Knee jerk police state yearning
by digby
I'm hearing from a lot of people that Edward Snowden has blood on his hands because he allegedly warned the Paris terrorists that governments had programs to spy on their communications.
I guess those terrorists didn't see this back in 2003:
Anyway, read this if you want to know the current thinking on all this. It's been reported many times, but it's worth saying again. There's no evidence that these metadata surveillance programs ever stopped any terrorist attacks. We know for a fact they failed to prevent bali, madrid, London, Boston and literally hundreds of others as the metadata programs were going full speed.
And by the way, France isn't particularly squeamish about surveillance today even if it's "illegal". I know a lot of people think that the rest of the world is a backwards pre-technological place and that America is the only country capable of doing anything like this, but that's not actually true. And the Paris terrorists aren't cavemen. They knew not to talk on cell phones or openly on the internet long before Snowden came along.
What Snowden revealed wasn't that governments were tracking terrorists. We knew that and the terrorists knew that. What we didn't know was that they were tracking us and storing all of our communications just for kicks.
Update: Ah, I see Greenwald got there long before me with a thorough dossier.
