dagblog - Comments for "Why Didn’t Snowden Go through “Proper Channels” to Blow the Whistle?"

Note: you've gone on and on

PeraclesPlease — Fri, 28 Jun 2013 07:03:39 +0000

In reply to Does anyone seriously believe

Note: you've gone on and on about Assange being a bloodsucker, but don't seem to know Adrian Lamo, who appears to be real vampire thing. (along with Kevin Poulson of Wired - "hack a site, then report it to let us clean it up" - uh, would be nice to offer a penetration test as a contract, not just do it in the wild)

Does anyone seriously believe

NCD — Fri, 28 Jun 2013 04:07:59 +0000

In reply to Why Didn’t Snowden Go through “Proper Channels” to Blow the Whistle?

Does anyone seriously believe Snowden's leaks are actually changing anything permanently? Snowden has only changed his future prospects in life.

And I like the 'almost leaker' Binney guy saying 'Snowden did the right thing', my ass, why didn't Binney do 'the right thing' and then and buy himself a one way ticket to China?

Changing anything would mean Congress would have to do it's job, not BS partisan attacks on Benghazi or the IRS, or repeal Obamacare 37 times, or write more unborn protection laws. That absence of devotion to their responsibilities in oversight, and voters who don't care if all they do is play partisan politics, combined with the 30 second attention span of Americans ensures that nothing much is going to happen.

In the end, the NSA is so poorly run ( a 3 month wonder can hack the outfit from top to bottom) it is frankly no more threat to your privacy, and 99.9999% of no use to national security, than your kid's latest X-Box. Let them have their toys, it's inevitable the government will tap 'metadata' because every corporation, nation and entity on the planet that possibly can is doing the same thing.

If Snowden or anyone else did leak evidence of actual crimes at NSA, illegal use of the data to harm innocent people for instance, the Party out of power would be hopping like horny toads off a hot skillet demanding hearings and investigations.

I haven't really followed

Orion — Fri, 28 Jun 2013 02:49:59 +0000

In reply to Yeah, the answer to this is

I haven't really followed much of this story but what Michael said. If the President of the United States is operating the government as one big espionage system aimed at its own citizens, what is the point of complaining about that to the President of the United States? That really is an insane question.

And the subtle difference is

PeraclesPlease — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 18:25:40 +0000

In reply to For example, when NSA

And the subtle difference is that Drake was simply exposing waste and fraud, not dealing with intelligence issues. And that made him an enemy non-combatant.

But use the official complaint lines Romana says.

Yeah, the answer to this is

Michael Maiello — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 15:28:16 +0000

In reply to Why Didn’t Snowden Go through “Proper Channels” to Blow the Whistle?

Yeah, the answer to this is just too obvious. The "proper channels" are part of the corrupt system. They can't be trusted.

For example, when NSA

A Guy Called LULU — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 14:19:44 +0000

In reply to Why Didn’t Snowden Go through “Proper Channels” to Blow the Whistle?

For example, when NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake tried to blow the whistle on fraud and corruption within the NSA – based upon the NSA spying on all Americans instead of targeting only suspected criminals – he was prosecuted under the Espionage Act.

Drake notes:

I differed as a whistleblower to Snowden only in this respect: in accordance with the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, I took my concerns up within the chain of command, to the very highest levels at the NSA, and then to Congress and the Department of Defense. I understand why Snowden has taken his course of action, because he’s been following this for years: he’s seen what’s happened to other whistleblowers like me.

By following protocol, you get flagged – just for raising issues. You’re identified as someone they don’t like, someone not to be trusted. I was exposed early on because I was a material witness for two 9/11 congressional investigations. In closed testimony, I told them everything I knew – about Stellar Wind, billions of dollars in fraud, waste and abuse, and the critical intelligence, which the NSA had but did not disclose to other agencies, preventing vital action against known threats. If that intelligence had been shared, it may very well have prevented 9/11.

But as I found out later, none of the material evidence I disclosed went into the official record. It became a state secret even to give information of this kind to the 9/11 investigation.