The Slatest brought this to my attention:
Edward Snowden has a new job. His lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, tells Russian outletRIA Novosti that Snowden has landed a new gig in technical support. Kucherena isn’t saying who Snowden’s new employer is, but did describe the company as a major Russian website. “He will be part of the support team of one of the largest Russian websites,” Kucherena told the Russian news agency. “I can’t say the name of the website now for security reasons.”
You can’t make this stuff up.
First, what employer on this planet would be so monumentally stupid as to hire Edward Snowden, someone who so famously betrayed every oath, every rule and principle held sacred by his former employers?
For a full reminder of the extent to which Snowden personifies the concept of betrayal, betrayal of everyone and everything around him, I urge you to go back at read David Brooks’ column of June 10. And I quote:
He betrayed honesty and integrity, the foundation of all cooperative activity. He made explicit and implicit oaths to respect the secrecy of the information with which he was entrusted. He betrayed his oaths.
He betrayed his friends. Anybody who worked with him will be suspect. Young people in positions like that will no longer be trusted with responsibility for fear that they will turn into another Snowden.
He betrayed his employers. Booz Allen and the C.I.A. took a high-school dropout and offered him positions with lavish salaries. He is violating the honor codes of all those who enabled him to rise.
He betrayed the cause of open government. Every time there is a leak like this, the powers that be close the circle of trust a little tighter. They limit debate a little more.
He betrayed the privacy of us all. If federal security agencies can’t do vast data sweeps, they will inevitably revert to the older, more intrusive eavesdropping methods.
He betrayed the Constitution. The founders did not create the United States so that some solitary 29-year-old could make unilateral decisions about what should be exposed. Snowden self-indulgently short-circuited the democratic structures of accountability, putting his own preferences above everything else….
“For security reasons…” Har-de-har-har-har.
Whose security? Edward Snowden’s? Who should feel any obligation to respect or protect confidentiality for his benefit?
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Sorry, I don’t agree that he “betrayed” anyone. Certainly not his friends and especially not the cause of open government. Do you realize how bizarre that sounds? He released factual information that allows Americans to decide just how intrusive OUR (emphasis OUR) government should be. Our “open” government would prefer we never know what is going on in any way, shape, or form.
I’d suggest that if there is even a single instance of the government obtaining personal information about a citizen without any just cause, that that would be considered the greatest betrayal. I don’t submit to allowing the government to decide what is best for me – especially when they won’t tell us what they are doing.
Allow me to quote this paragraph again:
The government isn’t just some THING “out there” deciding what’s best for you, as you and other libertarians like to put it so resentfully.
We are a society of laws. One of the many things we have a government for is to provide for the common defense, which is to say, for common security. Someone has to make decisions about how to act to promote this collective security. So we have this wonderful, elaborate system filled with checks and balances, a republican method for deciding who decides what.
Snowden just short-circuited that, and essentially declared himself king, or in Constitutional terms, declared himself to be the legislative, executive and judicial branches all by his lonesome, even though no one had voted for him for anything.
THAT is the outrage. That is what is intolerable. He had zero right to do what he did, and in fact profoundly violated our rules — placing himself and his personal will ahead of our system of laws — in doing what he did.
I’m with Doug on this one. Our government has been operating in this super secret world for too long. Time to hold the government accountable. The threat from terrorists really isn’t as big as the Lindsey Graham’s of the world would have you believe. Anytime our leaders want to hide something they invoke this “national security” mantra. It’s all a bunch of scare tactics, nothing more. Our biggest threat right now is from the plutocrats, not Al Qaeda.
Somebody who willfully would have violated the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 could also be said to have “declared himself to be the legislative, executive and judicial branches all by his lonesome, even though no one had voted for him for anything…placing himself and his personal will ahead of our system of laws — in doing what he did.” No question Snowden violated the law. Whether what he did was “right” or not…that’s a much more complicated issue.
Brad,
You are very far off. Snowden did not “short-circuit” the checks and balances. He hit the breaker switch. The checks and balances that you tout rely heavily on transparency and active, vigorous discussion with the assistance of an active, diligent press.
The release valve when those checks and balances fail is a whistle-blower. We have whistle-blower statutes intended to protect people who come forward. This case is a hard one because it implicates national security. But I have no doubt that the term “whistle-blower” applies to Snowden since I think the incredibly aggressive interpretation of the Patriot Act and other statutes are beyond the pale. The FISA court is more or less a rubber stamp for most requests, but has rebuked the NSA for overreaching or outright misrepresenting facts to the court. (And no, that does not prove that the FISA court is not just a rubber stamp.)
This is key. This is core. This is fundamental. Brooks understands completely, and explains impeccably, the things that these radical individualists such as Mark Sanford, Ron Paul and Edward Snowden just don’t seem to get AT ALL.
When I say that these folks “don’t understand how things work,” or better yet, how they are supposed to work, what America is about, this is the kind of thing I’m talking about.
It’s not about every man being some self-determining island who has no obligation to the society around him. It’s about a system of laws, a constitution, that determines (in the case of our Constitution, rather brilliantly) how we will live together.
Not because we choose to “live together,” but because we do live together, and there’s nothing that anyone can do about it. What each of us does or does not do affects everyone else, and what others do or do not do affects each of us. We are interconnected, whether radical individualists like the fact or not. So it is necessary to devise a system of governance that makes the inevitable togetherness of our condition operate as smoothly and fairly and wisely and justly as possible.
NO man is an island…
“Snowden just short-circuited that, and essentially declared himself king, or in Constitutional terms, ”
No, he didn’t. He released factual information that allows the citizens of this country to be informed about what OUR government is doing. Each of us now has the opportunity to assess that information and make a determination as to whether what the U.S. doing is right or not. We elect leaders who are supposed to make the policy that their constituents want. How can they do their job if they are not 100% in the loop on what is being done?
I have unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Spying on me in ANY way is in direct opposition to my right to liberty. The government’s right to provide a common defense is not a blanket approval to do whatever it wants to do in the name of “national security”. You certainly cannot offer ANY guarantee that the information that is collected will be used only for the single purpose of defending America. Well, you can if you live in a fantasy world.
And getting back to your desire to be a nation of laws – won’t the release of information by Snowden trigger just that? New laws that (hopefully) will rein in the surveillance? If that’s what Americans want based on this new information, how is that the wrong approach?
The laws we have are fine. But we can always have a debate about that. And we had enough information in order to have that conversation before we’d heard of Snowden.
The drip, drip, drip of sensationalism he has engendered crates the real possibility of an emotional, rather than rational, political response, in which we might amend our laws in ways that are far from wise.
Again, he has done nothing that can be rationalized into anything good…
“And we had enough information in order to have that conversation before we’d heard of Snowden.”
As Tonto said, “Who’s this “we” white man?”
Are you saying all of our elected Congressmen were fully apprised of all spying activity performed by the NSA, CIA? I don’t think so.
He released factual information that he had zero right, legally or morally, to release.
He betrayed every kind of confidence with which he was entrusted in order to do so.
What he did, and continues to do, is completely and utterly contemptible. There’s no redeeming quality in it, no silver lining. He did nothing but harm.
Isn’t it sort of over the top to claim he is “utterly contemptible” when many people disagree with you? Child molestation is utterly contemptible. Releasing factual information that exposes over the top surveillance activities is only contemptible to people of a certain mindset.
He did nothing but harm? That’s highly debatable. Folks now know that the US government is spying on its allies, something that is no doubt against German or French law. So in effect what Brad is defending is the right for the US government to secretly violate the laws of other nations. If the voters like that kind of spying in a world free of Nazis and Communists then they can vote for the Lindsey Grahams of the world. If not they can choose someone who respects privacy, the laws of other nations and understands the actual threats we face not a bunch of hyperbolized nonsense.
What employer would hire Edward Snowden, someone able who to outfox the U.S. NSA?
Who is better qualified to work for a front company of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB)? I expect by now the FSB (successor to KGB) has now completed a realistic background check on Snowden, unlike the perfunctory rubber stamp passing the Obama administration’s approval criteria (not Bush’s fault).
The name of the FSB front company employing Snowden could be FSB’s “Face, Fingerprint & Biometrics Book” though probably not. Could Snowden be a double agent? No, wherever he works, his antics are being overtly and covertly monitored.
If China’s Unit 61398 has successfully attacked the Pentagon, etc. Snowden would be very helpful to facilitating and refining attacks on U.S. infrastructure via SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) — industrial control standard to supervise, control and maintain U.S. infrastructure. That infrastructure includes water filtration plants, electrical power distribution grids, natural gas and oil pipelines, and much more.
Were Snowden to cooperate in that fashion, his treachery would reduce Benedict Arnold to a mere piker, and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg to wannabes.
The American left has never cherished security adequately, in my opinion.
I’m kind of hoping that Snowden will leak the ACA enrollment numbers.
“Anytime our leaders want to hide something they invoke this “national security” mantra.”
Agree with you on that, Bud.
“It’s all a bunch of scare tactics, nothing more.”
Must disagree with that bit of reasoning. While much has been scare tactics, we do not live in a world of actors who would not eat our lunch given the chance using any violent means at their disposal. That is different only in scale from the local areas in which we and you live. It is immutable human nature and cannot be cured by $$$$ or appeasement.
Folks who marginalize the importance of our national security often have two things in common: they have not traveled widely abroad, and; they have not served in hazardous military duty.
As Winston Churchill observed,
“The history of mankind is war.”
and,
“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”
Capitalism could be described as the philosophy of greed, the creed of ignorance of workers, the gospel of disrespect and it’s inherit virtue is creating misery for the masses while a handful get super rich.
Of course that would be as much of an oversimplification as Churchill’s description of socialism. Capitalism is both necessary for prosperity and dangerous, even disasterous if allowed to operate unchecked. Socialism cannot on it’s own create wealth but a good dose of socialism can serve to keep capitalists from polluting the environment; exploiting workers, including children; and ensuring all the people have a reasonable opportunity to pursue a happy and healthy life.
As standards of medical care decline under Obamacare (socialist healtrh care), we, you included, will have borne witness to the inevitable consequence of socialism. And the Marxist (widely demonstrated failed economies) about worker exploitation is as phony as it ever gets — unlike in many socialist countries (Europe included) we choose what work we do, for whom we do it, and agree to the pay and benefits. Until recently, full employment in the U.S. was considered 5.5%.
Tell us, how U.S. workers (with the highest average standard of living in the world/acre) can consider themselves “exploited” unless competitiveness in their workplaces is beyond their dignity? And, how can such workers consider themselves underpaid unless they envy the fruits of other’s labor without willing to produce as much or be as productive.
Bud, unfortunately “the creed of ignorance of workers” has described well the self-imposed attitude of many unionized workers.
As all humans consume, capitalism has satisfied consumer demands better than socialism, and quasi-capitalistic communism (People’s Republic of China).
You probably also thought Daniel Ellsberg was a traitor to the United States. Technically he broke the law, too, but his deed was a great service both to the American citizenry and beyond, and most I think (save a few Vietnam War revisionists) understand that.
The “wonderful, elaborate system filled with checks and balances, a republican method for deciding who decides what” doesn’t apply to decisions made in secret. What Snowden’s revelations have made quite clear is that the “check” part of that equation is a little weak at best. Surely you’re not really serious that “we had enough information in order to have that conversation before we’d heard of Snowden.” If that were true, you wouldn’t be so disturbed by what he has revealed. What he has revealed has sparked far more of a conversation on this topic than we were having previously, and as far as making wise “unemotional” decisions goes, isn’t a better-informed public better positioned to decide just far we want to tip the balance in the quest for greater “security.”?
The US is most certainly a country of laws, and so do we also have laws at the state and local level as well. But our history is rife with courageous people who have technically violated these laws, from people violating the Alien and Sedition Acts, to abolitionists, to MLK and civil rights protestors, to Daniel Ellsberg, and beyond. Their violations of the law, while technically undeniable, are seen in retrospect to have triggered positive course corrections for our country along the way. It’s too soon to say whether we will see Snowden in this light or not, but there’s no question that a truly comprehensive understanding of the depth and breadth of the surveillance state is never going come completely voluntarily. Are the American people better off knowing the information he has helped provide? Of course we are.