Comment Re:Actual Facts (Score 1) 389
No, it isn't. I said that I do not care how lightly they think of spying, not anything about their governments not existing or any other such nonsense.
You don't care what their government thinks. Their government represents them. You wish to impose your views on them -- or, more accurately, you wish to speak for them in place of themselves or their government.
The fact is, despite how many times you say otherwise, that being spied upon -- especially by foreign entities -- is almost universally considered a criminal offense at most. You really have to come up with some kind of definition for what human rights are that encompass whatever privacy rights you think you're advocating for in order to advocate them. I've asked you to do that, and you said you have, by reiterating what you've already said: that it just is. That's not going to cut it on any level.
It would be one thing to talk about a totalitarian government not just spying on its own people, but recording every action and social connection, like what the East German or previous Russian governments were known to do, since this kind of persecution is so easily coupled with the suppression of dissidents or any kind of opposition. But that's not what is occurring.
In an international world where foreign governments can go to war with each other, states (and their people) must naturally regard foreign interests with varying degrees of suspicion. But it's never zero suspicion. This means that states (and their people) are essentially compelled into conducting spy and espionage actions, if only to determine the nature of hostile spy and espionage actions conducted against them by foreign entities. Anything else would be neglectful and dangerous. Of course, it can be taken too far, but to say that any amount of foreign intelligence gathering is strictly immoral is pretty absurd.
They are to me. And it can be both at once.
Until you can provide some sort of definition of human rights which encompasses whatever privacy rights you're advocating, they really aren't.
How do you determine whether or not I think it's negative, or likely?
You've already told me. If you think your human rights are being violated by your communications being read by anyone except the intended recipient, then you're negatively impacted by Snowden's revelations about American foreign intelligence actions because these actions will now be studied, broken down, and copied. Perhaps against you, perhaps against other targets, perhaps against a more authoritarian government's own people. According to you, those are negative. According to reality, they are somewhere between likely and inevitable.
As for "crimes," I don't think law equates to morality, so whether he's technically a 'criminal' is uninteresting to me. But to me, they shouldn't be.
I never said that all of the NSA's activities are unconstitutional; that's not all that interests me. The domestic spying is definitely unconstitutional. I believe much of their other spying is immoral.
You have a pretty shaky foundation for your belief in it being immoral. If Snowden revealed that other governments were conducting espionage through his own immoral behavior, how would you feel about it? What about if Snowden were a European and revealed domestic spying programs by the NSA which he only learned about through conducting espionage against the USA?
If your answers to those resemble anything like "the ends justify the means" then I'm not sure how strongly you believe foreign intelligence efforts are immoral in the first place.