re: #239 darthstar

One such tasty nugget from that article:

In any case, far from denigrating American intelligence we should applaud it. It helps catch terrorists, gangster and foreign spies. The oversight and scrutiny is the toughest in the world. America has taken the most elusive and lawless part of government and crammed it into a system of legislative and judicial control. America is also part of the world’s only successful no-spy agreement, with its close allies—notably Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Would Switzerland or Austria, say trust Germany enough to sign a no-spy deal? I suspect not.

Snowden’s published revelations include material that has nothing to do with his purported worries about personal privacy. They reveal how countries like Norway and Sweden spy on Russia. Why is it in the public interest to reveal how democracies spy on dictatorships? The Snowdenistas’ outrage is based on the fact that this spying takes place in cooperation with the NSA, the Great Satan of the intelligence world.

Other disclosures are similarly hard to justify. Why is it in the public interest to reveal how the NSA intercepts e-mails, phone calls, and radio transmissions of Taliban fighters in Pakistan, or to show that the agency is intensifying scrutiny on the security of that country’s nuclear weapons? Snowden even revealed details of how the NSA hacks into computers and mobile phones in China and Hong Kong.

The spin and hype surrounding these leaks has cast a harsh, distorting and damaging light on the intelligence agencies’ work. The damage is catastrophic. It dwarfs the damage done by the traitors of cold-war era. Our spymasters are aghast at the damage, but stay tight-lipped about details for fear of making matters worse.

I’d agree with the author who notes that the Snodwenistas are a bunch of naive fools, and there’s no reason to trust Snowden on anything - particularly about the storage and security of the documents he stole.

The NSA and US officials have to assume that anything Snowden touched is now in the hands of the Chinese and/or Russians, and that the compromise to those programs is significant.

And for what? To make claims that the US spied on US citizens (except that in most instances there were warrants and judicial oversight, not what Greenwald initially claimed), and to undermine US relations with allies, even though the spying had nothing to do with violations of US law (one of the excuses thrown around by Greenwald and Snowden was the lawlessness of the NSA, when the very opposite is true - there’s significant oversight involved).