Through a PRISM darkly

[thewayne]

"He's a traitor."
-- House Speaker John Boehner on Edward Snowden

"Hero of the Year."
-- Michael Moore

"Treason...Bring back the death penalty."
-- Fox News analyst Ralph Peters

"The man for which I have waited. Earmarks of a real hero."
-- Glenn Beck

"An act of treason."
-- Sen. Dianne Feinstein

"When you have a dictatorship or an authoritarian government, truth becomes treasonous...For somebody to tell the American people the truth is a heroic effort."
-- Ron Paul

I really, REALLY, hate agreeing with Glenn Beck about something! At least it's over something worthwhile.

Comments

[vaudy.livejournal.com]

As the saying goes, even a stopped clock is right twice.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

ROFLMAO!

[maegwin-of-hern.livejournal.com]

I wonder whether Glenn Beck would've had the same to say if this had happened during the Bush administration, AKA the government under which this whole program came to be.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Excellent point. Then he'd probably be on the 'shoot the traitor!' side. A lot of people have known that the government was vacuuming up a lot more information than they were legally authorized to do, and this blows their thin veil of secrecy apart. I think this is a good thing, it's far too much information for the government to have.

I wonder if he's still in the "Bradley Manning = traitor" camp. What Manning did is pretty tame compared to what Snowden leaked.

This is something that I've had an issue against Obama since his beginning. In many ways, he's Bush's third (and now fourth) term, and this is one of them. Pundits call him a socialist liberal, but really he's a liberal conservative in my book. Bush seized too much power, and Obama has continued and expanded it, and now it's going to bite his administration in the butt. The Benghazi thing was a non-event, regardless of the Republican's slavering over it. The IRS "scandal" also is pretty much a non-event. The Associated Press seizing of phone records? That's definitely pushing it. But PRISM? It's a good thing for Obama that he's already in his second term.

[maegwin-of-hern.livejournal.com]

I wonder whether this will be addressed during his visit in Germany. Our government is in favor of collecting data from pretty much everyone (we call it "Vorratsdatenspeicherung"), but as far as I know, the public hates it with a passion (at least the majority of the part that is aware of it). However, I don't know how the media (or at least the established media) views it, so maybe they'll ask him about PRISM or they just don't care.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Considering the history of Stasi informants, I think the German people have a right to be concerned. It's far too easy for such information to be re-purposed to the advantage of the government and to the disadvantage of the people who elected it.

[silveradept]

Same lines of attack as PFC Manning. At what point did it become treasonous to point out the illegal things your government is doing, whether in the name of security or not? (W Bush currently leads the poll there, I'm guessing, but it's probably earlier than that, maybe Nixon?)

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Certainly during Dubya's term it became grossly unfashionable to criticize the government. Maybe that became sort of a cloak that encouraged them to continue and expand doing nefarious deeds?

[silveradept]

Possibly, but if that's your line of thinking, I'm still placing the blame earlier, in the Nixon-Reagan sort of era, because things like the Contra scandal or the "plumbers" are predicated on the idea that the government is always right and nobody should be able or allowed to criticize it.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Considering the acts of Nixon in fundamentally committing treason to prolong the Vietnam war prior to his election as POTUS, then followed up by Watergate et al and by Reagan's Iran/Contra shenanigans, we definitely have a need for government transparency.

[silveradept]

Oh, yes. We need a lot of transparency, and fairly quick transparency. Enough of this "national security means we don't say anything at all" bullshit. If you want to say that the public doesn't need to know, then the Intelligence committees need to be able to shut anything down that has even a whiff of being illegal or invasive.