To the Linux Community: The Edward Snowden Case
 

Hello all,

I would just like to post a word of warning about the petition currently on the White House web site. Do not sign it! The wording of the petition itself should set off warning bells: It should be obvious: he did not commit a crime, therefore he doesn't need a pardon. The proper petition would be one asking that all charges against him be dropped, not that he be pardoned from his current crime. Snowden was not the one who broke the law, the Government broke the laws. The U.S. constitution is the ultimate law in the land, all laws that do not agree with the U.S. Constitution are illegal. The government has been carrying out "unreasonable searches and seizures" on every thing carried over the internet, which is against the U.S. Constitution. The government, the entire government, are the guilty ones. They are the ones who need to be charged, impeached and arrested, not Snowden. Snowden, the whistle blower, was the one who was following the law, the government was the one breaking it.

Conclusion: Don't side the Pardon Snowden petition! He is not guilty, so he doesn't need pardoned.

"Good luck with that." :rolleyes:

If I were still seventeen years old, full of vim and vigor and still convinced that the world, perhaps with just a little bit of youthful convincing from people like me, really can work like I think it "should," then I might jump onto such a "petition."

Instead, when a college professor "quietly took me aside" and inquired "if I wanted to be a part of a project" that would have required me to join one of the 1.5 million(!) people who today have a "Top Secret clearance" ... I made a life-setting decision:

I said, "No, thanks."

Almost 40 years later, I still do not regret it.

First of all, I can't help but notice that, in exchange for having given the US Government carte blanche privilege to (that is to say, "officially" :rolleyes: ) peer into every single aspect of their personal lives, the vast majority of those million people don't seem to be making significantly-more money than I do.

Second, "my conscience is clean." Yes, there have (unfortunately) been times when there were just 2¢ in my bank-account, but I have never had to appeal to Vladimir Putin for mercy when I "leaked" the content of a PowerPoint presentation that, I am quite sure, was seen by a hundred thousand people.

My good friend, if you learn nothing else in this life, learn this: War Is A Racket. Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler (1881-1940), who was the most-decorated Marine in his day, and who held every commissioned rank from the bottom to the very top, said this quite plainly. A generation later, five-star General (and President) Dwight D. Eisenhower coined the phrase, military-industrial complex. This is the cancerous, nation-eating monster that has paid for quite a few 20,000-square-foot "cottages" in, uhhh, Maryland.

In the USA, today, you can tap into literally Trillions of dollars of "Uncle Sugar's Money," merely by breathing the magic words, "nine wun-wun." On a vastly larger(!) scale, you can actually launch a full-scale invasion of another country ... and it will be an invasion that never ends(!) ... and you can do this for a dozen countries at a time, and you can build more than a thousand military bases worldwide (some of them are small cities), and win the Federal contracts to supply all of them.

Now, put on your thinking-cap for a split second here, and guess which one of the two alternatives is more likely:

• { President Obama | Your Senator | Your Congressman } truly has no idea about any of this, and would be aghast to have discovered it, and therefore will move swiftly to Do The Right Thing. or ...
• { the aforementioned ... } "merely await the obligatory 10% 'Legislative Fee'" to arrive in the Grand Caymans.

(Close your eyes. The US National Debt is tens of Trillions, and most of that money was spent on ... this. What is 10% of (just...) 10 Trillion Dollars?)

"Son|Daughter, how much money do you make in a year? Uh, huh. That's nice. I make that amount of money in twenty-three seconds ... and Nobody Knows. Get it?"

"And-d-d the way that I make "all that money" is ... this.

"So, what are you asking me to do, you miserable plebeian? Get out of my face. Go... go eat some cake. And, if you are about to die, then you'd best better do it, and thus do your part to decrease the Surplus Population..."

I wasn't saying that we should start a new petition. I was just saying that the current petition is no good and explaining why.

I agree with you, but perhaps I go a bit further than you by asserting that the constitution itself has no authority, and neither the government established by it any legitimacy.

Every search engine, every web page (almost), every credit card company, every tv channel, and so on has been collecting data on me to sell me stuff and take advantage of me.

Thousands of crooks world wide have been attacking my computers, credit and bank accounts and such in order to rob me.

So when the NSA tries to prevent some nut from blowing me up, you guys are mad?? None of you guys ended up in any trouble out of this. None of you lost data because of this.

Edward Snowden is a coward, crook and can't keep a promise to his country and it's citizens. He did nothing to save the lives of innocent people from death.

A guy with a stripper girlfriend ought to give you a clue to what his is.

True.

Doesn't make much sense does it.

Actually he is extremely brave, he has taken on a government and I for one admire him for doing so. He may not have saved any Americans, but I dare say he has saved, in the future, lives of non-Americans,

What does his personal preferences have to do with this? Next you'll be saying to be LGBT is a bad thing.

I would like to see actual data on this. How many terrorist attacks have been prevented, actually? Not an estimate, real data, facts, together with names and which sentences the alleged terrorists have got for their crimes. Also, do the EU politicians that were bugged by the NSA count as possible terrorists, too?

How do you know? Does the NSA call you every time someone gets in trouble because of this?

Indeed, he has done something very few Americans do nowadays, as long as the second amendment isn't involved: He reported a blatant violation of the US constitution to the press, a violation of the very basis of your country. And he gets treated like a criminal for pointing out other criminals and is called a coward and crook for that? That seems to me somewhat weird: Those people that break the basic rules of your country are the heroes, those that point that out are the criminals?

I can't see what the profession of his girlfriend has to do with that at all. Would you have a different opinion of him if his girlfriend would be a singer in the opera? Or is this just a projection like: She is a stripper, in my world view strippers are evil, so since she is his girlfriend he must be evil, too?

Really? I thought he took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America, and furthermore I thought this oath is supposed to take precedence over any others, like "you must keep quiet about the illegal wiretapping we're doing here".

It seems to me he kept the oath that matters. Am I wrong?
Yes, it's a good thing we keep everybody under surveillance at all times, otherwise somebody might have been able to carry out an attack on, say, the Boston Marathon. Oh, wait...

My opinion: The only cowards are those who shiver at the mere mention of the word "terrorism", and are willing to give up all freedoms and all privacy for a false sense of security.

I hope he is caught an executed as a traitor, but he won't be because he's still an agent on a mission.

Yeah, bring back hanging, drawing, and quartering. And make it public, and on TV. Anybody with a stripper for a girlfriend deserves no less.

I vote for either Guillotine or firing squad on this one.

Nah, too quick and not messy enough.

Did you mean 'frying squad' ??

Yeah, put him in the barbeque queue.

@jefro Are you a Texan? If not. You'd make a good one.

I am more concerned about Manning living his life as a free man than Snowden right now. Just because he/Manning was a soldier does not mean he had to act like a Nazi (I was just following orders). Or as SGT.Shultz woulda said in Hogans Heroes. "I know nutting"!
I admire him greatly.