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An interesting perspective.<br>
<br>
What is incredible is there is a significant segment of the <br>
American people who believe that Snowden and Assange are criminals.<br>
<br>
Given that acts of violence are not only immoral, <br>
but futile and negative to a good cause--<br>
what is needed are more pens and fewer swords.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 07/10/2014 09:42 AM, David Johnson
via Peace-discuss wrote:<br>
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<h1>The Latest Snowden Leak Is Devastating To NSA Defenders</h1>
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<div class="cat-date-line"><span class="cat-date-line2"><a
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<span class="cat-date-line3"> <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/edward-snowden/"
rel="tag">Edward Snowden</a>, <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/nsa/" rel="tag">NSA</a>,
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<span class="cat-date-line4">By Conor Friedersdorf, <a
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href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/07/a-devastating-leak-for-edward-snowdens-critics/373991/"
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July 8th, 2014</span><br>
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<p><em>Edward Snowden’s new refugee document granted by Russia
is seen during a news conference on August 1, 2013.
(Reuters)</em></p>
<p>Consider the latest leak sourced to Edward Snowden from the
perspective of his detractors. The National Security Agency’s
defenders would have us believe that Snowden is a thief and a
criminal at best, and perhaps a traitorous Russian spy. In
their telling, the NSA carries out its mission lawfully,
honorably, and without unduly compromising the privacy of
innocents. For that reason, they regard Snowden’s actions as a
wrongheaded slur campaign premised on lies and exaggerations.</p>
<p>But their narrative now contradicts itself. <em>The
Washington Post’s</em> <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-nsa-intercepted-data-those-not-targeted-far-outnumber-the-foreigners-who-are/2014/07/05/8139adf8-045a-11e4-8572-4b1b969b6322_story.html">latest
article</a> drawing on Snowden’s leaked cache of documents
includes files “described as useless by the analysts but
nonetheless retained” that “tell stories of love and
heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises,
political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and
disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000
account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and
recorded nevertheless.”</p>
<p>The article goes on to describe how exactly the privacy of
these innocents was violated. The NSA collected “medical
records sent from one family member to another, résumés from
job hunters and academic transcripts of schoolchildren. In one
photo, a young girl in religious dress beams at a camera
outside a mosque. Scores of pictures show infants and toddlers
in bathtubs, on swings, sprawled on their backs and kissed by
their mothers. In some photos, men show off their physiques.
In others, women model lingerie, leaning suggestively into a
webcam …”</p>
<p>Have you ever emailed a photograph of your child in the
bathtub, or yourself flexing for the camera or modeling
lingerie? If so, it could be your photo in the <em>Washington
Post</em> newsroom right now, where it may or may not be
secure going forward. In one case, a woman whose private
communications were collected by the NSA found herself
contacted by a reporter who’d read her correspondence.</p>
<p>Snowden defenders see these leaked files as necessary to
proving that the NSA does, in fact, massively violate the
private lives of American citizens by collecting and storing
content—not “just” metadata—when they communicate digitally.
They’ll point out that Snowden turned these files over to
journalists who promised to protect the privacy of affected
individuals and followed through on that oath.</p>
<p>What about Snowden critics who defend the NSA? Ben Wittes <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.lawfareblog.com/2014/07/a-quick-read-of-the-posts-latest-nsa-story/">questions</a>
the morality of the disclosure:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Snowden here did not leak programmatic information about
government activity. He leaked many tens of thousands of
personal communications of a type that, in government hands,
are rightly subject to strict controls. They are subject to
strict controls precisely so that the woman in lingerie, the
kid beaming before a mosque, the men showing off their
physiques, and the woman whose love letters have to be
collected because her boyfriend is off looking to join the
Taliban don’t have to pay an unnecessarily high privacy
price. Yes, the <em>Post</em> has kept personal identifying
details from the public, and that is laudable. But Snowden
did not keep personal identifying details from the <em>Post</em>.
He basically outed thousands of people—innocent and not—and
left them to the tender mercies of journalists. This is
itself a huge civil liberties violation.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The critique is plausible—but think of what it means.</p>
<p>I never thought I’d see this day: The founder of <em>Lawfare</em>
has finally declared that a national-security-state employee
perpetrated a huge civil-liberties violation! Remember this if
he ever again claims that NSA critics can’t point to a single
serious abuse at the agency. Wittes himself now says there’s
been a serious abuse.</p>
<p>The same logic applies to Keith Alexander, James Clapper,
Michael Hayden, Stewart Baker, Edward Lucas, John Schindler,
and every other anti-Snowden NSA defender. So long as they
insist that Snowden is a narcissistic criminal and possible
traitor, they have no choice but to admit that the NSA
collected and stored intimate photos, emails, and chats
belonging to totally innocent Americans and safeguarded them
so poorly that a ne’er-do-well could copy them onto thumb
drives.</p>
<p>They have no choice but to admit that the NSA was so bad at
judging who could be trusted with this sensitive data that a
possible traitor could take it all to China and Russia. Yet
these same people continue to insist that the NSA is deserving
of our trust, that Americans should keep permitting it to
collect and store massive amounts of sensitive data on
innocents, and that adequate safeguards are in place to
protect that data. To examine the entirety of their position
is to see that it is farcical.</p>
<p>Here’s the reality.</p>
<p>The NSA collects and stores the full content of extremely
sensitive photographs, emails, chat transcripts, and other
documents belong to Americans, itself a violation of the
Constitution—but even if you disagree that it’s illegal,
there’s no disputing the fact that the NSA has been proven
incapable of safeguarding that data. There is not the chance
the data could leak at sometime in the future. <em>It has
already been taken and given to reporters</em>. The
necessary reform is clear. Unable to safeguard this sensitive
data, the NSA shouldn’t be allowed to collect and store it.</p>
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