It is true that Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance of American citizens—far vaster than any outsider had suspected, in some cases vaster than the agency’s overseers on the secret FISA court had permitted—have triggered a valuable debate,
leading possibly to much-needed reforms.
If that were all that Snowden had done, if his stolen trove of beyond-top-secret documents had dealt only with the NSA’s domestic surveillance, then some form of leniency might be worth discussing.
But Snowden did much more than that. The documents that he gave the
Washington Post’s Barton Gellman and the
Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald have, so far, furnished stories about the NSA’s interception of email traffic, mobile phone calls, and radio transmissions of
Taliban fighters in Pakistan’s northwest territories; about an operation
to gauge the loyalties of CIA recruits in Pakistan; about NSA
email intercepts to assist intelligence assessments of what’s going on inside Iran; about NSA surveillance of cellphone calls
“worldwide,” an effort that (in the
Post’s words) “allows it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.” In his first interview with the
South China Morning Post, Snowden revealed that the NSA routinely hacks into hundreds of computers in China and Hong Kong.
These operations have nothing to do with domestic surveillance or even spying on allies. They are not illegal, improper, or (in the context of 21st-century international politics) immoral. Exposing such operations has nothing to do with “whistle-blowing.”
Miss me with that bullshyt, Snowden is that dude
if you're black (in particular) and have the nerve to use the word "traitor" in regards to America, then I truly don't know what to say....
