There are those who would be our masters.

[AllPurposeAtheist]

I'm becoming a fucking conformist.. Somehow I knew I'd become an old white guy.

[FrankDK]

> How did he endanger the United States and its citizens by blowing the whistle on a domestic spying program? :-?

China has an active program to break into US computers - private, corporate, and military - to steal information.  It was recently revealed that they stole classified information on design of the most modern and secret US weapons.

If Snowden gave the Chinese information about our infosec capabilities, he may have cost the US billions of dollars and endangered much of our classified information.  If the US sells weapons to Israel, for example, and the Muslim states can buy countermeasures from the Chinese, that won't help sales much.

Frank

[Nonsensei]

So you assume the worse of our government

Assumptions are all anyone can have when the government itself refuses to set the record straight.

 

and want to grant full license to anyone to disclose any and all secrets you may or may not like.

No not anything I may or may not like. Things that represent an enormous expansion of federal power at the cost of the citizenry and render important parts of the constitution irrelevant.

 

You can't have it both ways. Either our government has the capability to secretly investigate criminal or terroristic organizations or they do not. If not then you're giving terrorists and criminals free license to operate with impunity.

Holy fallacious reasoning batman. First of all, I reject the idea that it is necessary to have full and unfettered access to all digital communications of all american citizens everywhere just to fight terrorism. Due to a refusal by the government itself to back up its own claims of thwarting terrorism, AND because the supposition that these measures are wholly necessary to accomplish that task is a ludicrous one, I am left with no alternative but to believe that fighting terrorism has nothing what so ever to do with this activity and would never be anything more than an incidental side benefit of this aggregate privacy violation.

Finally, not allowing the government to eliminate our right to digital privacy does not amount to giving terrorists and criminals free license to operate "with impunity". In order for that to be true, this sort of widespread privacy violation would have to be literally the only method of stopping crime and terrorist plots.

The federal government tells us that they can't fight terrorism without being able to read everyones email and listen to everyone phone conversation without any warrant or judicial oversight? I say they didn't try hard enough.

[Hydra009]

Which is what he did.

How did he endanger the United States and its citizens by blowing the whistle on a domestic spying program?   :-?

Explain "Domestic spying program." By calling it that, you reveal that you don't really know what the NSA actually did, what they monitored, what their limitations were, and why they did it.

*shrugs*  That's what the papers/blogs called it, so that's what I'm calling it.

A rose by any other name...