Snowden says he would agree to a plea deal!

Ralphy1 said:
No, but they may get tired of him living sort of laviously and can trump some charge to send off to freeze and ear gruel...
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Interesting assumption, that he's living lavishly.

As I was looking for an injury caused by these revelations (which so far doesn't seem to be showing up when I Google it), I came across the following. It's a reference to a new security program that apparently has one significant flaw that if implemented, could be the cause of an unintended war that's actually started by a third party. Seems to me that this flaw is significant. http://www.wired.com/2014/08/edward-snowden/


'.....The massive surveillance effort was bad enough, but Snowden was even more disturbed to discover a new, Strangelovian cyberwarfare program in the works, codenamed MonsterMind. The program, disclosed here for the first time, would automate the process of hunting for the beginnings of a foreign cyberattack.

Software would constantly be on the lookout for traffic patterns indicating known or suspected attacks. When it detected an attack, MonsterMind would automatically block it from entering the country—a “kill” in cyber terminology.Programs like this had existed for decades, but MonsterMind software would add a unique new capability: Instead of simply detecting and killing the malware at the point of entry, MonsterMind would automatically fire back, with no human involvement.

That’s a problem, Snowden says, because the initial attacks are often routed through computers in innocent third countries. “These attacks can be spoofed,” he says. “You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What happens next?”

In addition to the possibility of accidentally starting a war, Snowden views MonsterMind as the ultimate threat to privacy......'





 

The only article I can find referencing said 'harm', is the following:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/05/edward-snowden-damage_n_5448035.html

......Contacted by HuffPost, the Defense Intelligence Agency, Office of the Director of National Intelligence and State Department all declined to provide additional detail on their claims of damage.........
...... Congress has been of little help in explaining to the public what damage -- if any -- Snowden has done.....

The article was written one year after (2014) and to date I don't think I've read anywhere that his whistle blowing has caused any deaths or injury and wouldnt you think that if it had, the press would have it handed to them on a silver platter for dissemination to the world to loudly proclaim, "We told you so". "Here's the proof Snowden caused harm!"
 
Debby, scary stuff. But many would rather kill the messenger than heed the message. In ancient times, often literally. If Snowden had gone through legal channels, none of this would have come to light. It would have been buried, and
possibly him with it. Canada has not been good to our whistleblowers either. For far less vital information, they are harassed and routinely lose their jobs, treated like pariahs etc. Nations are about perpetuating power and influence, not about the welfare of individuals. We cannot afford to trust them to police themselves, but must remain forever vigilant, lest they usurp our freedom in the name of fear. A paranoid population, is a quiescent population. Throughout history, tyrants gain power through the straw dog of national security. Oops, there goes our freedom. No thanks. Where is the proof???
 

Not everyone CARES about having surveillance.... or feels any FREEDOM is compromised by it ladies... I prefer that terror plots are caught and stopped much more than I care if DHS knows when I have a dentist appointment.. It's the world we live in. Get over it... The enemy is not fighting a traditional war... our defense has to be different too.
 
Debby said:

The article was written one year after (2014) and to date I don't think I've read anywhere that his whistle blowing has caused any deaths or injury and wouldnt you think that if it had, the press would have it handed to them on a silver platter for dissemination to the world to loudly proclaim, "We told you so". "Here's the proof Snowden caused harm!"
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Very true Debby, we would have heard about it loud and clear.

Shalimar said:
But many would rather kill the messenger than heed the message. In ancient times, often literally. If Snowden had gone through legal channels, none of this would have come to light. It would have been buried, and
possibly him with it.
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That's right Shalimar, Snowden had no option than to take the route he did for the truth to get out to the American people, he did good.
 
Say it over and over but it changes nothing. He is a traitor. During wartime he would be eligible for the firing squad and well deserved.
 
IMO... Let him stay in Russia... Why should WE taxpayers foot the bill for a trial and his incarceration.. I'm sure they can find some use for him..
 
Looks like one of the useless surveillance programs is coming to a close. More here.

On Sunday, the National Security Agency will have to shut down one of its controversial mass surveillance programs: the unlimited collection of the phone records of millions of Americans, known as bulk metadata collection.

That program allowed the NSA to collect information about citizens' phone calls, including whom they were calling, when and where they made calls, and how long those calls lasted.

While metadata collection doesn't include what was said during those calls, the information can allow intelligence analysts to build up extensive profiles of an individual's pattern of life.

The New York Times first reported on the bulk metadata program, which was created under the Patriot Act, in late 2005, but it didn't attract truly widespread outrage—or reform—until details of the program appeared in the documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013.

A federal judge in Washington, DC, ordered the program to stop in a ruling issued later that year, but that didn't happen until Congress passed a law this May that outlawed the bulk metadata program as of November 29. Under the new law, phone companies must now keep such records themselves, and intelligence agencies must seek permission from a federal judge to access specific data.

To its supporters, the program was a critical counterterrorism tool. "There is no other way that we know of to connect the dots…Taking the program off the table, from my perspective, is absolutely not the right thing to do," said former NSA director Keith Alexander to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2013.

Michael Hayden, another former NSA chief, and former attorney general Michael Mukaseysaid in a joint op-ed that the reform law was "exquisitely crafted to hobble the gathering of electronic intelligence." After the terrorist attacks in Paris two weeks ago, there was even a failed last-ditch effort to restart the bulk phone records program.

But privacy advocates say the record tells a different story. "That program hasn't prevented or even contributed to preventing a single attack in the [nearly] 15 years that it's been in operation," says Elizabeth Goitein, the co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

Think tank reports on the program have backed her up. "There does not appear to be a case in which…bulk phone records played an important role in stopping a terrorist attack," wrote Marshall Erwin in a January 2014 report from the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank.

His counterparts at the nonpartisan but liberal-leaning New America Foundation found the same thing in a study that was released in the same month as Erwin's report. "Surveillance of American phone metadata has had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism," wrote national security journalist Peter Bergen and three others in the New America study.

The government hasn't provided much more compelling evidence. The study from New America noted that President Barack Obama once claimed bulk surveillance had stopped at least 50 terrorist plots, but Alexander eventually admitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee that there was actually only one such case, in which a San Diego cab driver had attempted to send money to the Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab.

Richard Leon, the federal judge who ruled the bulk metadata program illegal in 2013, wrote that there was an "utter lack of evidence that a terrorist attack has ever been prevented because searching the NSA database was faster than other investigative tactics."

Late last year, a trio of Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee—Oregon's Ron Wyden, Colorado's Mark Udall, and New Mexico's Martin Heinrich—filed a brief in support of a lawsuit against bulk surveillance, saying they had "reviewed this surveillance extensively and have seen no evidence that the bulk collection of Americans' phone records has provided any intelligence of value that could not have been gathered through means that caused far less harm to the privacy interests of millions of Americans."

In fact, say privacy advocates, bulk surveillance can actually hurt intelligence rather than strengthen it.

"Part of the problem is that the analysts were drowning in data," Goitein says, citing the 9/11 Commission Report as evidence. "There was too much information, and the threats got lost in the noise. So more surveillance isn't the answer."
 
Don't people see what is happening ? Isn't this the way the Nazis and the Soviets did it ? Imagine if you will, the US once gave sanctuary to Soviet dissidents and now our roles are actually reversed where Russia is giving sanctuary to someone called...an American dissident.

Without an opposition, you have no republic. Without the freedom to divulge infringements on our rights with what's been proven to be only domestic surveillance techniques without revealing or risking those in operations who are in fact, often violating another country's sovereignty...we are truly doomed.

Some commentators will tell you and I am not in disagreement, that with these very methods within a new legal regime domestically, add to that overwhelming power resulting in a new hegemony, a 4TH Reich is now forming...in the US. We are merely witnessing the long game, not the short version.

Already we are changing the meaning of words. When [they] kill innocents, we call it terrorism. When we kill innocents, we call it collateral damage.
 
Sid N said:
Don't people see what is happening ? Isn't this the way the Nazis and the Soviets did it ? Imagine if you will, the US once gave sanctuary to Soviet dissidents and now our roles are actually reversed where Russia is giving sanctuary to someone called...an American dissident.

Without an opposition, you have no republic. Without the freedom to divulge infringements on our rights with what's been proven to be only domestic surveillance techniques without revealing or risking those in operations who are in fact, often violating another country's sovereignty...we are truly doomed.

Some commentators will tell you and I am not in disagreement, that with these very methods within a new legal regime domestically, add to that overwhelming power resulting in a new hegemony, a 4TH Reich is now forming...in the US. We are merely witnessing the long game, not the short version.

Already we are changing the meaning of words. When [they] kill innocents, we call it terrorism. When we kill innocents, we call it collateral damage.
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Sid, you have much to consider. In this day and age much harm can be done to the entire country and our allies by a person who through his employment has the ability to gain access to information that is classified as secret by revealing it to others. How can a person take it upon themselves knowing nothing of the reasons behind the classification of said information or the harm it can do to others reveal this to potential enemies? Anyone who agrees with you or Snowden needs to learn why state secrets must be kept sacred. I won't even attempt to bring logic to you as it results from our killing those who behead innocents compared to the accidental killing of innocents in bombing. Study WW2 and find out what civilian death from bombing is all about. War is not a game of precision. It is you Sid who fails to see what's happening.
 
Snowden is a whistleblower, not a traitor. More here.

Snowden's leak was illegal -- but it wasn't treason under U.S. law. Article III of the Constitution defines it narrowly: It "shall consist only in levying War against'' the U.S., "or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."
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Judges have read that to mean joining enemy military forces or giving them intelligence directly. Snowden did neither. He sent documents to two newspapers.

Snowden's case is similar to that of U.S. Army Private First Class Bradley Manning, who sent secret documents to the website WikiLeaks. Manning went to trial last week accused of theft, computer fraud and violations of the Espionage Act, which criminalizes sharing sensitive military information. He won't face charges of treason.

Treason cases, in fact, are rare: Fewer than 30 Americans have ever been charged with the crime, and none since the aftermath of World War II.

Not even John Walker Lindh, who fought alongside the Taliban when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, was accused of treason. Lindh was originally charged with conspiracy to commit murder and terrorism, but he took a plea bargain on two yet lesser offenses.

Lindh's dodging of treason charges matches a broader pattern during the last half-century. Robert Hanssen, who gave spent two decades as a Soviet and Russian spy while working at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was convicted of espionage in 2001.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who gave U.S. atomic-bomb research to the Soviet Union, were convicted in 1951 of conspiracy to commit espionage and later were executed.

The last time a U.S. court convicted someone of treason was in 1948. Tomoya Kawakita, a dual citizen of the U.S. and Japan, had tortured American prisoners of war while in Japan and holding U.S. citizenship.

Adam Gadahn, who collaborated with the terrorist group al-Qaeda on propaganda videos, was the last American charged with treason. Gadahn, indicted in 2006, is still wanted by the FBI and hasn't been tried or convicted.

Why do U.S. prosecutors avoid treason charges? One reason is that the standards of evidence are high: The Constitution requires "two witnesses to the same overt act." Another likely explanation, however, is that treason convictions simply aren't worth the trouble. Most traitors can be put away for life on several counts of espionage and conspiracy. That's less work for the prosecution.

Snowden's crime doesn't fit the standards of treason, anyway. If captured, he will be prosecuted for offenses similar to those of Manning. One likely charge: the disclosure of classified information "concerning the communication intelligence activities of the United States," which is a federal crime. If past leakers are any indication, he will be in prison for decades, if not the rest of his years.
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SB, You can quote anything you want but it won't change my mind one iota. I held a secret + Special Access classification from the Department of defense for 30 years much of that time on projects I still cannot speak of and I treasure the faith the Government placed in me to keep what I knew to myself. I would never allow myself to endanger our country or fellow Americans by disclosing classified information.
 
While in the service I also had a clearance and faced a fine and prison term should I reveal top secret information. I also respected what the government was doing to keep us secure...
 
Ralphy1 said:
While in the service I also had a clearance and faced a fine and prison term should I reveal top secret information. I also respected what the government was doing to keep us secure...
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I agree Ralphy......my clearance was granted after I left the military but while working closely with the military as a civilian.
 
Some of us have seen firsthand the need for secrecy and the need for extensive gathering of information to try to insure our safety...
 

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