Mario, > This was sanctioned by FISA. You can bitch about FISA all you want, but it > and several other checks serve as the due process. Work to change FISA if you > believe it flawed. Corporations are people by law, though I think that's one > of the more stupid judgements of this century, and I work toward righting > that wrong. It's still the damn law.
What do you do when the Courts charged with protecting our rights refuse to do so? At what point do we acknowledge that the game is rigged, and there is nobody watching the watchers, and that if you expect the Courts to ACTUALLY care about your rights, you're just fooling yourself? > Soldiers have a duty not to follow *illegal* orders, Snowden is not a soldier. He has no duty to follow any orders. > The devil is in the detail: "How" should that soldier proceed when faced with > a possibly illegal order? A court *had* weighed in and this was legal. If he > was so bothered by what he saw, and didn't believe the FISA protocol was > adequate, he could have exhausted a number of other avenues to appeal and air > his concerns. > > I think you should _first_ follow proper avenues for appeal. If one still > feels a strength of conviction after that first rebuff, then sure - engage in > civil disobedience, protest, etc. I think history shows us that the people who stand out in a crowd, demanding the attention of their superiors are the ones who get drummed out (troublemakers) and start to have the fictional loner backstory filled out for them in advance by the powers that be "just in case its needed". The only way to get ahead of that routine, which happens time and time again, is to get out there AHEAD of the government's propaganda machine, so you can make your own first impression, and not have the government spoonfeed to the media the soundbites to be used in all media coverage describing you. > Unilaterally doing a classified data dump and then fleeing to China of all > places, doesn't exactly give me warm fuzzies about this guy's critical > thinking capabilities. Sorry if I disappoint very good friends on this list, > but I'm not a Snowden fan, though this is far from a black and white case. I > can see thinking people having compelling arguments for either side. What are the "compelling arguments" for maintaining secrecy? It's not like our enemies don't know that the US gov't could get this data. Heck, one could argue that it's almost certain that "our enemies" understood far better than American citizens do, just how corrupt, how rotten to the core, the government has become. One might EVEN argue that some of that is why we call them "our enemies" in the first place. And maybe it scares us a little bit to think maybe they are, in just a little bit, "right" about our gov't. > I think Toobin captures the essence of my concerns here: > http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/06/edward-snowden-nsa-leaker-is-no-hero.html To quote the Toobin article: > The American government, and its democracy, are flawed institutions. But our > system offers legal options to disgruntled government employees and > contractors. They can take advantage of federal whistle-blower laws; they can > bring their complaints to Congress; they can try to protest within the > institutions where they work. But Snowden did none of this. Instead, in an > act that speaks more to his ego than his conscience, he threw the secrets he > knew up in the air—and trusted, somehow, that good would come of it. We all > now have to hope that he’s right. I would argue that more "good" has come out of his "throwing the secrets up in the air" than would EVER have come out of pissing upwind at the NSA or writing to some bought-and-paid-for congresscritter. He's convinced society to have a discussion about what our "leaders" are doing in our name. A discussion that would never in a bajillion years have come about through anything resembling the "proper channels". A discussion that NEEDED to happen. D
_______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
