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I'm afraid no-matter the outcry the "just keep us safe at all cost" people are the majority. Whatever push back is gained against government intrusion we're always one instance, one attack, that will keep us moving forward towards a completely monitored, controlled society.
As for this guy, I don't know if his motives are as he states. I listened and read what a lot of people have said about this issue.
On a broader point, I do believe national security is important. Oaths are important.
A lot of people are trying to boil this down to him being a traitor violating the trust of this country. Even if the information he supplied was just and the people had a right to know. Even if someone exposed unconstitutional operations are policies. I have a hard time with that.
I can't believe any vow, oath, to any three letter government agency, secret court, orders, trumps the oath to uphold the Constitution.
I understand that the government will be compelled to go after him but I know in my heart no-matter how you want to slice it, try and justify it, storing communications, writings, thoughts, data, on every American that can be accessed at anytime is unconstitutional. I don't need any congressman, judge, supreme court or president to tell me if it is or isn't.
Quote:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
My communications, that's my property. Case law be damned.
Those of you that say "OH well", "it doesn't matter, I've got nothing to hide",
"Whatever it takes", You have already lost whatever was, whatever it used to be that was suppose to make us something special or different.
At this point, I don't know how long we have lied to ourselves or if we ever honored or upheld the ideals we say we stand for. I just no I believe in the principals and ideals of what we say we are.
With that, I think whistle blowers need to be taken on case by case bases. Exposing that government is tracking every American, in their papers, unlawful seizures of property, National security be damned. He should be a protected witness against a unconstitutional government run amuck.
I see traitors and liars out there but I will reserve that kind of judgment at this point for what should be a protected whistle blower.
Oh, here is a liar.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper
"Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"
You want to charge somebody? How about you start with him!
Working within the system is just not going to be effective. The system is broken.
When a party is granted retroactive immunity from legal challenges, and when the issues pertain to our most basic rights, it is clear that not only has our government vastly overreached its authority, but that traditional avenues of protest are permanently closed.
Lawsuits over government surveillance languish
PAUL ELIAS, AP
Mark Klein poses for photographs at his home in Alameda, Calif., Tuesday, J...
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Before there was Edward Snowden and the leak of explosive documents showing widespread government surveillance, there was Mark Klein — a telecommunications technician who alleged that AT&T was allowing U.S. spies to siphon vast amounts of customer data without warrants.
Klein's allegations and the news reports about them launched dozens of consumer lawsuits in early 2006 against the government and telecommunications companies. The lawsuits alleged invasion of privacy and targeted the very same provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that are at the center of the latest public outcry.
That was seven years ago, and the warrantless collection continues, perhaps on an even greater scale, underscoring just how difficult the recently outraged will have in pursuing any new lawsuits, like the one the American Civil Liberties Union filed against the government on Tuesday in New York federal court.
"I warned whoever I could," Klein said in telephone interview from his home in Alameda, a city across the bay from San Francisco. "I was angry then. I'm angrier now."
All the lawsuits prompted by Klein's disclosures were bundled up and shipped to a single San Francisco federal judge to handle. Nearly all the cases were tossed out when Congress in 2008 granted the telecommunications retroactive immunity from legal challenges, a law the U.S. Supreme Court upheld. Congress' action will make it difficult to sue the companies caught up in the latest disclosures.
The only lawsuit left from that bundle is one aimed directly at the government. And that case has been tied up in litigation over the U.S. Justice Department's insistence that airing the case in court would jeopardize national security.
"The United States government under both administrations has been stonewalling us in court," said Lee Tien, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represents the consumers who filed that lawsuit. EFF has also filed a related lawsuit seeking the Justice Department's legal interpretation of the law that the government is apparently relying on to collect consumers' electronic data without a warrant.
James Clapper, director of national intelligence, personally urged U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White to throw out the remaining lawsuit. Clapper wrote the judge in September that the government risks "exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States" if forced to fight the lawsuit.
But on Friday, federal prosecutors asked the judge to delay making any decision until it can report back to the court on July 12 what the latest disclosures may mean to the lawsuit. Tien and other EFF lawyers are also assessing the newest disclosures to determine if they bolster their case.
Snowden, 29, a former CIA employee who most recently worked as a contractor for the National Security Agency, admitted leaking details of two secret government surveillance programs.
He revealed a top-secret court order issued April 25 by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that granted a three-month renewal for the large-scale collection of American phone records. That program, the same one Klein tried to expose, allows the NSA to gather hundreds of millions of U.S. phone records to search for possible links to terrorists abroad.
Snowden also disclosed another program that allows the government to tap into nine U.S. Internet companies and gather all communications to detect suspicious behavior that begins overseas.
On Tuesday, Klein said that for a number of reasons, Snowden's disclosures sparked more public outrage than his own revelations did more than seven years ago.
For one thing, Klein said, Snowden had direct access to a secret court order and details of the program, while Klein pieced together the government's surveillance through internal AT&T documents and in discussions with colleagues who worked on the project.
"The government painted me as a nobody, a technician who was merely speculating," said Klein, who made his disclosures after he accepted a buyout and retired from AT&T in 2004. "Now we have an actual copy of a FISA court order. There it is in black and white. It's undisputable. They can't deny that."
Klein also said the allegations that the government was accessing social media sites such as Facebook may have gotten the attention of more — and younger — people who weren't bothered by his initial disclosures.
"Now, the government is intruding in places they go," said Klein, 68. "That probably got their attention."
They have been doing it for years, it's just more public now.
Pass all the laws and shuffle paper till your blue, they will not stop.
The many years they have become brick and mortor facilities they will not walk away from just because someone pass's judgement and signs a document of delclaration.
This was clearly foretold in 2011,it's here and Google isn't going anywhere.
More than a decade ago, Osama bin Laden appeared in a brief video to speak about several issues. One of them was to advise the Islamic world that they should expect the U.S. military to be defeated by Islam, the Taleban, and its allies in Afghanistan. The other was to suggest that Muslims should be prepared to watch the U.S. government strangle the civil liberties of Americans in the name of prosecuting its war against the Islamist mujahedin.
All the lawsuits prompted by Klein's disclosures were bundled up and shipped to a single San Francisco federal judge to handle. Nearly all the cases were tossed out when Congress in 2008 granted the telecommunications retroactive immunity from legal challenges, a law the U.S. Supreme Court upheld. Congress' action will make it difficult to sue the companies caught up in the latest disclosures.
This in itself seems to be a violation of the separation of powers protections written into the US Constitution. How can the legislative branch make ANYTHING immune from actions of the judicial branch if their powers are supposed to be separate and independent?
And the Supreme Court upheld this limitation on their own powers? I guess the law, or an amendment to that law, was entitled something like "A bill to guarantee yearly pay raises to all justices on the Supreme Court".
BTW, there is likely a very simple solution to putting a torpedo into this entire call monitoring issue. EVERYONE simply needs to try to put as many keyword flags as they can in every phone call, email, text message, whatever, that they can to just flood those monitoring computers.
Seriously, do they REALLY expect us to believe that content is not forwarded to the NSA? The phone records are absolutely useless to them without such information, so this is all just a smoke screen and white wash to try to cover up what they are actually doing.
Yeah, I know. "If you aren't doing anything wrong, then you have nothing at all to worry about." So OK, tit for tat, then. Make ALL of their meetings, no matter how small or large, RECORDED and available to the public. ALL of them, not just the ones they WANT to have public. Once you are in public office, every WORD you utter in any form to anyone needs to be public record. And "national security" be damned. All that really means these days is that anything embarrassing to someone in higher levels of government and will "shake the foundations of trust of the people for their government" needs to be kept from their sensitive eyes and ears. Why else would the US Government go after this Edward Snowden now? Simply because the government doesn't LIKE that someone blew the whistle on what they are doing. So now he is a traitor?
I would be very surprised to see Snowden on live feed anytime soon,the longer it is the less
likely he will appear before the media alive.
Rest assured,"HE RESISTED"!!
BTW, there is likely a very simple solution to putting a torpedo into this entire call monitoring issue. EVERYONE simply needs to try to put as many keyword flags as they can in every phone call, email, text message, whatever, that they can to just flood those monitoring computers.
BTW, there is likely a very simple solution to putting a torpedo into this entire call monitoring issue. EVERYONE simply needs to try to put as many keyword flags as they can in every phone call, email, text message, whatever, that they can to just flood those monitoring computers.
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Heck, I didn't even know about that, but I was darn close to being right on time..... 
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