FTFA:
Last night, the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times published their lead front-page Sunday article, headlined âoeBritish Spies Betrayed to Russians and Chinese.â
This is the power relationship in this case:
Murdoch's papers are fundamentally criminal enterprises who have been caught tapping the phones of government officials and celebrities alike, among other crimes.
They also deny that man-made climate change is a threat to human civilization, a fact about them which bascially makes them mass murderers in a lot of people's eyes, including a lot of people in government.
So their entire existence is hanging by a thread of goodwill and if that thread ever gets cut, they're going to prosecuted out of existence and Murdoch is going to jail like the criminal he is.
Such an compromised entity is called "useful" in government circles.
"Please dont' prosecute us, we'll do anything you say any time say.. anything..anything!"
Thus this news story.
No one should take from this that I am specifically pro-Snowden.
What I am is anti-what-he-revealed. It's just too much unchecked power waiting to be abused. It's a structural flaw in how governments operate that one day is going to cause catastrophic damage to democracy.
I would not have done what Snowden did just because think of the damage to national security and where's the evidence this power is currently being abused to stifle democratic liberties?
Where are the bodies and innocent ruined lives?
Where's the influenced or rigged elections?
Where 's the blackmail of Senators and Congresspeople?
All of these crimes are the stuff a panopticon faciliates, but we find no evidence for them, at least yet.
The worst we know about was what Anonymous revealed- a despicable but private effort on the part of govt. contractors to smear and destroy Glenn Greenwald's career and ability to make a living.
But that was private actors, the Chamber of Commerce going to Stratfor looking to destroy him, not the government.
OTOH revealing what he revealed absolutely helps Very Bad People do Very Bad Things. So that is absolutely a cost to society that can't be just brushed aside.
Point is, this panopticon 1984 shit should never have been put into place without serious limitations and safeguards, ones which were not left in the hands of a small group of political lackeys like the FISA court.
Abusive panopticons are what develop in the dark when no one is looking. No one is above the temptation to create unlimited power and take it unto themselves "for the greater good". If it's not being abused, it will be.
We would never know about it- Wyden wasn't able or willing to get the word out- except for Snowden. So we all owe Snowden a debt of gratitude, even if his process was imperfect. He could not sort everything he took for relevance \ danger to national security \ criminality. It was a logisitcal limitation. So he left it to reproters to sort it out.
It's complicated and I dont feel a need to make is less complicated than it is.
He clearly revealed things that are illegal and dangerous to the point of killing the democracy- dangerous to the point of *clearly being a threat to national security*.
At the same time he clearly damaged national secuity.
Legitimate appeals to national security cannot be allowed to evolve into a democracy suicide-pact.
You can't be allowed to baby-step the democracy off a cliff. You built a dangerous system you can't legitimately claim you can control, that is ripe and aching for Stasi / Nazi / Soviet style abuse, which could be used to kill the democracy. Your otherwise legitimate claims to national security are severely undermined .
What Snowden means is the NSA et al were power hungry madmen building a democracy killing WMD and someone who was not brainwashed into the cult found out about it and blew the whistle, and damaged our national security in the process.
The scary thing is this- we're not any better than THAT at preventing group-think within the parts of government that might wield extraordinary power.
This is the professionalization and fineness of capability at keeping people with dissenting views out.
If our system worked, Greemnwald and Snowden would work WITHIN the NSA in watchdog capacites, not outside it, throwing a baby out with every bathtub of dirty water.
It's not their fault in that sense. It's ours. It our failure to demand that government condict itself in light of the science we have done; science about group think, science about exclusionary tendencies of teams, about mobbing within organizations, about the ways power becomes corrupted.
OK then.
Presidential pardon for Snowden- reinstate him and whomever he selects as watchdogs within the NSA. Let outsiders from academia , lawyers and scholars who understand civil liberties into the sytem in a formal way and give them real, unusurpable apolitical power.
This is what needs to be done. We need to go radically outside the comfort zones of those currently in power. Give them their medals and pensions and honors and then retire them; times are changing faster than they can keep up with.
We're not dealing with treasonous traitors ala Hansen here. This is an internal dispute betwen equally patriotic Americans.
\