Snowden IHOW
by digby
Michael Sherer wrote what would have been the cover story on Edward Snowden had he been chosen TIME's man of the year. And it's good. I urge you to read the whole thing but I thought I would just highlight some of the quotes from Snowden himself:
“There is a far cry between legal programs, legitimate spying, legitimate law enforcement—where it is targeted, it’s based on reasonable suspicion, individualized suspicion and warranted action—and the sort of dragnet mass surveillance that puts entire populations under a sort of an eye and sees everything, even when it is not needed. This is about a trend in the relationship between the governing and governed in America.”
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“The NSA is surely not the Stasi, but we should always remember that the danger to societies from security services is not that they will spontaneously decide to embrace mustache twirling and jackboots to bear us bodily into dark places, but that the slowly shifting foundation of policy will make it such that mustaches and jackboots are discovered to prove an operational advantage toward a necessary purpose.”
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“The President could plausibly use the mandate of public knowledge to both reform these programs to reasonable standards and direct the NSA to focus its tremendous power toward developing new global technical standards that enforce robust end-to-end security, ensuring that not only are we not improperly surveilling individuals but that other governments aren’t either.”
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"In general, if you agree with the First Amendment principles, you agree with encryption. It’s just code. Arguing against encryption would be analogous to arguing against hidden meanings in paintings or poetry."
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“What we recoil most strongly against is not that such surveillance can theoretically occur but that it was done without a majority of society even being aware it was possible.”
The man's obviously an insane megalomaniac who hates America. No wonder they picked the pope. He only thinks half the human population should be subjugated.
*Note: I did find it telling that Mark Zuckerberg was portrayed as the "light" to Snowden's "dark". But then Zuckerberg is stupid rich so I suppose in our culture that automatically makes him someone with a positive optimistic vision.
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