Khi Edward Snowden khởi đầu việc công bố bằng chứng tội phạm của chính phủ Mỹ qua vụ NSA với tuyên bố khẳng định rằng một người như anh, ở vị trí trong nột công ty Tư Nhân, cũng có khả năng rình mò nghe lén trực tiếp văn phòng chính phủ các cấp, kể cả tổng thống Mỹ, bọn "chuyên gia" chính qui và các tay sai báo chí đã liên tục tấn công và mỉa mai Snowden là "bốc phét, cường điệu, tự đề cao bản thân v.v".
Như chúng ta đã chứng kiến, sau đó từng ngày nối tiếp nhau Snowden và Greenwald đã tiếp tục nhẫn nha đưa từng bằng chứng lên báo, và cũng từ những bằng chứng này, các "chính phủ nạn nhân" cũng đã lên tiếng xác nhận sau khi cơ quan an ninh của từng quốc gia "điều tra và xác nhận" sự chính xác của Edward Snowden. Thế nhưng chính phủ Mỹ và các chính phủ tay sai liên hệ và báo chí chính qui vẫn cố tình tìm đủ cách đánh lạc thông tin và liên tục qui tội phản bội lên Snowden. Riêng chính phủ Anh quốc đang nỗ lực tấn công tờ The Guardian và qui tội hạ gục tờ báo này, dù nhà báo Glenn Greenwald đã rời tờ the Guardian để tham gia vào một cơ quan truyền thông mới đối kháng mạnh mẽ và độc lập hơn do chủ nhân Ebay bỏ tiền ra tài trợ thiết lập.
Trong số truyển thông chính qui mỉa mai chế diễu Snowden trong những tháng qua, có danh hài chính qui Bill Maher kẻ đã từng liên tục chế diễu anh Edward Snowden để bênh vực Obama và chính phủ, trong tuần qua Bill Maher đã buộc phải thừa nhận Snowden là đúng, bằng cách mời Bill Binney một trong những công dân tố cáo nổi tiếng từ NSA đã đến Nga trao giải cho Snowden, để phỏng vấn và ca ngợi Bill Binney là "làm đúng và yêu nước" rồi cảm tạ điều Bill Binney đã làm...v.v nhưng không hề xin lỗi cũng như mở một lời cảm tạ Edward Snowden dù trong cuộc phỏng vấn đã buộc phải xác nhận rằng chính phủ NSA và báo chí chính qui đã SAI và thừa nhận điều Snowden tuyên bố là hoàn toàn sự thật.
Thế nới biết, khi không đủ kiến thức căn bản, trình độ chuyên môn tối thiểu để nhận định một vấn đề mà không cẩn trọng cứ theo "lẽ trí cạn" của mình mà huênh hoang sẽ phải tự ngậm bàn chân của mình, hay nói theo kiểu Việt nam là "tự kê tủ đứng vào mồm của mình!"
Người tự trọng nhân cách, khi SAI sẽ tự kiểm can đảm công khai thừa nhận và xin lỗi. Kẻ gian manh sẽ tìm đủ lý cớ để chạy tội hoặc phớt lờ: Bill Maher là kẻ theo chủ nghĩa quốc gia nhà nước là hạng người này!
nkptc
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Time to thank Edward Snowden
Mon Nov 11, 2013 8:53AM GMT
When Edward Snowden first leaked massive NSA files to the Guardian newspaper, public reaction was mixed. To some, he had arrogated to himself a decision to make public some of the most sensitive national security secrets, damaging America's ability to track terrorists, a decision that he had no right to make. People questioned his mental stability and his motives. To others, he had forced a submerged national debate and slowed down a secret and inexorable slide to a police state that protects security by routinely monitoring everybody.
Some relative liberals espoused the former view. The usually thoughtful Jeff Toobin wrote in the New Yorker that Snowden was "a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison":
The assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy led directly to the passage of a historic law, the Gun Control Act of 1968. Does that change your view of the assassinations? Should we be grateful for the deaths of these two men?
Of course not. That's lunatic logic. But the same reasoning is now being applied to the actions of Edward Snowden. Yes, the thinking goes, Snowden may have violated the law, but the outcome has been so worthwhile.
But the lunatic logic is Toobin's. The analogy between taking the law into one's own hands to commit a political assassination and to expose the slide to a police state is far-fetched, to say the least. (And The Gun Control Act of 1968, as Toobin must know, has been totally eviscerated by later laws and court decisions.)
What Snowden has done is to force a long repressed debate about how much liberty, if any, we need to sacrifice in order to protect our security. Before his leaks, that urgent conversation was a non-debate because the violations of liberty were being done entirely in secret, beyond the reach of democratic deliberation. Even Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, a key author of the Patriot Act, was appalled. He wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder: "I am extremely troubled by the FBI's interpretation of this legislation ... Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American."
Acknowledging that Snowden acted illegally gets us into a discussion of ends and means, a more complex issue than is often assumed. Look at all of the appalling things done or permitted by the state that were perfectly legal -- beginning with slavery.
Snowden's action was illegal, but the actions of the NSA were arguably far more threatening to a constitutional regime of liberty. The claim of damage done to national security also remains to be proved.
Have we totally forgotten counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke's revelations about the months before the attacks of 9/11? The American authorities had all the information they needed to understand that al-Qaeda was planning something very big. They got information from conventional intelligence work, before the Patriot Act authorized universal snooping. But President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld ignored Clarke's requests for urgent action because the White House was obsessively fixated on Iraq and Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.
With competent leadership at the top, the United States possessed all of the surveillance tools that we needed to thwart the 9/11 attack, without passage of the Patriot Act and the creation of a universal dragnet. The Patriot Act was actually a garbage can of long standing prosecutors' and intelligence operatives' wish lists for waivers of the usual restraints on searches. It was rushed through Congress in the panicky post 9/11 mood, with no exploration whatever of whether it was really needed.
Once we get a state that believes it has the authority to conduct unlimited surveillance, the logic is inexorable. It's prudent to snoop on everybody, because you never know where a terrorist might pop up. And we need to keep the very existence of this stuff secret, because debating it might compromise "sources and methods." So the slide to a police state is relentless.
In Britain, where there is no First Amendment and where the heroic editor of the Guardian newspaper, Alan Rusbridger, keeps publishing Snowden's revelations, the government has threatened to shut Rusbridger down.
The current issue of the New York Review of Books contains Rusbridger's chilling account of being forced by British government agents to destroy computers that contained Snowden's leaked documents, an absurd act of pure harassment since back-up copies of the documents were kept in New York. He wrote:
It is harder than you might think to destroy an Apple MacBook Pro according to British government standards. In a perfect world the officials who want to destroy such machines prefer them to be dropped into a kind of giant food mixer that reduces them to dust. Lacking such equipment, The Guardian purchased a power drill and angle grinder on July 20 this year and -- under the watchful eyes of two state observers -- ripped them into obsolescence.
This year is the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's March on Washington. They even have a stamp commemorating this march -- honoring a leader who in his day was a lawbreaker.
But as Lyndon Johnson made clear in his most moving speech, the speech of March 15, 1965 on the Voting Rights Act, in which LBJ declared "We Shall Overcome" and embraced Dr. King's movement, sometimes you need to break the law in order to uphold the Constitution. The racist southern governors and sheriffs who brutalized peaceful marchers were acting under color of law, just like the NSA. But that didn't make their actions consistent with American democracy. The heroism was in the civil disobedience of Dr. King.
Someday, many decades into the future, they may put Edward Snowden's picture on a postage stamp, too. For now, ironically enough, he is an exile in Russia, a place far more heedless of civil liberties than our own country. But Snowden has forced a debate that is long overdue and that will slow or even reverse America's slide into a society of universal surveillance. For that, he deserves our gratitude.
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