2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumHillary Clinton is Wrong About Edward Snowden (New Yorker)
Last edited Thu Oct 15, 2015, 08:56 AM - Edit history (1)
from http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/hillary-clinton-is-wrong-about-edward-snowden
This from someone who thought Hillary actually won the debate.
The commentary is about Hillary's reply to the question about Snowden:
He broke the laws of the United States. He could have been a whistle-blower. He could have gotten all of the protections of being a whistle-blower. He could have raised all of the issues he has raised. And I think there would have been a positive response to that. In addition, he stole very important information that has unfortunately fallen into a lot of the wrong hands. So, I dont think he should be brought home without facing the music.
Evidently, Clinton disagrees. In saying that Snowden should have invoked all of the protections of being a whistle-blower, she was repeating an argument that President Obama has made. But it doesnt withstand inspection. The Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989, which provided legal immunity to government employers who reveal lawbreaking, malfeasance, or abuse of authority, doesnt apply to employees of the intelligence agencies, including contractors like Snowden. These workers are covered by the 1998 Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act; but, as, Michael German, a senior counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, pointed out, in 2013, it is no more than a trap....Reporting internally through the ICWPA only identifies the whistleblowers, leaving them vulnerable to retaliation, he noted. The examples of former NSA official Thomas Drake, former House Intelligence Committee staffer Diane Roark and former CIA officer Sabrina De Sousa show [this] too well.
...
Finally, what about Clintons claim that some of the information Snowden took from the N.S.A. has fallen into a lot of wrong hands? The assertion echoed a report, published in June by the Sunday Times, which quoted anonymous officials in the British government who said that Russia and China had decrypted some of the files taken by Snowden...At this stage, though, there has been absolutely no confirmation of this allegation, nor even that Russia or China obtained any of the classified material that Snowden accumulated...as Glenn Greenwald, another journalist who worked with Snowden, pointed out on Twitter: It is ironic how Hillary used the same slimy innuendo against Snowden thats been used for months about her emails.
So what was Clinton up to? Perhaps she is such a pillar of establishment thinking, and of the national-security state, that she really believes what she said. Perhaps she was just using Snowden to burnish her credentials as a hawk and appeal to the American public at large, which is rather less sympathetic to Snowden than most progressives are...Ultimately, speculating about motives doesnt get us very far. The fact is that Clinton said what she said, and she said it unapologetically, just as she did in telling Cooper that she didnt regret voting for the Patriot Act. At least some Democratic votersthose who take seriously the right to privacy established under the Fourth Amendmentwill have been listening.
(More at link.)
(post edited to bold certain lines for emphasis, for those whose eyes glaze at 4 paragraphs of solid text )
slipslidingaway
(21,210 posts)JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)community whistleblowers.
That alone would cause me never to vote for Hillary.
Again, a lack of curiosity, a lack of informing herself about the facts, a simplistic approach to forming an opinion on an issue.
Hillary just is not presidential material in my view.
slipslidingaway
(21,210 posts)cascadiance
(19,537 posts)... if he'd "followed the rules", or gone after him like they did Kiriaku in being the only one going to prison for being a whistleblower on torture when all of those he blew the whistle on got let off the hook. The bottom line is that our system is rigged against security whistleblowers, and until we as a nation realize this, we're going to have more and more seeking asylum from malicious prosecution that in earlier days would have been a crime, but now is business as usual with today's PTB!
What Hillary said about this just solidified my opinion of her motives. If she doesn't know better, she fucking should!
Psephos
(8,032 posts)Tierra_y_Libertad
(50,414 posts)tex-wyo-dem
(3,190 posts)Whistleblower protections, which are a crock. "Open to retaliation" nails it.
Another example is Bunnatine Greenhouse who, for her troubles in informing authorities of abuse in Halliburton being awarded multi-year no bid contracts during the Iraq war, was demoted for "poor job performance."
http://www.alternet.org/story/24885/ordeal_of_a_whistleblower
"Protections" my ass!
RiverLover
(7,830 posts)That is so wrong.
These people are doing what is RIGHT, what is good to protect US, and being persecuted for it. It has to stop.
Thanks for the info.
eridani
(51,907 posts)http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/32943-what-did-clinton-mean-when-she-said-snowden-files-fell-into-the-qwrong-handsq
Hillary Clinton asserted at Tuesday nights Democratic presidential debate that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden stole very important information that has unfortunately fallen into a lot of the wrong hands.
She seemed to be darkly intimating that the information Snowden gave to journalists in Hong Kong before he was granted asylum in Moscow also ended up with the Chinese and/or Russian governments.
But that conclusion is entirely unsupported by the evidence; its a political smear that even the most alarmist Obama administration intelligence officials have not asserted as fact.
As Snowden has repeatedly explained, after turning over copies of the heavily encrypted files to reporters, he destroyed his own before he left Hong Kong.
He did not take the files to Russia because it wouldnt serve the public interest, he told the New York Times in 2013. Theres a zero percent chance the Russians or Chinese have received any documents, he said.
The Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday Times newspaper ran a front-page story in June asserting that Russia and China had cracked the top-secret cache of files that the paper, citing anonymous sources, claimed Snowden had brought with him to Moscow. But the story was thoroughly debunked and a video clip of the reporter acknowledging that we just publish what we believe to be the position of the British government went viral.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)Hillary's comments were not well informed. And that is shocking to me.
Whistleblowers in the intelligence community do not have adequate protection.
And Snowden did provide a service. Even Obama admitted that his NSA needed to change its policies. Who knows what is happening now? Who knows how much of our information the NSA takes and keeps?
Bernie's answer was outstanding on the Snowden issue. It took courage to say what he said on national TV, and he explained his view very well.
thesquanderer
(11,996 posts)and neither speaks well of her.