re: #79 iossarian

I don’t think that’s really true. There are proposals to reform the legal apparatus under which the NSA surveillance is carried out. They may not go anywhere but they exist. I suppose it’s a matter of opinion whether they constitute action “outside the blogs” or not.

Obviously, one can disagree over lots of points here:

- is the NSA surveillance desirable overall?
- is it legal?
- if legal, should the law be changed?

etc. But I think it’s a stretch to say that the system would be under the same level of scrutiny /sans/ Snowden.

We really don’t know if that’s true or not.

After all, isn’t one of Snowden’s memes that there were a “number” of NSA employees who had disagreements with the agency’s operations? Seems I can recall him saying that in one interview.

If that is actually the case, I’d think there would be at least one person in that operation that would have eventually emerged as a true whistleblower—unless, of course, he or she were just another mercenary contractor like Snowden, or a documented malcontent.