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?
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.)