> The whistleblower laws for intelligence community
members pretend that there’s no such thing as agency
level misconduct and we know that that’s not the case...
If what you’re talking about is official misconduct that
has been sanctioned by the agency, then obviously reporting that misconduct to that agency is not going to
help. So internal channels are useless
for things like torture, warrantless wiretapping, any of those major
systemic abuses, like the ones we saw after 9/11.
In the history of the United States, bullets have mostly if not solely been used for the protection of the lords, often by commoners either paid to do it and not caring, or convinced the issue was other commoners.
After all a common thread of US History is this LBJ quip:
> If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.
US history really doesn't have enough time to see it. Not to mention the Bill of Rights enumerated the natural right to self defense to be protected, including being armed well enough to form a militia. ( Military oath calls out enemies foreign and domestic, doesn't say enemies who hold political office are immune )
Look at Japanese history however and you see 100s of years of disarmament.
I agree with your comment (it reminded me of the times the Pinkertons or the deputized sheriffs shot at strikers long ago), but I think that every citizen being armed would be a good guard for the society's freedom, and thus that it would be worth it.
More than guns (or in addition to guns), it is important that people know how their government works and make their support indispensable if a ruler wants to stay in power. In other words, increase the number of "keys" like this YouTuber explains
What I struggle with is how does one make the leap from being a democracy to being a democracy which protects the rights of minorities? This doesn't have to be a gender or race thing. For example, here in the US we clearly don't do enough to protect incarcerated people from {sexual, physical, mental} abuse (by staff or by other inmates).
That was part of the idea of the Constitution; the founding fathers knew that uninhibited democracies were a bad idea (even the Greeks experienced some bad things with mob rule) and specifically tried to create a democratic republic restrained by a written set of rules protecting citizens from arbitrary exercise of power by a majority to avoid some of the worst. They lived through quite a few things we are seeing now, but I think a large part of preventing it depends squarely on culture. Having a culture that fundamentally believes in justice and equality will stave off tyranny and oppression, but it doesn't matter what laws you have in a society that doesn't value those. When I took Chinese philosophy there was a philosopher (can't remember which one) who basically said that it is good men who make the laws, but laws without good men will not be enforced.
The US is a Constitutional Republic... why everyone continues to conflate this with democracy I do not understand. The states election process does not define the Federal govt.
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened), against domestic Violence.
This isn't going to earn us any friends, but I agree with the contention, at least, that there is something to the theory that we'd be far less likely to suffer endless criminal war (as is the case now) on the part of the military-industrial complex, if we were indeed all armed of our own accord and thus responsible for our own defence at an individual level.
It does, at least, put a citizen on equal footing when it comes to understanding the responsibility of using a weapon, at all, to defend something or someone. There are many who say that responsibility is too heavy, or too hard, or should not be born by the individual .. but in this day and age there are too many well-armed warriors with the ability to destroy the very weak, and destroy they do. Daily.
One of the key means by which war-fighters get away with atrocity is when the weaker, non-armed civilians from which they must recruit and supply themselves, allow them to do so without oversight.
An armed citizenry defuses the source of military-industrial corruption: the secrecy by which the effects of war are kept from a weak-willed, easily manipulated, public.
If we knew what it was to fight a war, we'd be doing less of it. As it stands now though, the people of the nations of the western coalition are living in a putrid fantasy as to what their military are doing, in their name. And seem to be fine with it.
I wonder if it were so easily placed on the board, as it were, if we had a means of reigning in our military masters that was truly effective. In place of technological war-fighting might, it seems the only thing we have left is the light of truth on their secrets.
So, while the notion of 'arming all the citizens' is an extreme, there may be something less extreme in the idea of 'uncover all military-industrial secrets at all costs', which is .. after all .. kind of a similar basis by which one might defuse the complex.
The Government doesn't admit it did anything illegal, any court cases trying to show otherwise will take a decade as this one has, and currently the only one I'm aware of was dismissed as the courts ruled they could not prove damage had been done.
Though, even if found to be violating the law I find it hard to imagine any prosecutors trying individuals involved.
He stole credentials to download and give data en masse. This wasn't a guy exposing a single program. It was a guy just releasing everything he could get his hands on.
Snowden as well. He promised he destroyed all the data that had nothing to do with internal spying programs when he landed in China but before he defected to Russia. And he must be telling the truth because he said he's telling the truth.
He didn't defect to Russia. He was on a flight that had a layover in Moscow airport, but the US revoked his passport, so he got stranded there until Russia eventually granted him asylum.
His passport was revoked while he was in Hong Kong. Somehow he was allowed to board the flight to Moscow with a revoked passport, but not the flight from Moscow.
>He was on a flight that had a layover in Moscow airport, but the US revoked his passport, so he got stranded there until Russia eventually granted him asylum.
Not quite. As another poster stated, Snowden had his passport revoked a day before he cleared security in Hong Kong and boarded the plane to Moscow. The decision to allow him to board the plane could only have come from the top of Russian leadership. US also issued a request to detain him and again, the decision by Hong Kong and Chinese authorities to ignore this request could only have come from high up in the respective leadership chain.
His entire time Hong Kong is mired in controversy and implicates him as a defector (either planned or spur of the moment) - for example his visit to Russian consulate (with Putin himself acknowledging that Snowden met with Russian diplomats). Wikipedia has a good write-up [1].
Maybe Snowden was worth more to Russia by not being a traitor. Consider:
* Most of the secrets were probably already known by well running spying organizations of big countries. They have their own real spies working in there, and what Snowden revealed was for a big part already suspected by many. Snowden has demonstrated the smoking gun to the planet, but a lot of people noticed the smell of the corpse before that.
* USA=Bad is a claim that sticks beter if the messenger is a knight in shining armor.
* Russia has a lot more room to mess around if the would-be police of the world iis caught with its pants down every other week.
* Russia is very good at sowing distrust between their enemies. It seems a main point of their current defence against NATO.
>revealed was for a big part already suspected by many
The problem is that the details on the existence of internal spy programs were a very small part of the cache of data he stole. Initial estimates range from 50,000 to 200,000 stolen documents (with later revisions of the estimates jumping to 1.7 million) with no real idea of the extent of the theft.
Here's how Army General Martin Dempsey (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) characterized the theft: "The vast majority of the documents that Snowden ... exfiltrated from our highest levels of security ... had nothing to do with exposing government oversight of domestic activities. The vast majority of those were related to our military capabilities, operations, tactics, techniques and procedures."
We know Snowden took those documents with him to China. We don't know what he did with them. We know he was monitored by Chinese, Russian and American intelligence agencies in Hong Kong - which should raise alarm bells because there is no way that neither Russian nor Chinese agencies would simply pass up an opportunity to exfiltrate this data for themselves. Snowden said that he destroyed all those files, though his story has changed several times and you simply have to trust him at his word ... which raises the question, why did he steal that data (not talking about domestic surveillance programs) in the first place. I mean, he sure as hell could have simply given it to the Russians, or had it stolen by another intelligence agency.
But Snowden was not the only person having this access. What about all of his colleagues? If a country manages to bribe or blackmail even one of these people to smuggle out an USB stick, you have exactly the same situation.
Given the resources available to China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc..., the sheer number of available targets, and the invisibility of the attack, what are the odds of this kind of theft not happening? And that's without all the other ways for them to get reasonable estimates of these things.
What crime are we talking about? Because the surveillance programs have been sanctioned and overseen by all three branches of government. In other words, they were perfectly legal government programs.
So Snowden didn't actually whistleblow any crime. You may argue about the public right to know about these programs, and I would be friendly to that view, but Snowden stole much much much more than that, took it to China and asked us to trust him when he said he destroyed that data (though he changed his story quite a few times)... that's why he is a traitor.
> The whistleblower laws for intelligence community members pretend that there’s no such thing as agency level misconduct and we know that that’s not the case... If what you’re talking about is official misconduct that has been sanctioned by the agency, then obviously reporting that misconduct to that agency is not going to help. So internal channels are useless for things like torture, warrantless wiretapping, any of those major systemic abuses, like the ones we saw after 9/11.
https://pen.org/sites/default/files/Secret%20Sources%20repor...