Video & Multimedia
Related: About this forumAutumn
(45,048 posts)it was my son in that position it would just kill me with grief. I couldn't bear it.
Politicalboi
(15,189 posts)Go live with your shit stain for a son in Russia.
Obama puts his life on the line every day. Any nut like your son could try and kill him. Your son is cowering in Russia.
bravenak
(34,648 posts)Your son's a twit. That's what he get.
EC
(12,287 posts)been there to give him console then. But this is just so much bull crap. Your son doesn't have insane maniacs threatening him day and night.
Douglas Carpenter
(20,226 posts)a decent fellow or not:
Crazy traitor leaker got Congress to notice vast surveillance state By Alex Pareene
(And for this reason - if liberal western democracy survives - all free people will forever owe him a debt of gratitude)
Pols from both parties are all of a sudden demanding more transparency and pushing reforms. Thanks, leaks!
(Credit: Reuters/Bobby Yip)
There is a guy, a famous guy, who lives now in a Russian airport or something, no one is really sure, but everyone in the media (and lots of people not in the media) cannot stop fighting and arguing about this guy. Some people say he is a jerk and crazy and bad and others say he is a hero and super cool. Either way, mean jerk or cool hero, this guy that everyone wont shut up about is actually responsible for the first major public displays of Congressional opposition to the unchecked surveillance state in 35 years or so.
Congress has always had a handful of privacy advocates and true civil libertarians. But for many years in political Washington it has been considered foolish and perhaps a bit treasonous to suggest that our intelligence agencies are even slightly overzealous in their collection of all information possible about everything on the globe. That is still the general consensus, but as McClatchys Washington Bureau wrote on Friday, there are suddenly a bunch of members of Congress who actually want to rein in the NSA.
The last time a significant number of Washington politicians favored additional restrictions on intelligence-gathering and surveillance powers was in the immediate aftermath of the Church Committee reports, in the mid-1970s. Since then, Congress has practically abandoned its oversight power over the intelligence communities, and its only gotten worse since 9/11. Fighting terrorism trumped privacy every time Congress was asked to expand government spying powers. For much of the last dozen years, civil libertarians werent just ignored by the political establishment, they were vilified. When Democrats took full control of Congress, they still rubber-stamped Bushs surveillance programs.
So what happened, exactly? Well, the American people learned a bunch of scary sounding stuff about how much data the NSA is collecting, on everyone. They learned this because of illegal leaks of classified information, to reporters, from the guy everyone is fighting about. Everyone can keep fighting about the guy, I guess, but no one can now say that the guys leaks were entirely gratuitous. Because before the leaks, people who were alarmed at what the intelligence agencies could be up to were ignored and politicians who had pretty good notions of what they could be up to (or who couldve learned what they were up to if they cared to) werent concerned.
http://www.salon.com/2013/07/22/crazy_traitor_leaker_got_congress_to_notice_vast_surveillance_state/?source=newsletter