Not Snowden but *Keith Alexander*: Hero or Traitor (the debate we should be having)

[unhappycamper]

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

Not Snowden but *Keith Alexander*: Hero or Traitor (the debate we should be having)
By Juan Cole | May. 29, 2014

NBC News’s Brian Williams interviewed Edward Snowden in Moscow on Wednesday night. But then Mr. Williams followed it up with a panel discussion of whether Snowden is a hero or traitor. It was a cowardly and venal thing to do, and Mr. Williams should be ashamed of himself. By framing the post-interview discussion in these inflammatory and black-and-white terms, NBC nearly undid all the good journalism they accomplished with the interview. It was one more sad example of the broken ‘one the one hand, on the other hand’ model of news that dominates the US airwaves, which gave us the Iraq War (Saddam Hussein: WMD menace to the US or mere evil dictator?) and global warming denial as equal to science.

Mike McFaul, former US ambassador to Russia and now at Stanford University embarrassed himself by answering the question of whether Snowden harmed anyone by saying that he hurt German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s feelings when she found out her personal cell phone was tapped. Really, Mr. McFaul? I think we were asking whether any NOCs got their identity revealed by Snowden as Bush-Cheney outed Valerie Plame, or whether any US military personnel were endangered. Snowden didn’t hurt Angela’s feelings. The US government did.

~snip~

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.

They used this data collection not against terrorists but in drug and other petty crime cases, sharing the illegally-gathered information with the DEA and local law enforcement agencies, who then lied to judges about how they had come to investigate these individuals in the first place. The domestic surveillance not only undermined the Constitution, it corrupted the entire justice system. Lest you reply that you can hardly shed tears for criminals, it should be pointed out that in some instances the Feds were prosecuting people for doing things not illegal in state law, and using illegal methods to do it. In other instances, they appear to have targeted civil society groups, interpreting their civil disobedience campaigns as criminal conspiracies.

[bemildred]

1. Word. nt