Two con, two pro — four articles regarding the TSA whistleblower Edward Snowden:
What Is Private, What Is Not: The national security of the United States justifies the collection of “metadata”
By Andrew C. McCarthy
As we’ve discussed at great length on the Corner and elsewhere at National Review Online (see, e.g., here, here and here), there is shrieking in the land over revelations that, for the better part of a decade, the federal National Security Agency (NSA) has been gathering and storing “metadata” on American citizens. That is, in connection with untold millions of phone calls, both international and — jarringly to many — domestic (yes, American-to-American), the government is compiling the phone numbers involved, the duration of the calls, and the like. This is often called “envelope information,” an analogy that contrasts the dry and presumably innocuous details about conversations with the content of conversations — what is inside the envelope.
NSA Leaker Edward Snowden IS A Traitor
By Lucius Madaurus
By disclosing these highly classified national security programs to the foreign media, Edward Snowden effectively appointed himself to the United States Congress, Presidency and Supreme Court — and made himself the arbiter of all things constitutional.
That may help feed Snowden’s ego, but it does little to advance the causes of constitutional government and respect for the citizen privacy in the context of the First, Fourth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution that Snowden clams to be defending.
Ron Paul: We should be thankful for people like Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald
By Allahpundit
To no one’s surprise, the admiration is mutual. That was easy to predict. Harder to predict is how Paul fils will react.
Campaign for Liberty Chairman Ron Paul today again condemned reports that the Obama Administration is secretly collecting data from the phone and internet records of millions of Americans and called for more transparency in government:
“The Fourth Amendment is clear; we should be secure in our persons, houses, papers, and effects, and all warrants must have probable cause. Today the government operates largely in secret, while seeking to know everything about our private lives – without probable cause and without a warrant…”
In Defense of Edward Snowden
By Ben Hart | 6/10/13
Edward Snowden is the NSA contractor who informs us that the National Security Agency is . . .
- collecting all our cell phone records recording and storing all our cell phone conversations…
- collecting all our credit card transactions and bank records…
- collecting all our emails and social media posts tracking all our online searches via Google, etc.
Snowden also tells us, chillingly, that the NSA has the ability to track what we are thinking in real time as we are typing on our computer keyboards.
This means that an army of faceless analysts and bureaucrats at the NSA, CIA (and no doubt other government agencies) know our passwords and have full access to everything and anything we do online — bank accounts, everything.
It’s called the PRISM Project. And “We the people” knew nothing about it until Edward Snowden bravely stepped forward.
I do believe Snowden has some good legal defenses.
