Is Snowden guilty of espionage? - Page 28

On January 16 2014 00:41 ETisME wrote:
Whether Snowden should be judged as guilty of espionage does not matter, what matters is the NSA.

The rapid development of technology involved in our lives are making these info even more easily obtainable by the NSA.
what it can do now is only a small proportional of what it can do in the not too far distance.

And what can we do about it? Nothing, exposing NSA will only slow it down. Government can easily change its name, make backdoor deals with companies and run it all over again and this time, we might never ever hear about this program.

imo, he might have exposed too many documents to other countries, it might be a safety net for him to "bride" his way into a foreign land and live his life, or it might be him making deals before he even ran off with the documents.

But we should not place any less attention onto these spy activities, especially on its own people.
I thought the great wall of China was bad. but NSA bad? What if China has this level of technology and spying on its own people.
and we know it will happen because technology will get figured out, adopted and improved.

I worry for our society future and what it means to live in such country.

"The New York Times has an interesting story on how NSA put transmitters into the USB input devices of PC, allowing computers unplugged from the Internet to still be monitored, via radio, from up to 8 miles away. The article mainly reports NSA's use of the technology to monitor Chinese military, and minor headline reads 'No Domestic Use Seen'. The source of the data was evidently the leak from Edward J. Snowden."

"Fred Kaplan, the Edward R. Murrow press fellow at the Council on Foreign Relation, writes at Slate that if Edward Snowden's stolen trove of beyond-top-secret documents had dealt only with the domestic surveillance by the NSA, then some form of leniency might be worth discussing. But Snowden did much more than that. 'Snowden's documents have, so far, furnished stories about the NSA's interception of email traffic, mobile phone calls, and radio transmissions of Taliban fighters in Pakistan's northwest territories; about an operation to gauge the loyalties of CIA recruits in Pakistan; about NSA email intercepts to assist intelligence assessments of what's going on inside Iran; about NSA surveillance of cellphone calls 'worldwide,' an effort that 'allows it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.' Kaplan says the NYT editorial calling on President Obama to grant Snowden 'some form of clemency' paints an incomplete picture when it claims that Snowden 'stole a trove of highly classified documents after he became disillusioned with the agency's voraciousness.' In fact, as Snowden himself told the South China Morning Post, he took his job as an NSA contractor, with Booz Allen Hamilton, because he knew that his position would grant him 'to lists of machines all over the world [that] the NSA hacked.' Snowden got himself placed at the NSA's signals intelligence center in Hawaii says Kaplan for the sole purpose of pilfering extremely classified documents. 'It may be telling that Snowden did not release mdash; or at least the recipients of his cache haven't yet published — any documents detailing the cyber-operations of any other countries, especially Russia or China,' concludes Kaplan. 'If it turned out that Snowden did give information to the Russians or Chinese (or if intelligence assessments show that the leaks did substantial damage to national security, something that hasn't been proved in public), then I'd say all talk of a deal is off — and I assume the Times editorial page would agree."

On January 16 2014 00:41 ETisME wrote:
Whether Snowden should be judged as guilty of espionage does not matter, what matters is the NSA.

The rapid development of technology involved in our lives are making these info even more easily obtainable by the NSA.
what it can do now is only a small proportional of what it can do in the not too far distance.

And what can we do about it? Nothing, exposing NSA will only slow it down. Government can easily change its name, make backdoor deals with companies and run it all over again and this time, we might never ever hear about this program.

imo, he might have exposed too many documents to other countries, it might be a safety net for him to "bride" his way into a foreign land and live his life, or it might be him making deals before he even ran off with the documents.

But we should not place any less attention onto these spy activities, especially on its own people.
I thought the great wall of China was bad. but NSA bad? What if China has this level of technology and spying on its own people.
and we know it will happen because technology will get figured out, adopted and improved.

I worry for our society future and what it means to live in such country.

On January 16 2014 03:23 BisuDagger wrote:

To me I am under the opinion China is currently spying at a much greater level then the US and that it's just common knowledge. It would almost be naive to think that China is spying any less then the US. Our computer systems are hacked into on a daily bases from Chinese hackers. Obviously I'm biased from what history classes has taught me about the cold war. But seeing the extent that North Korea goes to, to keep tabs on every citizen the US and China could be no better, but are just less obvious.

On January 16 2014 12:05 sluggaslamoo wrote:


Why should China be the level at which the line is drawn?

You're implying that it doesn't matter what the US does as long as China is worse. China is one of the worst countries, its sounds like to you its ok for the US to be the second worst country in terms of privacy and freedom in the world.

If you compare the US to all other first world countries, the US almost looks like China compared to them.

Is China really a standard we should be comparing to when looking at this issue?