Why I am skeptical about Edward Snowden. [View all]

[jazzimov]

To be honest, the first Red Flag for me was that he leaked to Glenn Greenwald, who I always thought had a personal agenda and whose work I always either ignore or take with a grain of salt (usually the former). Because it was written by Greenwald, I also took into consideration that the info released was not necessarily the info that Greenwald received - giving Snowden a little benefit of the doubt. The first I heard of the article was on DU, although unfortunately there was no link associated with the post so I had to Google it to find out anything.

The first thing I found/Googled/downloaded was the leaked FISC order to Verizon.

I don’t know if any of you actually remember the fight with the Bush Administration over their illegal warrant less wiretapping, but this FISC appeared to fall into the resolution that came directly out of that fight.

Then, Snowden claimed that the NSA had “direct access” to the servers and that he, as a NSA analyst, could listen to any conversation he wanted.

But that was directly contradictory to the FISC order that he also supposedly leaked. In the first place, if the NSA had direct access to the servers, they wouldn’t NEED the FISC order. Secondly, the order specifically omitted “content”, which means that he couldn’t, as he claimed, listen to any conversation.

The next day, every company that he claimed the NSA had “direct access” to their servers denied the allegations, also claiming that they had received court orders and complied with them. - but they adamantly denied any “direct access“. To prove such, several of them are now sueing the government to release the exact orders that they received.

Then, several Congressional members verified that they had been briefed on the program in compliance with the 2008 law that so many of us fought for. Yes, some of these were Repukes, but some of them were Dems that I trust such as DiFi and Al Franken.

Shortly after that, he was fired from his contractors job and his actual salary was released - which was substantially less than he claimed. Now we knew that he was capable of lying - or at least capable of exaggeration.

Then I find out from here on DU that he’s a Ron Paul fan. NOW it starts to make sense! He is not a true “whistle-blower” trying to save Civil Liberties and Privacy, but merely wants to destroy anything to do with the government.

Then he releases more “blockbusters”, such as the US spy agencies are spying on Russia. As the former agent on CBS News says, everything that Snowden has released seems more focused on embarrassing the NSA than actually protecting anyone’s rights. This also fits into his Ron Paul aficionado persona.

One good thing I have personally noticed, is that people now are talking about how “nothing is private” and how much people actually reveal on Facebook, Twitter, etc. For instance, I pointed out that people used to use answering machines to see who to rob (Hello, we’re not home right now…) and someone else pointed out that his wife always liked to update their status (We’re at Waffle House right now) - which means “come rob our house” or, as he pointed out, if someone was looking for him they knew exactly where he was.