Even if you believe he did the right thing, he did it the wrong way. Badly wrong. And not one of his disclosures have revealed clear violations of the law. What exactly is he blowing the whistle on? The NSA was authorized to do this.
- Compromised national security
- compromised the security of important US allies and other foreign governments
- embarrassed the United States diplomatically
- hurt our ability to track terrorists
- revealed covert practices by our intelligence agencies
- damaged our ability to conduct covert intelligence
- allies may choose not to cooperate with US anti-terrorist efforts.
To fight terrorism? Sure. How does it hurt me for the NSA to know who calls me or who I call. Not a bit. I ain't a terrorist. All I worry about is if the NSA allows this data to be used by the police to go fishing, by marketeers, and most importantly by politicians. There exists the possibility of abuse by police, marketers and political operatives. If the NSA only shares this data with anti-terrorist agencies, then I see no problems. Why would we want to hurt that effort? With proper oversight, I think this is not only OK, it makes good sense.
But it's not just the phone call metadata. Snowden released
1.7 million classified documents that have set back U.S. efforts against terrorism, cybercrime, human trafficking and weapons proliferation. The most closely held secrets by the United States are what we know about
everyone else's secrets and how we came to know them. Military operations have largely been downplayed for security reasons. But the NSA, which is part of the Pentagon, is both a combat support and intelligence agency. Terrorists and their support networks now have a better understanding of our collection methods and they are taking counter measures.
U.S. cloud computing companies may lose an estimated $35 billion in business from customers abroad, concerned NSA spying compromises their security. U.S. diplomatic relations with Brazil and Germany have been frayed by the news that the NSA spied on their leaders. If terrorists are using tougher encryption, or switching from easily intercepted digital communications altogether, they may be going dark to the NSA and other government spy agencies. And that could mean that it is harder to stop attacks on embassies and troops in places like Afghanistan.
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