My NSA Conspiracy Theory

It may be that Snowden’s revelations will have some good consequences. The surveillance state is not one I care to live in unless the alternative is defeat in an open war. And maybe the Obama administration is really as clever as you suggest, though I have seen precious little evidence of it so far.

Regardless. Snowden is part of the rebel alliance, and a traitor.

I can only presume that the line about rebel alliance and traitor is part of the Vader persona. As far as I can see, Snowden has successfully maximized the information showing we have an overzealous security state, while minimizing release of specific intel gathered. He is not giving support to our enemies. He is trying to free us from a govt unburdened by such mundane things as a Constitution and laws.

It was part of the persona, but it is also my sincere belief. I believe you are being a bit naive about Snowden.

I thought the Snowden affair was a big yawner. I had previously assumed that all those things had been going on since the Patriot (ie, during the Bush administration).

That the NSA snoops all data crossing our borders (incoming and outgoing) has been known since the creation of NSA.

That the CIA snoops all the data it can outside of our borders, among friends and foes, is also old news.

Did Snowden really tell us anything that someone who had read the Patriot Act didn’t already know?

No, perhaps not, Bookslinger, but what he did succeed in doing, was making the public aware of it. There have been previous whistleblowers, but none have really caught the public’s attention.

Vader… perhaps I am naive. Yet, notwithstanding that, what would you have done differently, had you been in his position?

Zen,
you forget that Lord Vader’s day job to pay his and the Emperor’s bills involves him having a top secret clearance or a Q clearance or such thing. He’s hardly going to come out and announce that he think’s betraying classified info to Red China and the Russkis is hunky dory.

As an example of where my theory is coming from, about a half hour after I put this up at Junior Ganymede I received a message to all employees at my work site. The message warned us not to click on particular stories up yesterday on the Washington Post and the Drudge report. Those stories contained leaked classified information, and if we read them on unclassified computers at work, that would constitute a spillage of classified data on the unclassified network. Every time that happens, the computer people have to trace through everywhere the classified information has been saved, archived, or cached and eliminate it. Each incident costs thousands of dollars to clean up, we’re told. If we could induce Al Qaeda to imitate our methods, we would drive them bankrupt. Something like Reagan’s victory over the Soviet Union.

I only regret I wasn’t the first to propose weaponizing our dysfunction.

There are right ways to be a whistleblower, consistent with being a patriot, and then there’s Snowden’s way of being a whistleblower.

Which is not consistent with being a patriot.