Thật sự nếu MỖI NGƯỜI TRONG CHÚNG TA, thực hiện một đối kháng nho nhỏ thôi- tình hình đã khác, đã tốt hơn... Nhưng .................
Trong khi đó NỖ LỰC CHÍNH QUI HÓA Snowden đang tiến mạnh với lời THÚ NHẬN CHÍNH THỨC từ tờ báo chính qui sừng sỏ THE NEW YORK TIME, rằng Edward Snowden đã cống hiến cho đất nước một điều vĩ đại! (New York Times: Edward Snowden ‘Has Done His Country a Great Service’)...
Rằng dù anh "đã phải PHẠM PHÁP" để thực hiện công trình phục vụ xã hội đất nước này.
Tờ NYT, kêu gọi "Hãy ÂN XÁ" Snowden!!! Luận điệu van xin, THA THỨ khoan hồng khoan đen được tận dụng, làm như nhà nước chính phủ là kẻ VÔ CAN, VÔ TỘI, và chính những tờ báo chính qui như NYT từng sỉ vả, lên án Snowden một cách hạ tiện nhất... trở thành 'tiếng nói chân chính' - là QUAN TÒA!!!
Thật là mỉa mai! Khi chúng không còn chối nổi tội ác dơ bẩn, và thất bại trong nỗ lực triệt hạ người chân chính... chúng quay ra CA NGỢI... Và quần chúng cứ nhẩn nha tiếp tục nuốt chửng!
Edward Snowden và những cộng sự viên cũng như tất cả những ai chân chính ủng hộ việc làm của anh, đang đứng trước một thách đố tế vi nhưng cực kỳ nguy hiểm: Trở thành chính qui- gián tiếp chính đáng hóa vai trò tội phạm chính phủ và tự phủ nhận hành động đúng đắn cần thiết của dân chủ
----
A Dare for NSA Staffers: Do the Quarter-Snowden With a Twist
How to register alarm without revealing secrets or risking jail
With 2014 upon us, NSA employees are perhaps casting about for a New Year's resolution. Depending on how much they know about mass surveillance on innocent Americans, they may be conflicted. On one hand, they've signed a civil contract to keep their employer's secrets. On the other hand, as federal employees, they've also taken an oath to protect and defend the United States Constitution, and when federal bureaucracies break the law, their staffers are morally obligated to report it.
Edward Snowden is the most famous person to face that dilemma. He decided to leak classified information. In doing so, he gave up a comfortable life in Hawaii with his girlfriend. Now he faces decades in jail and lives in exile to avoid prosecution. There may be other NSA employees who are convinced that their employer needs to be reined in, but are averse to leaking classified information and facing jail time.
Perhaps the full Edward Snowden isn't for them.
But I want to encourage them to execute a different trick in 2014, a little something I've dubbed, in anticipation of the upcoming Olympic Games, the quarter-Snowden with a twist.
It doesn't require leaking classified information. Nor does it violate the law. To pull off the quarter-Snowden with a twist, which requires even less than a quarter of Snowden's courage, an NSA employee need only resign their position, seek out a trustworthy journalist of their choice, and announce that while they aren't at liberty to reveal any state secrets, they believe that Congress ought to rein in the NSA immediately. "If Senators Dianne Feinstein and Ron Wyden, who are permitted to see classified information, are listening," the staffer could say, "I'd like to brief them on my concerns." At least one of those Senate Intelligence Committee members will take the plea seriously.
The quarter-Snowden with a twist requires giving up a lucrative, intellectually challenging job during a time when the economy continues to be slow. But it is the right thing to do. And as far as patriotic sacrifices go, it is far less burdensome than the price many have paid.
In the present political environment, it is also likely to have a powerful effect.
If there are no NSA employees whose consciences are bothering them, then this article can be ignored. I suspect that there are NSA employees who sympathize with Snowden's actions but understandably can't bring themselves to break the law or risk jail. They ought to remember the more conservative course that permits them to register their considered opinion that the NSA goes too far without betraying its secrets.
Let your conscience be your guide.
“Considering the enormous value of the information he has revealed, and the abuses he has exposed, Mr. Snowden deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and flight. He may have committed a crime to do so, but he has done his country a great service. It is time for the United States to offer Mr. Snowden a plea bargain or some form of clemency that would allow him to return home, face at least substantially reduced punishment in light of his role as a whistle-blower, and have the hope of a life advocating for greater privacy and far stronger oversight of the runaway intelligence community.”
That’s from an editorial published Wednesday.
In the same piece, the Times points out that President Obama was plainly wrong when he said Snowden could have blown the whistle internally without breaking the law, because of Obama’s own executive order:
—Posted by Peter Z. Scheer
AP/Jose Luis Magana
Demonstrators hold up banners with photos of Edward Snowden during a protest outside of the Capitol in Washington, D.C
It’s rare that I write about good news. But the editorial from yesterday’s New York Times is really good news.
Entitled “Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower [1],” the Times editorial board praises and defends Snowden’s decision to leak information about the NSA and argue he deserves some kind of clemency or pardon.
Jesselyn Radack of Government Accountability Project, speaks to that at Daily Kos, writing [8] “The chorus of voices for rolling back NSA mass surveillance includes leading Members of Congress from both parties, federal judges and the President’s own hand-picked review panel. The voices calling for clemency for Snowden includes NSA Snowden task force leader Rick Ledgett, Silicon Valley’s tech giants, [9] the ACLU and now, the New York Times.”
At Reason, J.D. Tuccille argues [10] 2013 saw a significant shift in the way people view those who defy the state:
==========
Edward Snowden is the most famous person to face that dilemma. He decided to leak classified information. In doing so, he gave up a comfortable life in Hawaii with his girlfriend. Now he faces decades in jail and lives in exile to avoid prosecution. There may be other NSA employees who are convinced that their employer needs to be reined in, but are averse to leaking classified information and facing jail time.
Perhaps the full Edward Snowden isn't for them.
But I want to encourage them to execute a different trick in 2014, a little something I've dubbed, in anticipation of the upcoming Olympic Games, the quarter-Snowden with a twist.
It doesn't require leaking classified information. Nor does it violate the law. To pull off the quarter-Snowden with a twist, which requires even less than a quarter of Snowden's courage, an NSA employee need only resign their position, seek out a trustworthy journalist of their choice, and announce that while they aren't at liberty to reveal any state secrets, they believe that Congress ought to rein in the NSA immediately. "If Senators Dianne Feinstein and Ron Wyden, who are permitted to see classified information, are listening," the staffer could say, "I'd like to brief them on my concerns." At least one of those Senate Intelligence Committee members will take the plea seriously.
The quarter-Snowden with a twist requires giving up a lucrative, intellectually challenging job during a time when the economy continues to be slow. But it is the right thing to do. And as far as patriotic sacrifices go, it is far less burdensome than the price many have paid.
In the present political environment, it is also likely to have a powerful effect.
If there are no NSA employees whose consciences are bothering them, then this article can be ignored. I suspect that there are NSA employees who sympathize with Snowden's actions but understandably can't bring themselves to break the law or risk jail. They ought to remember the more conservative course that permits them to register their considered opinion that the NSA goes too far without betraying its secrets.
Let your conscience be your guide.
New York Times: Edward Snowden ‘Has Done His Country a Great Service’
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/new_york_times_edward_snowden_has_done_his_country_a_great_service_20140102/
Posted on Jan 1, 2014
The New York Times is kicking off 2014 by demanding clemency or a plea deal for Edward Snowden.“Considering the enormous value of the information he has revealed, and the abuses he has exposed, Mr. Snowden deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and flight. He may have committed a crime to do so, but he has done his country a great service. It is time for the United States to offer Mr. Snowden a plea bargain or some form of clemency that would allow him to return home, face at least substantially reduced punishment in light of his role as a whistle-blower, and have the hope of a life advocating for greater privacy and far stronger oversight of the runaway intelligence community.”
That’s from an editorial published Wednesday.
In the same piece, the Times points out that President Obama was plainly wrong when he said Snowden could have blown the whistle internally without breaking the law, because of Obama’s own executive order:
In fact, that executive order did not apply to contractors, only to intelligence employees, rendering its protections useless to Mr. Snowden. More important, Mr. Snowden told The Washington Post earlier this month that he did report his misgivings to two superiors at the agency, showing them the volume of data collected by the N.S.A., and that they took no action. (The N.S.A. says there is no evidence of this.) That’s almost certainly because the agency and its leaders don’t consider these collection programs to be an abuse and would never have acted on Mr. Snowden’s concerns.Although often ridiculed by the right as a left-wing outfit, The New York Times is the establishment paper of all establishment papers, and its editorials carry weight in Washington, if not elsewhere. Snowden is running out the clock on his one-year asylum in Russia and looking for somewhere safe to go. How appropriate if that place could be the United States, land of the free, home of the brave.
—Posted by Peter Z. Scheer
AP/Jose Luis MaganaDemonstrators hold up banners with photos of Edward Snowden during a protest outside of the Capitol in Washington, D.C
Views On Snowden: Are the Times A-Changin’?
Posted By John Glaser On January 2, 2014 @ 8:32 am In News | 6 Comments
It’s rare that I write about good news. But the editorial from yesterday’s New York Times is really good news.
Entitled “Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower [1],” the Times editorial board praises and defends Snowden’s decision to leak information about the NSA and argue he deserves some kind of clemency or pardon.
Considering the enormous value of the information he has revealed, and the abuses he has exposed, Mr. Snowden deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and flight. He may have committed a crime to do so, but he has done his country a great service. It is time for the United States to offer Mr. Snowden a plea bargain or some form of clemency that would allow him to return home…To help make their point, the Times lists the following bullet points as evidence of the value of Snowden’s leaks:
…The shrill brigade of his critics say Mr. Snowden has done profound damage to intelligence operations of the United States, but none has presented the slightest proof that his disclosures really hurt the nation’s security. Many of the mass-collection programs Mr. Snowden exposed would work just as well if they were reduced in scope and brought under strict outside oversight, as the presidential panel recommended.When someone reveals that government officials have routinely and deliberately broken the law, that person should not face life in prison at the hands of the same government.
- The N.S.A. broke federal privacy laws, or exceeded its authority, thousands of times per year [2], according to the agency’s own internal auditor.
- The agency broke into the communications links [3] of major data centers around the world, allowing it to spy on hundreds of millions of user accounts and infuriating the Internet companies that own the centers. Many of those companies are now scrambling to install systems that the N.S.A. cannot yet penetrate.
- The N.S.A. systematically undermined the basic encryption systems of the Internet [4], making it impossible to know if sensitive banking or medical data is truly private, damaging businesses that depended on this trust.
- His leaks revealed that James Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, lied to Congress [5]when testifying in March that the N.S.A. was not collecting data on millions of Americans. (There has been no discussion of punishment for that lie.)
- The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court rebuked the N.S.A. [6] for repeatedly providing misleading information about its surveillance practices, according to a ruling made public because of the Snowden documents. One of the practices violated the Constitution, according to the chief judge of the court.
- A federal district judge ruled earlier this month [7] that the phone-records-collection program probably violates the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. He called the program “almost Orwellian” and said there was no evidence that it stopped any imminent act of terror.
Jesselyn Radack of Government Accountability Project, speaks to that at Daily Kos, writing [8] “The chorus of voices for rolling back NSA mass surveillance includes leading Members of Congress from both parties, federal judges and the President’s own hand-picked review panel. The voices calling for clemency for Snowden includes NSA Snowden task force leader Rick Ledgett, Silicon Valley’s tech giants, [9] the ACLU and now, the New York Times.”
At Reason, J.D. Tuccille argues [10] 2013 saw a significant shift in the way people view those who defy the state:
For some high-profile people who publicly told the government to go to hell, 2013 was, personally, a bit rough. Information freedom activist Aaron Swartz took his own life [11]under threat of a brutal prison sentence. Revealer of inconvenient government secrets Bradley/Chelsea Manning [12] actually ended up in prison. And surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden went into exile in Russia to escape what promised to be a “fair” trial followed by a first-class hanging [13]. But tough consequences aren’t unusual for people who defy the state. What was different and encouraging was how many people rallied behind Swartz, Manning, Snowden, and other rebels, explicitly siding with them over the government, in opposition to the powers-that-be.I agree with that. I think in an earlier era, people like Snowden would be far more universally condemned. As Bob Dylan famously prophesied, the times they are a-changin. And despite the cascade of horrible news that provides endless fodder for my own writing here, it’s important to acknowledge the good.
…In years past, government officials would have counted on the public to boo and hiss at Snowden on command. You’re not supposed to spill the government’s secrets to the world at large.
But Americans are horrified [14] by those secrets—published revelations of NSA snooping have helped drive public revulsion at “big government” to record high levels [15]. Snowden himself gets more of a split decision, but over a third of people tell Reason-Rupe that what he did makes him a patriot [16] (with even higher support for him among younger Americans). That’s almost equal to the percentage of respondents who give him a thumbs-down. Those would have been unthinkable numbers in a different era.
==========
Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Seven months ago, the world began to learn the vast scope of the National Security Agency’s reach into the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the United States and around the globe, as it collects information about their phone calls, their email messages, their friends and contacts, how they spend their days and where they spend their nights. The public learned in great detail how the agency has exceeded its mandate and abused its authority, prompting outrage at kitchen tables and at the desks of Congress, which may finally begin to limit these practices.
The revelations have already prompted two federal judges to accuse the N.S.A. of violating the Constitution (although a third, unfortunately, found the dragnet surveillance to be legal). A panel appointed by President Obama issued a powerful indictment of the agency’s invasions of privacy and called for a major overhaul of its operations.
All of this is entirely because of information provided to journalists by Edward Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor who stole a trove of highly classified documents after he became disillusioned with the agency’s voraciousness. Mr. Snowden is now living in Russia, on the run from American charges of espionage and theft, and he faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life looking over his shoulder.
Considering the enormous value of the information he has revealed, and the abuses he has exposed, Mr. Snowden deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and flight. He may have committed a crime to do so, but he has done his country a great service. It is time for the United States to offer Mr. Snowden a plea bargain or some form of clemency that would allow him to return home, face at least substantially reduced punishment in light of his role as a whistle-blower, and have the hope of a life advocating for greater privacy and far stronger oversight of the runaway intelligence community.
•
Mr. Snowden is currently charged in a criminal complaint with two violations of the Espionage Act involving unauthorized communication of classified information, and a charge of theft of government property. Those three charges carry prison sentences of 10 years each, and when the case is presented to a grand jury for indictment, the government is virtually certain to add more charges, probably adding up to a life sentence that Mr. Snowden is understandably trying to avoid.
The president said in August that Mr. Snowden should come home to face those charges in court and suggested that if Mr. Snowden had wanted to avoid criminal charges he could have simply told his superiors about the abuses, acting, in other words, as a whistle-blower.
“If the concern was that somehow this was the only way to get this information out to the public, I signed an executive order well before Mr. Snowden leaked this information that provided whistle-blower protection to the intelligence community for the first time,” Mr. Obama said at a news conference. “So there were other avenues available for somebody whose conscience was stirred and thought that they needed to question government actions.”
In fact, that executive order did not apply to contractors, only to intelligence employees, rendering its protections useless to Mr. Snowden. More important, Mr. Snowden told The Washington Post earlier this month that he did report his misgivings to two superiors at the agency, showing them the volume of data collected by the N.S.A., and that they took no action. (The N.S.A. says there is no evidence of this.) That’s almost certainly because the agency and its leaders don’t consider these collection programs to be an abuse and would never have acted on Mr. Snowden’s concerns.
In retrospect, Mr. Snowden was clearly justified in believing that the only way to blow the whistle on this kind of intelligence-gathering was to expose it to the public and let the resulting furor do the work his superiors would not. Beyond the mass collection of phone and Internet data, consider just a few of the violations he revealed or the legal actions he provoked:
■ The N.S.A. broke federal privacy laws, or exceeded its authority, thousands of times per year, according to the agency’s own internal auditor.
■ The agency broke into the communications links of major data centers around the world, allowing it to spy on hundreds of millions of user accounts and infuriating the Internet companies that own the centers. Many of those companies are now scrambling to install systems that the N.S.A. cannot yet penetrate.
■ The N.S.A. systematically undermined the basic encryption systems of the Internet, making it impossible to know if sensitive banking or medical data is truly private, damaging businesses that depended on this trust.
■ His leaks revealed that James Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, lied to Congress when testifying in March that the N.S.A. was not collecting data on millions of Americans. (There has been no discussion of punishment for that lie.)
■ The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court rebuked the N.S.A. for repeatedly providing misleading information about its surveillance practices, according to a ruling made public because of the Snowden documents. One of the practices violated the Constitution, according to the chief judge of the court.
■ A federal district judge ruled earlier this month that the phone-records-collection program probably violates the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. He called the program “almost Orwellian” and said there was no evidence that it stopped any imminent act of terror.
The shrill brigade of his critics say Mr. Snowden has done profound damage to intelligence operations of the United States, but none has presented the slightest proof that his disclosures really hurt the nation’s security. Many of the mass-collection programs Mr. Snowden exposed would work just as well if they were reduced in scope and brought under strict outside oversight, as the presidential panel recommended.
When someone reveals that government officials have routinely and deliberately broken the law, that person should not face life in prison at the hands of the same government. That’s why Rick Ledgett, who leads the N.S.A.’s task force on the Snowden leaks, recently told CBS News that he would consider amnesty if Mr. Snowden would stop any additional leaks. And it’s why President Obama should tell his aides to begin finding a way to end Mr. Snowden’s vilification and give him an incentive to return home.
No comments:
Post a Comment