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Edward Snowden is asking the US president to pardon him based on the morality of his action.
Well, here is a completely opposite view from the other side, so to speak:
http://observer.com/2016/09/were-losing-the-war-against-terrorism/
"Since 9/11, NSA has been the backbone of the Western intelligence alliance against terrorism. Its signals intelligence is responsible for the strong majority of successful counterterrorism operations in the West. More than three-quarters of the time, NSA or one of its close partner Anglosphere spy partners like Britain's GCHQ, develops a lead on a terror cell which is passed to the FBI and others for action which crushes that cell before it kills. If NSA loses the ability to do this, innocent people in many countries will die.
Unfortunately, there's mounting evidence that NSA's edge over the terrorists is waning. It's impossible not to notice that jihadist emphasis on communications security and encryption, which is now gaining ground, began in 2013. That, of course, is when Edward Snowden, an NSA IT contractor, stole something like 1.7 million classified documents from his employer, shared them with outsiders, then defected to Moscow."
"However, our precious edge in the SpyWar is waning fast. We are no longer winning. We're about to hear a great deal of unwarranted praise of Ed Snowden thanks to the hagiographic movie about him by Oliver Stone that's to be released this week. Don't be fooled. Snowden is no hero. In truth, he and his journalist helpers have aided terrorists in important ways. Snowden and his co-conspirators have blood on their hands—and perhaps much more blood soon thanks to their aid to the genocidal maniacs of ISIS."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Francis on Thursday September 15 2016, @06:30AM
That's a point I wish more people would realize. Terrorists kill a shockingly small number of people compared with things like car crashes and infectious disease. And prior to the US arming shady people, the number was even lower.
In 2001, there were something like 15 people killed in car crashes that year for every one 9/11 victim. And at this point the 9/11 victims are outnumbered by the service people killed trying to get revenge. And the service people killed are outnumbered like 20 or 30 to 1 by innocent civilians killed in Iraq during the genocide that followed our embarrassing attack on Iraq.
In other words, the terrorists won. They killed about 2500 or so of ours, and in the ensuing incompetence something like 40x as many people wound up dead as a result.
(Score: 5, Informative) by davester666 on Thursday September 15 2016, @09:03AM
And we turned our country into even more of a police-state, with the TSA feeling up the genitals of small children and the elderly, mother's been forced to throw out breastmilk because it's in too big of a bottle, everyone forced to take off their shoes, roving gangs of TSA agents searching people at bus and train stations, and onboard buses and trains. Basically everyone is assumed to be a "potential terrorist", unless you are part of the gov't.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 15 2016, @11:28AM
Human physiology at work. For those things considered routine (car crash/disease) we tend to have no fear (or little fear) due to their being routine. But for things that are extremely rare, far too many people have a built in hardwired primal fear reflex.
There's probably an aspect of this that evolved over millennia. If you were so afraid of falling from a tree that you would refuse to climb it, you also likely eventually starved to death eventually due to lack of food (trees often contain edible fruits). But if you were instead irrationally afraid of a lion hiding in the tall grass that you avoided all the tall grass, you usually lived to tell the tale and pass along your genes (because the lion in the tall grass was an unlikely outcome [as compared to falling from that tree], so you'd have been almost as likely to survive anyway). Millions of years later, that same reflex is now being exploited by terrorists to make folks cower in fear over something that, for them personally, is likely to never be directly experienced in their lifetimes.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday September 15 2016, @06:23PM
In that case the obvious solution is to recruit the terrorists, rather than try to stop them.
Schedule a routine terrorist suicide bombing every Wednesday morning at 10am. Once it becomes routine, people will stop paying attention to it.
Facetious as this suggestion is, it would probably save lives overall.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 15 2016, @01:50PM
It's amazing how government always uses edge cases, like terrorism and diseases like Zika and the swine flue that almost kill no one, to justify expanding their reach (ie: the CDC post mentioned before).
Yet when it comes to things that actually kill people, like starvation and the actual flu, the government hardly lifts a finger to fix these problems. and these problems can be fixed relatively easily too by comparison.
Makes you think the government's motive isn't to fix anything but, instead, to just keep expanding its powers and reach. They purposely look for imaginary problems that are so rare that they don't really need to be addressed and they use it to justify more government overreach without actually addressing those 'problems' while ignoring the problems that actually need to be addressed but the government is too lazy to do anything about them. Easier to avoid addressing a non-existent problem and to then use it as an excuse for more government overreach.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Thursday September 15 2016, @02:09PM
Those aren't good examples. Those are infectious diseases that aren't well understood. The Swine Flu in particular was a pandemic and they didn't have the luxury of waiting around to see what was going to happen before doing something about it.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 15 2016, @02:21PM
Look at who is running the government [ballotpedia.org]:
Republican state senators 1,085 55.0%
Republican state representatives 3,021 56%
Republican governors 34 56.3%
The party with majorities everywhere just happens to be the party whose entire platform is "Government can't do anything right", which means they have a vested interest in proving that at every opportunity. This isn't to say that Democrats are any better, but looking at the party steering the government along with the direction they've been taking the government for the past 2 (4) decades, its pretty clear that they need to be ousted. Stop electing and re-electing fascists already, look at what they do and stop listening to the obvious lies they keep repeating. Start looking at independents in your area to elect as your representatives.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday September 15 2016, @06:07PM
Makes you think the government's motive isn't to fix anything but, instead, to just keep expanding its powers and reach. They purposely look for imaginary problems that are so rare that they don't really need to be addressed and they use it to justify more government overreach without actually addressing those 'problems' while ignoring the problems that actually need to be addressed but the government is too lazy to do anything about them. Easier to avoid addressing a non-existent problem and to then use it as an excuse for more government overreach.
I think it is far more likely it is good old fashioned human corruption at work, rather than any vast, complicated conspiracy to gain more government control over us. Let's look at Florida for example (Florida is always a fine example of corruption and villainy, should you need a quick go to...). Governor Rick Scott is lusting after funds to "fight" the Zika virus. If he was simply interested in expanding government overreach, he would have grabbed the funds for expanding Medicaid when he had the chance as well. But he turned those down those funds because they were earmarked for a specific purpose (helping poor people for chrissake!) and had to be accounted for in their use. But Zika money? That sort of government funding is a grant that can be handed out to potential donors and family members* or simply swallowed up in mostly "administrative" costs. Bureaucrats absolutely love that sort of thing for reasons that have nothing to do with control of the population. The only control involved is a marketing effort to gain public support.
*It turns out Rick Scott's wife is heavily invested in a Zika mosquito spraying business.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by guizzy on Thursday September 15 2016, @07:50PM
I'll echo Scott Alexander here: you can't compare causes that work at a steady, reliable pace with causes where much of the effect is in outliers.
If terrorists had, right now, a nuke in New-York or London or any major western city, they would not hesitate to detonate it. It fits with their goals and their MO. Then you'd have 10 million deaths by terrorism in a single day. It's not because most years there's only a handful of Americans killed by terrorists that it should be treated as less important than, say, deaths by falling off furniture. Because there won't be a year where 10 million people will suddenly fall off their beds to their death, but there could very well be such a year with regards to terrorism. Just one such event per century (which is really not that much of a stretch) would spike "deaths by terrorism" to over 100 000 deaths/year.
Flu's the same thing as terrorism in that regards. Most years have a couple thousand deaths by flu. Then there's the Spanish Flu that killed between 50 and 100 million in a single year. You don't want to wait until this happens before you take flu seriously.