As usual you miss the point entirely.
Snowden is NOT representing himself. It is your hallucination that he is representing himself. All he has done is to refuse to appear in court and he can be declared guilty by default, but that's as far as it goes.
What he is saying is that he does not trust US laws to protect him and he is seeking asylum.
No, it is
YOU who missed the point. If Snowden interpreted the laws and acted upon his own, he had effectively represented himself.
Of course the government will always claim that everything it does is in the national interest and all the good sheep should just follow along. A free society gives its citizens the right to question the government and that is exactly what Snowden did.
Correct...And Snowden is the first to challenge the govt.
All whistleblowers will violate coworkers trust, either explicitly or implicitly. That is a given. What is also true is that the whistleblower feels that violating colleagues' trust is the lesser evil compared to the greater evil being perpetrated by the organization. You may disagree with Snowden's choices, but that is your personal opinion. Without a court determination of NSA's wrongdoings, all we have are the leaked documents, and people can form their own opinions.
Bullshit.
Your argument is based on the assumption that Snowden knew exactly what his colleagues were doing, to a man and woman, and that every actions violated ethics, laws, and morality. And that what he did was the
ONLY course available for the greater public good.
The reality is that whistleblowers do not, and should not, deceive their colleagues into helping them exposing whatever misdeeds suspected. It is Snowden's deceptive actions
AGAINST his colleagues, not just against the NSA, that you refuse to consider in trying to place a halo over Snowden's head.
Snowden Used Password From NSA Co-worker: Report | SecurityWeek.Com
The civilian employee told FBI agents that he provided Snowden with his personal encryption information but was "not aware" the IT contractor planned to divulge secret files to the media, according the the NSA memorandum.
But in a public Google chat in January, Snowden denied media reports that he stole or deceived fellow employees to get their log-in information.
"I never stole any passwords, nor did I trick an army of co-workers," Snowden said.
It does not take a James Bond mentality to dismiss Snowden's claim of innocence. Even in the civilian sector, companies that have nothing to do with national security issues have secrets and the proverbial 'need to know' access rights for their employees.
(PS. About my example that seems to trouble you so much, think of it as working for a large bank which has a skunkworks department stealing credit cards. The analogy still applies.)
The analogy is still nonsense. The NSA have periodic Congressional oversight while any bank that does what you hypothesize does not have any oversight by anyone. Oversight implies legal approval and protection to start, and the supervision is there to ensure actions do not violate certain boundaries.
So if you want to stick to this absurd analogy, show us where theft is legally sanction by laws.
The fact that, according to Snowden, the whistleblower protections do not extend to security contractors highlights a flaw in the system. All Americans who understand the core concepts of liberty, and the importance of checks on the government, would be troubled by such loopholes in the law. When a government exempts itself from checks, that is a major red flag for civil libertarians.
Correct...According to Snowden...
Subpart 3.9—Whistleblower Protections for Contractor Employees
I do not claim to be a lawyer, but I would like to see specifically which law or section of laws that Snowden referenced before he made his decision to act. The above source is just one of many examples available to the public.
Bottom line is this:
- Snowden does not have to violate his colleagues' trust via deception.
- Snowden could have achieve the same goal without the involuntary involvement of his colleagues. Perhaps the degree of material exposure would not be as great as we see it today, but what we see today gives us a clue into Snowden's mentality in that he wanted to be a companion to Julian Assange.
- Snowden could have availed himself of the nearly unlimited army of 'legal eagles' in the US and to make a name for one's self, any 'legal eagle' would have represented Snowden
FOR FREE. If I, a non-lawyer, can find a complex law regarding whistleblowers as above, what do you think a team of accomplished lawyers from the ACLU can find, interpret, and fight on Snowden's behalf ? Keyword search for you: 'ben wizner snowden'.
- Congressional oversight may be tardy but unlike your absurd analogy about theft by banks being the same as the NSA legitimate mission of national security, if the sins of the Executive branch is great enough, said oversight will accelerate. Snowden could not have been so stupid as to be ignorant of the built-in adversarial relationship between the Executive and the Legislative branches as structured by the US Constitution.
Chest thumping sheep will never understand what all the fuss is about.
Speak for yourself about being a sheep. Looks like you pretty much put aside any kind of critical thinking when it comes to criticizing US. Your posting of the Fourth Amendment was hilarious. Remove that 'THINK TANK' tag, more like 'THINKING TANKED' for you.
