And I quote:

"Someone saw something he felt was unconscionable and acted to try and correct it."

Since when is it up to someone like Snowden to decide what's "unconscionable" and what is troubling?  It seems anyone in Congress who actually cared about this sort of thing was welcome at the briefings.  Surely many of them knew the basic outlines of the operation, and though a few of them raised concerns and asked for a more open debate, none of them considered it unconscionable.  And if you consider that liberal Democrats are generally all about civil liberties, its noteworthy that even Al Franken said it was both legitimately under supervision and necessary for the defense of the nation.

Snowden declared himself judge jury and executioner and still has the balls to say the Congress, President and the courts* were somehow acting anti-democratically.  Why does he get to decide what's good and what's bad for the American people?  No, he was simply assuming that everyone who "matters" sees things his way and the rest of the country can go fuck itself.

And BTW, what exactly did he save us from?  They were collecting metadata they can use to retroactively track someone's communications.  According to everyone who actually knows something about the program says they can only open the box and look at the data when they have a court order, which is exactly what they have to do to get the old-fashioned phone records.  They decide they want to find out who someone is talking to, and can not only start tracking him from the moment the judge signs the court order, but they can also go backwards in time to look at the trail as it was captured in the database.  How is this "unconscionable" exactly?  Visa, my bank, even my workplace keeps records of everything I do.  What is the story here exactly?  Did they look at data without first getting a court order?  Those are violations of the law, and should be prosecuted.  But that's not what Snowden supposedly "saved" us from.  He claimed that the very notion of keeping records of everyone's phone calls in a quick access database was "unconscionable".  Dont see it.

Now of course it could turn out that there's more to the picture than meets the eye.  If they were actually putting phone call audio into a searchable format, that would cross a line that would require a much more robust debate.  But wait a minute.  I seem to remember exactly that debate happening about 10 years ago when "total information awareness" became a thing to freak out about.  They <b>were</b> actually planning to keep everyone's voicemails and such in a giant database.  When enough people in congress looked at it they (and the ACLU) said, "wait a minute, that's not cool".

That's how democracy works.  Snowden is a traitor.  And since this is /. I will also throw in a little conspiracy theory action 'atcha.

The timing of the leak and his various pronouncements about China coincide rather conveniently for the Chinese as the new Premiere meets the President for the first time under the cloud of the emerging cyber-cold-war.  Perhaps the Chinese have been manipulating young Master Snowden in one or more ways.  Money, fame, protection.  Any or all of these may have drawn Snowden into a trap that he is now attempting to escape.  Praising the Chinese and claiming that he has information on US spying operations in China is all on it's own a traitorous act.  In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if that's one of the things they charge him with.  As if that matters now.

I'm out...

*Dont like FISA, but that's been a public debate for years now, so this leak does little more than push people toward more visibility.