Snowden Gets Personal: Gov't 'Exploits' 9/11 To Justify Spying

[Capt. Obvious]

Edward Snowden got personal about how the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks affected him in a wide-ranging interview with NBC News' Brian Williams that aired Wednesday night.

"I take the threat of terrorism seriously, and I think we all do," the former National Security Agency contractor said. "And I think it's really disingenuous for the government to invoke and sort of scandalize our memories to sort of exploit the national trauma that we all suffered together and worked so hard to come through, and justify programs that have never been shown to keep us safe but cost us liberties and freedoms that we don't need to give up, and our Constitution says we should not give up."

Snowden said he was in Fort Meade, Maryland, where NSA headquarters is located, the day of the terror attacks. He also recalled that his grandfather was working for the FBI at the time and was in the Pentagon when it was hit by a hijacked plane.

In another part of the interview with Williams, Snowden said that he sees himself as a "patriot."

"Being a patriot means knowing when to protect your country, knowing when to protect your Constitution, knowing when to protect your countrymen from the — the violations of an — and encroachments of adversaries," he said, as quoted by NBC News. "And those adversaries don’t have to be foreign countries."

TPM

Old news Comrade Eddie. Everyone knows that.

[Pholus]

1. "What happened is fairly obvious...."

What happened is fairly obvious. The US national security apparatuses took advantage of the rise of the internet and its dominance by US firms to subvert the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution and mountains of case law. They collected and stored the cellphone records and therefore the private lives and locations of tens of millions of innocent Americans. They inserted themselves secretly into Google’s servers and those of many other giant tech companies. They weakened encryption standards. They turned much American technology and software into spyware. They scooped up not only information about who Americans called, and when and where they were when they did it, but also used the transnational character of the internet to collect the actual texts of emails and the electronic files of telephone calls.

http://www.juancole.com/2014/05/snowden-alexander-traitor.html

[Capt. Obvious]

3. All of this old news

Does it make any sense?

[Pholus]

5. Old news or not, it is relevant and must be addressed.

Why is there this feeling that calling something "old news" makes it retroactively right?

[socialist_n_TN]

2. Yep. One of those "Duh!" insights........

Of course quite a few citizens seemed to be taken in by this pre-planned campaign (dare I say, conspiracy?) back in the day. Maybe Eddie was one of them. Better late than never I guess.

[frazzled]

4. Wow, an insight thirteen years after

we already discussed TIA and the various Patriot Acts and ...

Deep thinker there.