Snowden's "Live Chat" Twitter feed

I haven't read that many submitted questions yet, but the best so far is: "Who do like in the super bowl?"

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This one is probably for real: "Is there anything you know about the USGovernment withholding info on extraterrestrials?"

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Snowden's live chat with questioners was tardy, causing one to hilariously ask, Isn't Russian 8GMT [3 pm Eastern] the same as Germany's 8GMT?

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Snowden allays mass panic; to wit, "is [it] possible for our democracy to recover from the damage NSA spying has done to our liberties?" I genuinely feel sorry for such angst-afflicted souls. At any rate, Snowden reassures her: "Yes."

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Assuming Snowden is correct on this, he has an exceptionally valid point:

One of the things that has not been widely reported by journalists is that whistleblower protection laws in the US do not protect contractors in the national security arena. There are so many holes in the laws, the protections they afford are so weak, and the processes for reporting they provide are so ineffective that they appear to be intended to discourage reporting of even the clearest wrongdoing. If I had revealed what I knew about these unconstitutional but classified programs to Congress, they could have charged me with a felony.

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I hope this one elicits an answer: "Why did you not restrict your leaks to what you considered clear NSA violations of US law? Why expose international programs?"

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Snowden's response site is infuriating; it frequently spins and reloads--only to proffer no updates, no new answers, no new nothing--just spinning and blank reloadings.

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This question is probably from the extraterrestrials guy: "Do you know another truth about the 9/11 than the official story?"

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Truly incredible technology for a super-hero-anti-spook. Snowden's site is slow, sloow, sloooow. It's like the old dial-up, only connected by string to tin cans.

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Snowden's sort-of, quasi-answer to the "international programs" question: "When we’re sophisticated enough to be able to break into any device in the world we want to (up to and including Angela Merkel’s phone, if reports are to be believed), there’s no excuse to wasting our time collecting the call records of grandmothers in Missouri." Translation: we wouldn't have known about the NSA's full capabilities had data on international spying not been published. 

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One questioner asks that which has really frosted my butt since the entire Snowden affair began: "Do u regret not betraying USA when Bush was prez knowing u would've been hailed as a hero by same media"--and I would add, the same partisans--"now condemning you?"

I ordinarily overlook hypocrisy as just standard-issue politics, but I've read so much of it from folks I know, at an empirical and intellectual as well as a gut level, would have praised Snowden under Bush, but have condemned him under Obama. And that hypocrisy has been unavoidably remarkable.  

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Snowden erects an insurmountable hurdle to satisfactory domestic reform:

we need to recognize that national laws are not going to solve the problem of indiscriminate surveillance. A prohibition in Burundi isn’t going to stop the spies in Greenland. We need a global forum, and global funding, committed to the development of security standards that enforce our right to privacy not through law, but through science and technology. The easiest way to ensure a country’s communications are secure is to secure them world-wide.

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Q: "what’s the worst and most realistic harm from bulk collection of data? Why do you think it outweighs national security?"

Snowden's response is largely a repetition of his WaPo interview, but this abridgement is worth posting:

Fundamentally, a society in which the pervasive monitoring of the sum of civil activity becomes routine is turning from the traditions of liberty toward what is an inherently illiberal infrastructure of preemptive investigation, a sort of quantified state where the least of actions are measured for propriety. I don’t seek to pass judgment in favor or against such a state in the short time I have here, only to declare that it is not the one we inherited, and should we as a society embrace it, it should be the result of public decision rather than closed conference.

See, however, my recap of Sean Wilentz's cynicism about Snowden's overall assessment.

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I guess I missed something. Snowden: "current, serving officials of our government are so comfortable in their authorities that they’re willing to tell reporters on the record that they think the due process protections of the 5th Amendment of our Constitution are outdated concepts."

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Snowden's final pitch:

even the President now agrees our surveillance programs are going too far, gathering massive amounts of private records on ordinary Americans who have never been suspected of any crime. This violates our constitutional protection against unlawful searches and seizure. Collecting phone and email records for every American is a waste of money, time and human resources that could be better spent pursuing those the government has reason to suspect are a serious threat.

The constitutional questions remains, however, and any intel hawk would tell you that wasteful data is wasteful only until it's needed, relevant, and valuable. As both an intel and constitutional layman, I couldn't begin to authoritatively demarcate legally valid data from the justifiably banned.

But it's noteworthy that Snowden, too, dodged the actual question, which is a very old one, as old as liberal democracy: "They say it’s a balance of privacy and safety. I think spying makes us less safe. do you agree?"

Snowden addressed this by conceding merely that "Intelligence agencies do have a role to play." But what of the balance? What's is its precise tipping point? When exactly does safety cross the line and violate legitimate privacy and civil liberties?

I'm still troubled by Snowden's earlier remark that, ultimately, only vigorous international governance of intelligence capabilities can answer such questions. That, we plainly will never see. It's utopian. That renders Snowden & Co.'s ultimate answer forever unatttainable--meaning no satisfactory reforms, in their view, can ever be passed at home. Thus grounds for permanent paranoia.

 

Comments

[japa21]

If Snowden is correct on that point, he does make a valid point. However, it would not have applied to him, as he does not qualify as a "whistlebower". Not do I think he is qualified to determine constitutionality, which has not yet been determined.

And the very ligitmate question you pointed out? I would be shocked if he answered that.

[Peter G]

A couple of questions I would have liked to ask: why did you give Greenwald and other reporters a pile of stuff even they think would be wrong to make public? The second question would revolve around an exchange I had with Nicole Bell at Crooks and Liars. She was outraged that your government had failed to stop Tamerlan Tsarnaev. My answer did not please. they didn't stop him because they didn't have enough information beyond Russian suspicions. Which the Russians refused to elaborate. So no arrest warrant. But that she told me was but a fraction of the alternatives at their disposal. And so we get to the crux. Yes they could have allocated a lot of resources to continuous monitoring of a perfectly innocent person. And that applies to perhaps tens of thousands of others on whom the merest suspicion hangs. Often no more than a travel pattern. Everyone they so monitor is an innocent person. Right up to the moment they aren't. How the hell anyone is supposed to find anything when looking is deemed a violation of privacy God only knows.

Almost everyone they do so examine is likely to be innocent. A few will not be. Someone will have to tell me by what magic one is supposed to differentiate in advance. You might as well demand, as I have frequently pointed out, that traffic cops see only traffic law violators and your border security search only the luggage of smugglers. Good luck with that. Especially since you will, as Nicole did, blame your government for every failure not to spy on the "right" people. whoever they might be.

[Turgidson]

I have grown annoyed at the "if Bush was doing it, you'd be furious. But it's Obama, so you praise it" trope.

First, I don't think that has been a pervasive or particularly widely-held attitude. Yes, it exists, but not to the extent the Greenwaldians believe it to be (in my experience, anyway). Some Democrats and liberals are more comfortable rationalizing or ignoring the revelations, but I really have not seen a whole lot of "Obama can do no wrong" cheerleading. I see a fair bit more coverage or commentary explaining that there has been more heat than light in many of Snowden's revelations and the Greenwald cliques coverage thereof. And I agree with that, to an extent. The distinction between what the NSA is capable of doing (which is a whole freaking lot, and some of it is quite frightful), what they ARE doing (far less, but still a worrying amount) and HOW MUCH they're doing what they're doing (again, a worrisome amount, but Snowden and Greenwald habitually exaggerate this to a comical extent, from what I can tell).

Second, the distinction is not often made that damn near all of what is being leaked and discussed now BEGAN UNDER BUSH. I don't say it to absolve Obama of his responsibility for what the NSA has been doing under his watch - I'm disappointed that Obama didn't do much at all to unwind these programs until Snowden started leaking the details, but I think there is still a distinction to be made - Obama isn't "just like Bush" in my view, as it was not he or his administration that opened all these floodgates. And even before Snowden, his administration did shut down some of the NSA's stupider programs. Obama has been a severe disappointment to me on this subject, but not actively, relentlessly malicious like BushCo was. That's a big difference.

In related, the biggest surveillance-related controversy in the Bush years was warrantless wiretapping. That activity was very clearly, bright line, illegal (until Congress stepped up to the plate and....legalized it. Fail.) Bush's goons tried to get a half-dead Ashcroft (!) to authorize it and even he couldn't stomach it. There has been no such scandal as to the Obama administration's actions. They should take heat for their inaction - their unwillingness to proactively clip the NSA's wings, and their often surprisingly robust rhetorical defense of some of these things. But what really enraged me about Bush was the thuggery and aggressive lawlessness of it all. No similarly reprehensible behavior from Obama or his team has come out, and I doubt it ever will.

Finally, what do people think would have been the Bush administration's reaction if Snowden had done his thing on their watch? Would they have countenanced any debate or dissent whatsoever? Hell, I'm not sure they wouldn't have ordered drones to find and kill Snowden wherever he was. Obama's reaction has been imperfect and disappointing, but fairly reasonable and thoughtful too. He is taking the revelations more seriously than most presidents would. That counts for something, to me.

As with many other issues, the choice between Obama (or another Democrat) and Bush/GOP is one between inevitable disappointment and complete horror and disbelief. So it is on this topic, for me at least. And by and large, I see more of that than mindless Obama-cheering from the left side of things. Just my opinion.

/rant

[Janicket]

With you all the way, Turgidson. Well stated.