The Leaker is.......

[a777pilot]

I understand that obama has no shame, no sense of history, no idea of guilt, no honor and no loyalty to the Constitution.

[John Galt]

correct, obama is infallible, and any faults must be someone else. never mind he's expanded it. never mind all that, lets just play the political angle and say "what was good for the goose is good for the gander" and laugh at supposed hypocrites.

of course, the guy actually blew open what exactly is going on with the NSA, things the general public, despite hilarious posts by the dude fawning over obama, again, did not know. wqe live in a world where 500 times the amount of regulations are expanded upon every year than laws are passed. the irresponsible congress keeps on ceding authority so they won't be left holding the bag. this is not something the congress or the people really wanted, i don't think.

so now it's open, instead of playing politics, why don't we all get together and say this is unacceptable. because it is unacceptable.

this guy was raking in 200K salary at 29, had undoubtedly a hot girlfriend and lived in hawaii. he gave this all up "because what I'm doing is self-interested: I don't want to live in a world where there's no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity."

it's not like manning. i agree with what obama is doing with him, although he should go farther and execute him. that was a member of the military and he blasted secrets all over the web. this, on the other hand, was leaking of knowledge of high level activities, not specifics as to what was going on. it's not leaking the content of cables, he leaked a powerpoint document and things of that nature. he was exposing what the NSA was doing.

i hope some country harbors this guy. he was right to come forward and tell everyone who he is. eventually they would find him out, and he would have died quietly in a drone strike or something. now the world knows him, he can't just disappear

[The Dude]

[Stratego]

[The Dude]

[Darkhorse]

Up until last week, suggesting that the government had a list of every call you've made would have gotten you labeled a conspiracy theorist. You would have been lampooned on this forum for being a tinfoil hat wearing, right wing nut job (and probably a racist). Now that there is evidence, those people will call you ignorant for not knowing about these top secret programs already. It's all spin. The same thing happened with the IRS scandal.

Personally, I reject the notion that we have somehow missed our chance to be outraged about this kind of government surveillance and the secrecy that surrounds it. There is no statute of limitations on condemning inappropriate government intrusion into our private lives. People should have been more critical of these programs a decade ago when their groundwork was laid, but that is irrelevant at this point. The average American only just started realizing how much information the government had about them and they have every right to be upset about it.

[Sparse1]

He hasn't actually confirmed the Guardian story though. He has just said that the US government use the Patriot Act to get web search data based on keywords and that they could access phone records of people they see as suspect without a warrant. Which we all knew.

The core of the 'leak' was that the US government has backdoor access to the servers of every tech company in America. He has not claimed that now and the Guardian have provided no evidence of it.

[The Dude]

How would that make you a conspiracy theorist when the media reported on this many years ago?

Did we all just forget the NSA was collecting this data? That aspect isn't knew at all.

I'm not arguing that we can't be outraged now. I'm just confused as why we weren't outraged before and why we're pretending we didn't know about it. These things were reported on even before Obama became president.

[Sparse1]

[Mr.Bill]