A discussion of the leaker is a discussion that is not entirely focused on the meaning of what they leaked.

Once separately verified the discrediting game is utter nonsense though.

Furthermore to assume that studying someone's character as part of investigation (both public and NSA-internal) is just mere propaganda and media smoke and mirrors seems to dismiss more mundane notions as a) curiosity about the leaker and the story, b) routine counter-intel procedure, and c) journalists having stuff to write about.

In short, you are giving far too much credit to the idea that the public is stupid and easily distracted. Come on, we all know the score here.

If Snowden were a character if ill-repute or questionable morality (outside the question of the morality of leaking intelligence secrets to foreign countries), it requires that you question whether any of the leaked information may have been tampered with.

Once the relevant leaked-upon agency admits to the validity of information, then definitely the messenger's credibility becomes decoupled from the truthiness of the message.

I'm all for whistleblowing on how the NSA is abusing its powers to spy on US citizens, and I think it's extremely important that he did so. I really wish he'd constrained himself to that. Releasing everything he did hurts his credibility in everyone's eyes and prevents any part of the government from acknowledging him as a legitimate whistleblower, which would have been the best outcome to this whole scenario.

I can't believe you're saying this. Is your judgement so clouded by patriotism that you somehow think other people have no right to their privacy? Let me explain the consequences of what you are suggesting here, apart from the obvious loss of goodwill across the world. Countries will feel free to barricade "their internet" and control communications. There will be lesser transparency, more firewalls and more detentions. Oppressive regimes will love this, and your allies will be left confused.

In times of peace, your allegiance should be towards ideals. Like democracy, privacy and free speech.

(edit: take an upvote anyway, you are entitled to your view.)

Whistleblowing: Revealing that an entity is doing things it should not be doing so the correct oversight can be put in place.

Sabatoge: Deliberately destroying the capabilities of an organization by means of deception and rule-breaking.

I am 100% for the former. I am against the latter, even when I agree with the philosophy behind the actions.

How are we to wind it down, or even know that we want to wind it down, if we don't know what it does? The reaction to all of this over-the-top foreign spying stuff is as loud as it is precisely because most people were not aware of its extent, regardless of the stated mission of the NSA. The NSA grew so large and powerful because its projects were secret and thus largely shielded from public review. In that light, the secrecy is a lot more than an operational detail; it's a deception directed at the American people in order to pursue unpopular security policy. Note, for example, that even the NSA's budget is classified. They've built something very big, and they were only allowed to do it by keeping it in the dark.

To put that another way, if it really is merely the NSA's stated mission and revealing its secrets is mere sabotage, why is it scandalous that they tapped Angela Merkel's phone? Why is it outrageous that they're spying on Google's intra-datacenter communications? Why is tracking the world's cell phone locations an embarrassing thing to have done? Because if we'd been asked, we wouldn't have let them do it. But we weren't asked, because secrets.

Thus, I think that revealing the extent of NSA spying, including all of the foreign stuff, falls in this bucket:

> Revealing that an entity is doing things it should not be doing so the correct oversight can be put in place.

In my view, our government doesn't have a fundamental right to secrecy. We provisionally granted it the privilege of keeping some things secret from us (remember, we're The People) because we felt it was in a good position to make the tradeoffs required there. It has systematically abused that privilege and now it's lost its claim to it.

Sabotage: I will secretly undermine your operations and try not to get caught. My sabotage is operational- it is most effective when undiscovered.

Civil disobedience: I will publicly defy your rules with every intention of being apprehended. My defiance is political- it achieves nothing by itself, and must be public.

Yes, both involve breaking rules, but that is where the similarities end.

The point behind civil disobedience is to publicly demonstrate the unjustness of the law, not fight it head-on. Remember when those nonviolent University students a little while ago got pepper-sprayed? Much, much better press for them and their cause than "students start brawl with police".

Some people believe civil disobedience doesn't have to be nonviolent, but most people agree on nonviolence and all the famous examples of civil disobedience were nonviolent (Rosa Parks, Thoreau, Gandhi, etc)

I said nothing about violence - in fact, your comment is the first on this page to mention violence - so I don't really understand where you're coming from.

It's not a matter of patriotism, it's a matter of self-preservation. We acknowledge that other people in our own society have rights because we also understand that they have reciprocal obligations. If there is conflict, we can resort to legal process to mediate the conflict and preserve everyone's rights. This is possible because we are all party to the same social contract.

But people outside our society do not have any obligation to us. They are not party to our social contract. We in America cannot legislate how say the Chinese go about their business, even when those activities might have an impact on us (e.g. air pollution in California). That is why we don't acknowledge that they have rights identical with those of people in our own society.

Short Answer: None.

So if the Constitution doesn't grant those things to citizens, how can we remove them from non-citizens?

It's blatant historical revisionism to assert that a group of people who didn't believe that black people in America had any rights somehow believed in a concept of universal natural rights that we should apply to people in Yemen or Afghanistan.

The Constitution is fundamentally a product of "social contract" thinking. The preamble says:

"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

When you see uses of "the people" in say the First Amendment, it's a clear reference to "the people of the United States" not "people everywhere." It's not necessarily limited to U.S. Citizens, but it is limited to people who have some nexus to the U.S., either through citizenship or presence on American soil.

Clearly there are laws, and the US government is bound to those laws. Are you saying that the US government can have people killed? Torture? And as long as the US legal system isn't there to intervene it is legal?

Ostensibly this is all about protecting the itself from danger. What is the threat posed by, say, Germany?

Well they're one of the world's major industrial powers and just a couple of generations ago they threatened to take over all of Europe.

So much of the outrage over NSA spying (abroad) is predicated on this foolish idea that we live in a time outside of history, that while the West may have spent the better part of the last millennium embroiled in warfare with each other, that our generation is the first to be so enlightened as to make that unthinkable.

They have a mountain of data already -- if they can't get a sense of what's going on from that then maybe they're not up to the task.

<snark> Slightly tangential anecdata: the FBI was warned about the suspicious flight school students yet they bungled the job of stopping the 9/11 attack. So what good is this comprehensive intelligence gathering if the government can't even use it properly? </snark>

<extra-snark> The FBI had information within the organization itself and still fumbled the ball: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03...

<snark-doubledown> The CIA likely helped create Al Qaeda, so perhaps they were protecting their own. Or maybe they were too busy running drugs and plotting the overthrow of other governments to get the memo out. </snark-doubledown> </extra-snark>

Sorry, no love for any of these guys.

What sources would you recommend reading to learn more about that? The 9/11 Commission Report? I'm embarrassed to admit that I haven't done much reading on inter-agency relations pre-9/11.

(I hope this comment doesn't read as snark, I'm genuinely interested in learning more.)

For a general idea of what the book goes into, you can see Soufan's profile in the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/07/10/060710fa_fact_wr.... In the (Pulitzer Prize-winning) reporter's own words: "Soufan became America’s best chance to stop the attacks of September 11th.".

You picked the worst example.

Five years before Germany invaded Polland, Allied leaders held Hitler and Mussolini in very high regard and publicly praised their gentlemanly natures and leadership abilities.

You may argue that we already knew what the NSA was doing, but specifics matter. If I have a key to your house (for emergencies), you know that in theory, I could be there every minute of the day when you aren't. But you assume that I'm not doing this. The specific knowledge that I was there, and ate the last piece of chocolate cake, changes everything.

While these agencies are nominally accountable to Congress, and thus their mission is "approved", in practice, it seems they are not. Snowden's whistleblowing is a step in the direction of accountability.

Also, don't think like a hacker, think like a politician. Having the information isn't a simple boolean state. There's a difference between "the information is available" and "everybody knows, and it's top of mind". Or "people have vague worries that X and Y might happen" and "X and Y is happening and it's on a grander scale than you could have conceived".

It's one thing to "know" from movies that someone is being spied on. It's another thing entirely to know from NSA documents that you and people you know are being spied on.

Details of military battles could be kept secret during the battles and for a couple of years afterward, and sure we should keep demographic data about private people restricted to only those agencies that legitimately need that data, but those are the only exceptions that come to mind.

It's not a belief that foreigners have no rights, but more like foreigners have their own government to watch out for them.

I don't really know which I personally believe, just sharing information.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union...

Not if we read the text:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Extracting the relevant bit:

Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech

Illegal immigrants and visitors "have" free speech because no laws may be enacted against it, period.

Illegal immigrants and visitors have the right to assembly because no laws may be enacted against people assembling, not just citizens assembling.

And perhaps more significantly, let's look at the 14th amendment (which I really should have started with in the first place):

>All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Here there is a clear distinction between citizen and person

Yes, there is. There is also a clear distinction between which persons it applies to and which it doesn't;

> ... nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws

There is a clue though:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union...

His risk/reward calculation seems to be on line with mine. Of course his leaks do some damage to U.S. foreign policy, but that's acceptable collateral damage. His leaks help to shape the power balance between government and citizens in liberal democracies.

You are and it would take a lot to correct that statement. I'd start at the timeline: http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/multimedia/timeline-ed...

Most of what Snowden revealed did not relate to domestic spying overreach. Hell, he wasn't even in China for a week before he revealed NSA programs that spy on the Chinese. Snowden has done more damage to his cause than the government ever could, and it's not for lack of trying.

His credibility as a whistleblower has been fatally harmed by choosing to leave the country: not only did he leave, but he went to China and then to Russia, taking an encrypted hardrive with him! You'd have to be really stupid to think the Chinese and Russians have not copied every single piece of information he had, even the information that The Guardian has decided not publish yet because of the damage it could cause.

At this point, he is a spy from every angle you look at it. Between revealing foreign collection activities, giving China and Russia loads of classified information, and fleeing from the U.S. to China and then Russia, there's no case to be made for him being a whistleblower.

He blew the whistle on a few domestic programs and that's a very good thing. But that is such a small part of everything that Snowden did. Still, in total disregard of the facts, some will consider him a whistleblower and a hero.

He is every bit as much of a hero as Edward Lee Howard and I have little doubt he will meet the same fate.

[citation needed]

>At this point, he is a spy from every angle you look at it.

Remember that not even U.S. government is not charging him from being a spy.

Also, if he is not a spy and is not being charged as one, then he should return to the US. The fact that he can't and won't speaks volumes about his character and his intentions.

Ellisberg (the gentleman who leaked the Pentagon Papers) strongly disagrees with you. Please do carefully read this op-ed by Eillisberg himself:

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-07-07/opinions/40427...

For reference, the Pentagon Papers revealed a systematic effort by multiple Administrations to lie to Congress and the public about the reasons for initiation of the Vietnam war, and the covert expansion of the same.

Anyone remotely surprised the NSA were spying on foreign governments (including allies) is basically an idiot.

That would mean they should have put into place institutions protecting them from said spying. Which would be taking (defensive) military action because of the actions of an allied government. Now what kind of alliance is that?!

Your assertion that his credibility is somehow diminished based on his actions doesn't leave much room for your version of the correct way a whistleblower should go about his business properly. I'm not sure you fully grapple what this man has laid out on the line for everyone else here and has signed himself up for a life that will always be in question. Arm-chair NSA antics don't seem to justly appreciate the level at which someone has gone to great lengths to do the job fully and, IMHO, correctly.

I don't think everyone considers NSA legitimate. NSA is a bunch of people with lots of information and an agenda that is most probably not in the best interest of all Americans, just those richest and most influential 1% or 0.01%. Their track record speaks for itself.

First, many didn't know that they were doing it. Second, as an American citizen I surely don't agree that it should be doing it as a matter of policy. This is another situation where the government does things in my name that I disapprove of. Third, nice American Exceptionalism, bro!

Er, no actually. Most people actually believe the NSA should keep their dirty fingers and prying eyes to themselves.

The only ones arguing differently are Americans somehow under the delusion that they are alone on this planet. Thankfully, taken on the whole they are a minority.

But go ahead, asserting that my private information should be free to be vacuumed up and abused for whatever purposes your shady intelligence organisations need.

For some reason you think there's an imaginary line to be drawn between US citizens and other human beings. You have a right to privacy, and the rest does not. Superiority much? Kind of a stupid thing to say, on an international forum, IMHO, showing your true colours, US vs "Them", etc. This is the 21st century, wouldn't you like to be able to look each other in the eye?

Joke's on you, however. Because don't for a moment believe that this shadowy government organisation "of yours" shares your ideas about how US citizens somehow have more rights to privacy than other human beings. "Stated mission" or not, they're in it for the power and money, and have done and will do anything they can get away with.

And if you'd have been paying attention instead of sitting back convincing yourself "hey at least they're fighting on my side", you might have noticed that this "moral high ground" is there for a reason. It's also sometimes called a "moral compass" for a reason, because you can use it to make right decisions when you can't know who to trust.

Snowden couldn't have leaked just one without the other either. Not to the same great effect. That's a hint right there. Because the imaginary line doesn't really exist, leaking just the "spying on US citizens" bit and not the rest, would have been so incredibly disingenuous--it's the whole Internet, silly!!--it could only have been done by someone with much less of a moral backbone than Snowden has. And then it wouldn't have gotten the exposure needed, coverage by the Guardian/Greenwald, a leftist UK paper, speaking ill of the US? Ridicule and ignore. No, it had to be the whole picture.

The rest of the world's outrage is actually helping you, you understand?

The NSA, they're not actually working for you, you understand that too? If there is any Us vs Them, we are in fact on the same side.

Again, you could legitimately argue that that's a good thing in the global scheme of things. You could also argue that sabotaging the US air force is a good thing, on pacifist grounds. Unfortunately, this is where Snowden looks most like a traitor and least like a patriot, because US military officials tend to view the two situations as pretty much the same.

Sure, but haven't the caretakers of the document cache gone to great lengths to only reveal the coarse-grained details of what a program does, and generally how it does it, but not the particulars?

Not everyone, and especially not when you're talking about "friendly" governments (aka, our allies). And even more so when the spying is being done for industrial espionage / economic advantage purposes, and not national defense.

... and because the leaks related to issues that outraged most people. It's easy to understand the concerns regarding spying, and most people have a visceral negative reaction. It's much more difficult to elicit that type of response to, say, human rights violations that don't directly affect most Americans.

In this case, I think that the media is siding with the people (more viewers / ad revenue). If this were any other type of leak, without the same populism, the media most likely wouldn't be as "friendly". There is dirt, but it hasn't been brought to light because it wouldn't sell well (who wants to bash the guy who told us that the NSA is spying on us?)

I don't have a problem with Assange's approach, really. The point was for him to personally be the lightening rod so that Wikileaks could go about its business in peace, which is a reasonable gambit. And if monetization and theatricality are the easiest way to get people to pay attention to what you have to say, so be it. He just didn't execute well enough in separating the two when it came to absorbing attacks, and WL didn't have enough interesting things to say to stay relevant.

"Snowden differs from many of the whistleblower ilk in that there is nothing to dislike about his character (yet)."

How do you feel about famous whistleblowers like "Deep Throat (Mark Felt)", or the various awardees of the Sam Adams award: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Adams_Award