[kstrauser]

I say this without intending to denigrate Snowden at all: Klein's situation was less messy. Snowden had a top secret clearance and vowed to safeguard all the secrets he came across. Klein was just a regular guy doing regular work for a regular company when he saw something strange. That doesn't mean I think Snowden was wrong, just that there's a ton of room for people to say "I agree with him but he shouldn't have done that because he swore not to". Klein didn't have those obligations.

[nabla9]

Snowden explained it well. There were four other whistleblowers besides Snowden and Klein.

(1) Russ Tice: USAF intelligence analyst

(2) William Binney: NSA Technical Director.

(3) Thomas Tamm: DOJ lawyer

(4) Thomas A. Drake: senior executive at NSA

Each of them was a senior position relative to Snowden and Klein and all these cases were shut down. What change Snowden had to do traditionally by the book whistleblow or tiny traditional leak. He made the conscious decision to take the information so that they could not shut him down, and make a scene from outside the US (Hong Kong) so that there would be time to talk to the press.

Snowden made a political crime that was morally justified. It was not self serving. It turns out that Americans don't care but at least he made a splash.

[anonym29]

Snowden also swore an oath to uphold the constitution, including the fourth amendment that the NSA was illegally violating (one NSA crime) and covering up (second NSA crime), including by lying to congress (third NSA crime), as well as to protect America from domestic enemies, like the kind of traitors who'd come up with a secret plan to violate the constitutional rights of the entire country and lie about it to congress.

Thank goodness he took his oath more seriously than the "I was just following orders" crowd. We know from WW2 that "I was just following orders" is not a legitimate excuse to help facilitate grave atrocities, like all of those other NSA employees did every single day, in violation of their own oaths that they each swore.

[kstrauser]

You won't get any argument from me. I agree. And even in agreement, I still say that there's a much larger grey area in Snowden's case. We can and should discuss whether his actions were justified. I think they are. But I can at least appreciate that people who disagree have legitimate reasons to see it otherwise.

Klein's case didn't come with all that other baggage.

[axus]

The moment which struck me the most from all the recent confirmation hearings was the parade of senator after senator asking Tulsi Gabbard if Edward Snowden was a traitor. It was like the #1 priority for them that people believe that, and they would skip any relevant questions about the job only to pursue that one topic over and over.

[anonym29]

A litmus test for uncompromising ideological loyalty to an obviously false but politically correct narrative among TPTB.

[anonym29]

No argument from me with what you wrote, either, I just wanted to make sure I was doing my interpretation justice by sharing it - there's certainly no shortage of posters parroting the other side's talking points.

It's interesting that Klein's tell-all didn't get as much attention despite being less legally fraught. It makes me wonder how much of the Snowden media frenzy was organic in the first place, and if not much, who was pulling the strings to draw attention to practices that our own government had an obvious interest in repressing and concealing discussion of.

[jll29]

Could be that Snowden took it to The Guardian, a foreign and international news outlet. The story how British intelligence folks showed up at the Guardian HQ and symbolically destroyed a hard drive, and the way Guardian management used their New York offices to work around restrictions in UK law to publish the story, that's quite a story itself, and of course journalists know how to get coverage and reach.

Mark targeted the EFF, not a news outlet, in contrast. The EFF probably first and foremost had the legal pursuit in mind, not making a story big.

The most shocking things of all for me was how ignorant ordinary people were and still are about both whistle blowers' disclosures and the subsequent pretend fixes by lawmakers. (Cynically, I'm inclined to add there might be more riots and demonstrations if you take Heinz ketchup away from people than theirlegitimate rights to privacy.)

[Tepix]

> Mark targeted the EFF, not a news outlet, in contrast.

"Mark not only saw how it works, he had the documents to prove it. He brought us over a hundred pages of authenticated AT&T schematic diagrams and tables. Mark also shared this information with major media outlets, numerous Congressional staffers, and at least two senators personally."

[bb88]

I don't recall agreeing to any oath like that when I applied for a US clearance. I just recall the NDA.

I may have pledged allegiance to the US flag when I was a kid, but that wasn't the same as taking an oath of elected office to uphold the constitution.

[worik]

> grave atrocities

Tapping phones is immoral and unethical, IMO.

But a long was from the "grave atrocities" that were uncovered at the end of WWII

[anonym29]

It wasn't simply tapping phones, it is the warrantless collection of close to all global electronic communications.

And the immorality doesn't stop there, that's where it starts.

"We kill people based on metadata." - General Michael Hayden, former Director of the NSA, former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and former Director of the CIA.

This includes innocent people. Women, children, civilians. Deliberately. "Acceptable collateral damage" is the euphemism used to mask the moral evil of deliberately murdering women and children.

[bb88]

If you're in a war of attrition (like the the US was in Afghanistan), and the other side already has agreed it's okay to kill innocents (9/11), then you're not going to win by fighting an "ethical" war -- whatever that means.

I'm not going to defend the CIA/NSA for actions taken inside the country. On the other hand, I'm not going to second guess decisions happening on the ground in an active war zone.

[aucisson_masque]

The end never justify the mean, that's how you end up with concentration camps, massive executions and other atrocities.

Beside, killing without distinction combattant and civilians didn't work, see the result of the American Afghanistan war.

Even during the war, 99% of the country was to the hand of war leaders and talibans because everyone hated Americans. Guess why.

It took only a handful of days for Talibans to defeat the American sponsored 'democratic' gouvernement.

[bb88]

> The end never justify the mean

It's working so far for Russia. It worked for Germany in WWII until the US stepped and fought our way through Europe.

If you see a certain group as your sworn enemy for life which should be destroyed at all means possible -- then you will never have peace. All you can have is war.

[simoncion]

> ...you're not going to win by fighting an "ethical" war -- whatever that means.

By not fighting ethically abroad and by permitting our authoritarians largely free-rein both abroad and domestically, we gave the folks who planned and caused the destruction of the WTC towers nearly everything they were hoping for.

Overreacting and letting Bush II run his military campaigns in the Middle East was one of the greatest gifts we could have given Al Qaeda and those like them. Encouraging our populace to permit themselves to be (and continue to be) terrorized is a lesser but still significant gift to those same organizations.

[anonym29]

Afghanistan had nothing to do with 9/11. Neither did Syria, or Iraq.

Vietnam wasn't self-defense. Korean war wasn't self-defense. CIA-instigated Color revolutions and Euromaidan weren't self-defense. Kosovo wasn't self-defense. Launching a cruise missile (a precision weapon that requires the operator to enter precise geographic coordinates prior to launch) at the Chinese embassy in Belgrade wasn't self-defense.

A vast and overwhelming majority of the military operations the post-WW2 USA conducts overseas are not acts of self-defense, they are acts of imperialism.

"I want to grow the imperial empire's influence and footprint" is not justification for murdering unarmed civilians. Never has been, never will be.

[serial_dev]

“I was just following orders” is only a bad excuse if your side loses.

[shadowgovt]

And now he's nice and cozy in a country that is busy invading its neighbor... But one that the US President has himself cozied up to the leadership of as of late.

It's an odd world that makes odd bedfellows. One wonders depending on how the next four years go if Snowden could even catch a pardon.

... or if he did, the Russians would even let him leave.

[marxisttemp]

Likewise, Manning got pardoned when her release was clearly messier and less targeted than Snowden’s. There isn’t much logic to these things.

To be clear, all 3 are personal heroes of mine.