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

[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.