Snowed on Snowden [View all]

[flamingdem]

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2013/07/snowed-on-snowden.html

--- snip

The method isn't really about reform; it's about making the US retaliate, and then pointing to the harsher policies and claiming the US is no longer its liberal self, true to its ideas, and then working to discredit and undermine both America and its liberal ideas as false. It is not about wishing the best for the US, as much as Snowden thinks he can mouth this platitude and have us believe it.

It's like the hackers who hack and disable and damage a website and then claim that all along they were really just "helping" a company to beef up its security. Baloney. If they really cared, they would quietly speak to their own IT colleagues and help them. If they really cared, they wouldn't need to bully and shame a corporation and portray it in an ill light -- and harm its customers. What happened with Snowden's hack of USA, Inc. is no different than Swartz taking down Jstor and MIT defiantly in the copyleftist cause, or Weev assaulting AT&T and running off with its customer lists in a supposed, um, helpful probe dedicated to a Better World. Poppycock. All of this is about radical nihilism and anarchism and most of all, taking power. After all, when anarchists thwart and disable and defeat power, where does it go? To them. WikiLeaks is about a war for power, not a campaign for freedom or rights.

There are too many liberals who think that there's some national conversation to be had here that is "better" than Snowden's coerced version -- they're willing to say they've been "lost" on the cause because he leaked to the Chinese but still think he "did some good".

Nonsense. The nature of the means by which you "start this national debate" matter -- if it is by crime, collusion, and coercion, then those are the results we will end up with when those hackers come into power. No thank you!