to anything in his system. If he wants to look at something in the system, he can, and then erase the logs (if any) of his accesses afterward. All the so-called oversight means jack shit when the technological barrier is gone and the laws are unenforceable. The NSA answers to a committee that is comprised of congresspeople with a 10% approval rating and can barely use Twitter. The Intelligence Committee is chaired by the Senator most eager to ban guns and was born before televisions existed and I'm supposed to be assured that these programs have civilian oversight because these people were voted into office?
Government surveillance abuses like the
FBI pressuring Martin Luther King Jr. to commit suicidedon't happen anymore, you say? Today's government is more professional and civic minded you say?
Wrong.
Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator's computer.
"Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News.
Even if you trust Obama and his NSA, we change administrations every 4 or 8 years. Kennedy died in '63. Nixon was elected in '68.
"We're a turnkey away from a police state." -- Daniel Ellsberg.
