Another round of editorials about how Snowden should be judged has set off some discussion threads that touched a nerve with me. I'm cross posting my response to a series of comments that included this observation:

The only people who didn't know what they learned from Snowden are IDIOTS who didn't WANT to know. The general information that he released was already widely-known by anyone who cared to know. The specifics that he released, pose a very serious threat to our national security, by revealing delicate intelligence information, the presence of which on the internet, makes us all LESS SAFE.

There is a significant difference between THINKING that something is true and KNOWING that it is true. Many people thought the NSA was collecting all phone records, particularly after the USA Today published a story to this effect in 2006, but the President denied it and the phone companies denied it. As I'm sure you know, DNI Clapper was asked this question under oath in a Senate hearing in 2013 and he denied it.

Some people took the POTUS and the phone companies at their word, particularly when this word was given as testimony in public hearings where it is supposed to be illegal to lie. People who had faith in the integrity of our domestic political process should not be cast as "IDIOTS." Furthermore, everyone who wished to challenge the Constitutionality of this program in a court of law was denied standing to do so because they could not prove that their records were being collected. Therefore, you can count the federal court system among the "IDIOTS" who took the executive at its word.

There is no public policy that authorizes the program. The statutory argument here is that when Congress authorized the collection of only those business records that were "relevant" to a foreign intel or terrorism investigation, they really meant to authorize the collection of all business records everywhere all the time because everything is relevant. Several prominent experts in this policy area expressed surprise at this interpretation, including Orin Kerr, Benjamin Wittes, and Robert Chesney.

So why are we being told that everyone who paid attention to this policy area knew that this had been authorized all along? That is a lie and it is just as dishonest as Clapper's statements under oath in the Senate.

This meta-data collection program is not some targeted operation that should be kept secret from the American people. This is a major, domestic public policy matter that is far beyond the scope of the sort of things that government secrecy ought to encompass.

The American people have a right to decide whether or not we want all of this meta-data collection to happen, and we were robbed of that right through dishonesty on the part of this country's leadership. Furthermore, the American people have a right to expect that our public policy process should operate with integrity, and that the Pr... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]