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xchrom

(108,903 posts) Sat Aug 3, 2013, 09:03 AM Aug 2013

The Snowden Effect

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/08/03

For those of you who have been away from news reports for the last few months, herewith a primer on a now famous individual who has been in the news with much frequency-Edward Snowden. The first thing you need to know about Mr. Snowden is that he has had an effect on the media and Congress that none of the people who work in either of those place could hope to have had. The second is that he has permitted the United States to implicitly demonstrate its moral superiority to places such as Russia. First things first.

But for (as lawyers are wont to say) Mr. Snowden, none of the discussion that has consumed millions if not billions of words during the last two months would have taken place. But for Mr. Snowden the House of Representatives in the United States Congress would have continued doing nothing other than taking the 39th, 40th and 41st votes on whether or not to repeal Health Care. Thanks to Mr. Snowden those votes have been postponed. Instead, in an unusual moment of bipartisanship 94 Republicans and 111 Democrats voted to defund the National Security Agency’s telephone data collection program. It failed by seven votes. Notwithstanding that defeat, two congressmen have begun preparing a bill that would curb telephone surveillance.

But for Mr. Snowden there would have been no discussion of the FISA court. We would not have learned% that ten of the 11 judges assigned to the FISA court by Chief Justice John Roberts from among all federal judges, are Republicans appointed to the bench by Republicans. But for Mr. Snowden we would not have learned that of 1856 requests to the FISA court for secret surveillance none was denied by the FISA court. But for Mr. Snowden there would be no discussion at the national level of the fact that there is no one to represent the public when the Justice Department asks the FISA court for permission to conduct secret surveillance.

Of course Mr. Snowden didn’t give us all that information. He was just the one who forced us to have the discussion. Before he spoke all we had were a couple of senators who kept saying that if we knew all the bad things the government was doing we’d be really upset but because the bad things were highly confidential they were not at liberty to disclose them. It was Mr. Snowden who caused the discussion to occur with the result we may be protected from some of the abuses that the Senators could not disclose or prevent.