Ex-CIA chief: Amnesty for Snowden idiotic, he ‘should be hanged by his neck'

It's amazing to me how many people in this thread seem to be ignoring the same thing I have said all along.

I never once said he should be accountable for the content or whistle blowing. I want to see the end game play out before making that judgement. If he is trying to effect change for the better of the US people then great, if he did this because he is mad he failed out Special Forces school or was frustrated with his current job assignment then that is a different story.


My point throughout has been the following:

1. Their are clearly defined laws and regulations around how you can transport, store, export, backup, access and secure classified info.

2. Their are clearly defined laws and regulations around how and with whom you can disclose that info.

3. Their are clearly defined lists around which countries you can and cannot share/trade/export classified info with.

4. Depending on your level of clearance their are additional other rules around items 1-3.


All the people saying when you "get a clearance you don't know what you are signing up for" are wrong when dealing with the items above. When you sign up for a clearance you 100% know exactly those things I listed above and if you don't then you don't get your clearance.

If I expand beyond that you can't be naive enough to think that someone who tried to make it in the SF then worked in the CIA and NSA had no idea that bad things were happening and the reality of it is I'll bet you anything Snowden was complicit in some of those bad things.

Again it's too early to say anything definite other than he did something that , like anyone with a clearance, if caught he would be fined and serve possible jail time for. Maybe he turns out to be the greatest hero ever, maybe he turns out to be an Operative for another agency and maybe he turns out that this was all for his personal gain. It's too early to say any of that definitively.

reply to post by netbound

I’m afraid the best we can do now is require tight and relentless oversight of these operations.

I am going to be blunt at the risk of being offensive.

J. Edger Hoover's agents called his FBI headquarters the Seat of Government.
Hoover was in business for something like 48 years. Have you noticed that after JEH died (in office) that the average tenure of FBI directors dropped. No president from Eisenhower to JFK could fire JEH. Hoover was corrupt to the core. Where was the oversight you propose? Who could have overseen Hoover's FBI?

The CIA is overseen by congressional committees. Has the CIA ever lied to congress?

Has the CIA ever defied laws passed by congress to limit their power? Iran Contra.

Former CIA director vice president GHWB should have provided oversight. There was a scandal. Bush was "out of the loop". Where was the oversight. Bush wasn't reprimanded. He was promoted. To president.

The sad fact is that the bad guys out number the good guys. Ten to one? How are the good guys able to oversee the bad guys?

An honest whistle blower is not an institution. It is a last ditch effort.

reply to post by opethPA

Again it's too early to say anything definite other than he did something that , like anyone with a clearance, if caught he would be fined and serve possible jail time for. Maybe he turns out to be the greatest hero ever, maybe he turns out to be an Operative for another agency and maybe he turns out that this was all for his personal gain. It's too early to say any of that definitively.

A whistle blower could be just another crook who steals secrets to sell to the enemy for profit.

opethPA
It's amazing to me how many people in this thread seem to be ignoring the same thing I have said all along.

There are clearly defined laws and regulations to releasing classified information, but there's also a demonstrated history of internal concerns not bringing about change. William Binney, J Kirk Wiebe, and Thomas Drake all brought them up and were all attacked by the NSA. While Snowden made the choice to leak information the NSA made it abundantly clear from previous actions that it would be the only way to effect change.

You're right that there's rules to leaking classified information, but by law classification can't be used to hide illegal actions. He also has a duty to uphold the constitution, which the policies he revealed were violating to such an extent that it's frankly unbelievable. If what he did is right or wrong isn't for us to decide though, one day Snowden needs to stand trial for what he did and a court needs to decide if he was justified in doing it or not. I would like to see him found justified and pronounced not guilty, but my opinion doesn't define law, nor does the opinion of the CIA agent that wants to see him hung from the neck. While I totally understand why Snowden fled considering the treatment of his predecessors and Manning, my opinion remains the same. He needs to return to the US, he needs to testify to congress, and he needs to stand trial, and it needs to be a fair trial.

Panic2k11
I agree that the only option is revolution, its been in the cards for too long but my view is that it will occur when things are mostly unfixable and at a tremendous human cost (among others) and the result will probably be worst that what we started (before it became extremely corrupt). Worst because the situation of demographics, ecology and geopolitics, it is clear that the new tendency is to aim to a more Asian view of human worth (that translates to lower significance and less power to the individual across the board), this is mostly unfixable because of out competitive existence.

While I'm not totally opposed to the idea of a violent overthrow, the idea of it scares the hell out of me. It's an absolute last resort and the result will be a government worse than the idea of our current one. As a collective we don't actually embrace concepts like liberty and freedom anymore. We embrace what we think it means but not the true meaning... we would end up with a pretty poor society. Throw in the deep and significant partisan divide and I don't even see how we could get a cohesive compromise put together. It would be an unmitigated disaster. That's assuming the revolution could beat the US military in the first place, and I can give a list longer than the max post size here allows of reasons why that wouldn't happen. At some point and I'm not exactly sure when, our government shifted from focusing on governing the population and trying to do the best it could, to self preservation. In my opinion that's the moment we descended into tyranny. A government that seeks only to preserve itself isn't a government that exists for and at the whim of the people.

Wrabbit2000
Why would this subject, of everything discussed on ATS, be one ATS members should be careful with or not comment on?

I'm not the one you asked, but in a future that's not too unbelievable anymore we could be in a world where those that have voiced discontent with the way things are going could be put on a list of dissenters to be sent to reeducation camps.

netbound
Personally, I don’t care what anyone else thinks (you see, I’m just as hardened in my view as the rest of you are), but I’m willing to surrender some of my so-called freedoms if it means that we’re less likely to have another 9/11, or much worse, repeated on American soil. Actually, I use the Internet a LOT, but I’m not paranoid about whether or not Big Brother is peering over my shoulder as I make this post. And if he is, so what! Frankly, I doubt anyone at the NSA has the time to sit around playing voyeur with the kind of volume they’re required to review/process each day. And if anyone does do this, they should be dealt with appropriately. Christ, people don’t seem to mind spilling their guts on Facebook and Twitter, letting the entire world have access to their personal lives. But, Heaven forbid should the NSA get ahold of any of their “private” coorespondence. That’s simply unAmerican and unacceptable.

I'm not going to repeat a too often quoted line from Benjamin Franklin but I would argue that you don't understand (or don't care about) the concepts of freedom and liberty. So I'm just going to put it this way. We've had 12 years of expanded NSA powers and they have yet to show even one foiled attempt. Furthermore we've had one case of domestic terrorism, likely with the Saudi's involved and they weren't able to stop it. Going by their record, the NSA is a failure, they couldn't even make up something believable for their 60 minutes piece. That aside, the reason you should care about them collecting everything is because one day something you're doing may not be legal anymore. When that day comes there are no assurances they won't use the collected data against people to see who was doing that activity before it became illegal. There are very major issues with them collecting all of our electronic communications.

The bottom line is, there are very real dangers to the government collecting this type of information about us, and so far there has been no added benefit.

reply to post by leostokes

So tell me, then, what's your solution? Disband all the intelligence agencies? Maybe the entire government? Get real. That ain't gonna happen.

And if they did severely restrict NSA surveillance activities, and protect all those so-private Facebook and Twitter exchanges, etc,, and then we were hit by another 9/11 scale terrorist attack, what would your reaction to that be? I'll bet you'd be all over the security agencies for being inept and incompetent in their jobs.

I won't change your mind about all this anyway, and I'm not going to try. You have your opinion - I have mine. Deal with it...

netbound
reply to post by leostokes

 

So tell me, then, what's your solution? Disband all the intelligence agencies? Maybe the entire government? Get real. That ain't gonna happen.

And if they did severely restrict NSA surveillance activities, and protect all those so-private Facebook and Twitter exchanges, etc,, and then we were hit by another 9/11 scale terrorist attack, what would your reaction to that be? I'll bet you'd be all over the security agencies for being inept and incompetent in their jobs.

I won't change your mind about all this anyway, and I'm not going to try. You have your opinion - I have mine. Deal with it...

Here's the thing though, pre 9/11 there's ample evidence that we knew it was going to happen. Warning alarms went off all over the place on these hijackers, we knew something was going down in New York City, and we even knew the day and time. That was without these expanded powers.

This expansion doesn't keep us safer because we already had enough intelligence to detect the threat. All it does is reduce our liberties.

Besides that, very few people are dying from these attacks, we can have freedom that 99.999% of people live to see, or we can have a draconian police state that 100% of people live to see. Which would you prefer?

Freedom isn't free, if you have freedom there's always a chance it will be used against you, that's the price of having it.

I'd like to see him charged under 18 USC 794, certainly my favorite thing the security officer reads you when you're read onto the sort of access Snowden had. He had it recited to him. He signed that he understood. So, give him the 794 hammer.

While they're at it, I'd love to see something draconian happen to the security officers over him at the place he snagged all the data. He ought not have had that sort of access.