Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Still unsettled re Edward Snowden?

Read this one carefully first

Demonizing Edward Snowden: Which Side Are You On?
June 24, 2013 Posted by John Cassidy
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/06/demonizing-edward-snowden-which-side-are-you-on.html

ok .. now this one ..

Y'All Are Irritating Me

by BooMan
Tue Jun 25th, 2013 at 11:26:04 AM EST

John Cassidy .. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/06/demonizing-edward-snowden-which-side-are-you-on.html?currentPage=all .. is right about one thing. How people react to Ed Snowden depends on their attitude toward authority. The more anti-establishment you are, the more sympathetic you are going to be to Mr. Snowden. Frankly, though, I have little patience for either side of the argument. Mr. Cassidy self-identifies as being in the pro-Snowden part of this dispute, but his argument is completely incoherent.

When he finally gets to offering his own analysis, he gives us this:

~~~~~~~~~~
The Obama Administration doesn’t want him to come home and contribute to the national-security-versus-liberty debate that the President says is necessary. It wants to lock him up for a long time.

And for what? For telling would-be jihadis that we are monitoring their Gmail and Facebook accounts? For informing the Chinese that we eavesdrop on many of their important institutions, including their prestigious research universities? For confirming that the Brits eavesdrop on virtually anybody they feel like? Come on. Are there many people out there who didn’t already know these things?
~~~~~~~~~~~

Mr. Cassidy is arguing that Mr. Snowden provided us with basically no meaningful information. Everyone knew that the NSA was sweeping up massive amounts of information, including any potential adversaries. There is no harm here. Perhaps recognizing that there must have been some value in Snowden's disclosures, Mr. Cassidy continues:

~~~~~~~~~~
Snowden took classified documents from his employer, which surely broke the law. But his real crime was confirming that the intelligence agencies, despite their strenuous public denials, have been accumulating vast amounts of personal data from the American public.
~~~~~~~~~~

I'm not sure that the American public is any more enlightened than the jihadis or the Chinese. If our adversaries were not advantaged, I don't think the public was particularly advantaged, either. There is absolutely no pressure for anyone to resign. No one is going to be charged with perjury. No crime has been revealed. Policies and programs have been exposed that people may dislike and may think go too far. I know that I feel that way. But even Mr. Cassidy acknowledges that Mr. Snowden broke the law. Mr. Cassidy says he wishes that Mr. Snowden had remained on U.S. soil to fight the charges against him even though he would be facing thirty years in prison, yet he argues that the penalty is far too stiff.

There is too much ambiguity in this line of argument. Surely the government has the responsibility to prosecute those who brazenly violate their oath to protect classified information. While there should be whistle-blower protections, they cannot apply to people who don't reveal criminal wrongdoing.

On the other hand, those who are acting like Mr. Snowden is the second coming of Usama bin-Laden are equally irritating. People who conscientiously object to certain government policies are not usually doing so to aid and abet the enemy. I certainly don't think that is the case here. Mr. Snowden needs to answer for what he did in court, as a deterrent to other leakers if nothing else, but he doesn't need to be locked up for decades.

http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2013/6/25/11264/4503

"Snowden blew it" .. that said .. the MSM is blowing it, too ..

Top Ten Ways US TV News are Screwing us Again on NSA Surveillance Story (Iraq Redux)

Posted on 06/24/2013 by Juan Cole

US television news is a danger to the security of the United States. First, it is so oriented to ratings that it cannot afford to do unpopular reports (thus, it ignored al-Qaeda and the Taliban for the most part before 9/11). Second, it is so oriented toward the halls of power inside the Beltway that it is unable to examine government allegations critically. US television news was an unrelieved cheering section for the launching of the illegal and disastrous Iraq War, which will end up costing the taxpayers many trillions of dollars, which seriously wounded 32,000 US military personnel (many of them will need help the rest of their lives), which left over 4000 soldiers, Marines and sailors dead, and which was responsible for the deaths of on the order of 300,000 Iraqis, the wounding of 1.2 million Iraqis, and the displacement from their homes of 4 million Iraqis (out of a then population of 26 million). In 2002 and 2003, Bush administration leakers and ex-generals led the television reporters and anchors by the nose. The corporations were all for the war, and they own the news. Where on-screen talent was unwilling to go along, such as Phil Donohue or Ashley Banfield, they were just fired.

Now, corporate television news is repeating this shameful performance with regard to the revelations by Edward Snowden of massive, unconstitutional government surveillance of Americans’ electronic communications. The full failure to do proper journalism was on display on Sunday (when, unfortunately, critical voices such as Rachel Maddow are absent). Here are the propaganda techniques used to stack the deck on Sunday:

1. Focus on the personality, location, and charges against the leaker instead of the substance of his revelations.

2. Smear Snowden with ad hominem fallacies. His transit through Moscow was held up as a sign of disloyalty to the United States, as though nowadays American business people and government officials don’t transit through Moscow all the time. The US ships significant amounts of military .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_logistics_in_the_Afghan_War#Northern_Distribution_Network .. materiel for Afghanistan through Russia. Is that treasonous?

3. Focus on politicians making empty threats against China and Russia for not being sufficiently obedient to the United States. The US can’t do anything to either one that wouldn’t hurt the US more than it did them.

4. Ignore important breaking stories that impugn the government case. For instance, The Guardian broke .. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/23/mi5-feared-gchq-went-too-far .. the story Saturday morning that the NSA PRISM program was small compared to the TEMPORA program of GCHQ, its British counterpart, which Snowden alleged has attached sniffers to the fiber optic cables that stretch from New York to London, and is vacuuming up massive amounts of email and telephone conversations. A Lexis Nexis search in broadcast transcripts for Sunday showed that no US news broadcaster mentioned TEMPORA or GCHQ. This was true even though the NSA has 250 analysts assigned to TEMPORA and even though that program sweeps up and stores exactly the kind of material (telephone calls, emails) that President Obama denied were being collected.

5. Skew the guest list. Television news interviewed Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), Rep. Peter King (R-NY), Rep. Ilena Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and a gaggle of retired FBI and CIA figures. All of them without exception were cheerleaders for the Iraq War. Glenn Greenwald was virtually the only voice allowed on the other side. He was cut short on CNN and was at a disadvantage on television because he was on the phone from Rio. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), Al Gore, Steve Wozniak, Pierre Omidyar, and a whole host of figures supportive of Snowden having told us what is going on were not invited on the air to balance the hard liners interviewed.

6. Accuse journalists of treason for reporting Snowden’s revelations. This was the absolutely shameful tack taken by David Gregory on Meet The Press, when he asked Greenwald, “To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?” The “to the extent” and “aided and abetted” language isn’t journalism .. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2013/06/23/david-gregory-whiffs-on-greenwald-question/ .. it is shilling for the most despicable elements in Congress (and that is way over on the despicable scale).

7. Ignore past government misuse of classified information. Television news has studiedly avoided referring to Dick Cheney’s outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA field officer (and therefore outing of all the CIA field officers who used the same dummy corporation as she did as a cover,as well as all local informants known to be connected to that dummy corporation). Television anchors seem to think that the government is always trying to ‘protect’ us and is on the side of the angels, and sidestep the question of whether secret information can be used for private or shady policy purposes. Plame, by the way, is warning about the intelligence-industrial complex .. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/23/nsa-intelligence-industrial-complex-abuse .

8. Continually allege or allow guests to allege that Snowden could have taken his concerns to the NSA or to Congress internally. None of his predecessors had any luck with that approach .. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-the-national-security-agency/2013/06/21/438e0c4a-d37f-11e2-b05f-3ea3f0e7bb5a_story_1.html . Even sitting senators of the United States of America like Ron Wyden have been muzzled and cannot conduct a public debate on these abuses.

9. No one on television has discussed how many of the 850,000 analysts with access to secret databases containing your information work for private corporations such as Booz Allen Hamilton .. http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-06-13/chart-how-booz-allen-hamilton-swallowed-washington#r=hpf-st . That is, they aren’t even government employees. And, how much lobbying do these intelligence contractors do of Congress?

10. Focus the discussion on the alleged criminality of Snowden’s disclosures instead of on the obvious lawlessness of programs such as Tempora, which sweep up vast amounts of personal information on private individuals and store them in data bases. As Noam Chomsky has said, the way to distract the public in a democracy is to allow more and more vigorous debate about a more and more narrow set of issues. By narrowing the debate to “how illegal were Snowden’s actions?” instead of allowing the question, “how legal are the NSA’s actions,” the US mass media give the impression of debating both sides of a controversy while in fact suppressing large numbers of pertinent questions.

http://www.juancole.com/2013/06/screwing-surveillance-redux.html

For me gotta say there is a troublesome tingle every once in awhile of some cognitive dissonance, then again ..

Such operations, like non-cyber espionage, are typically illegal in the victim country while fully supported by the highest level of government in the aggressor country. The ethical situation likewise depends on one's viewpoint, particularly one's opinion of the governments involved. .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber_spying

.. would be great if noone did it .. lol, on balance i'm sticking with
"Snowden blew it" .. while pondering a couple of Juan's points ..