{"id":20827,"date":"2013-06-25T15:08:26","date_gmt":"2013-06-25T20:08:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=20827"},"modified":"2013-07-28T10:20:35","modified_gmt":"2013-07-28T15:20:35","slug":"snowdens-character-doesnt-matter-snowdens-revelations-matter-a-great-deal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/06\/25\/snowdens-character-doesnt-matter-snowdens-revelations-matter-a-great-deal\/","title":{"rendered":"Snowden’s character doesn’t matter – Snowden’s revelations matter a great deal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gene Healy<\/a> says that it doesn’t matter what you think about Edward Snowden, you should care a lot about what he’s revealed:<\/p>\n

Here, the most disturbing aspect of the Snowden revelations is the NSA’s comprehensive, multiyear call-records database, with communication and phone-location information on millions of Americans. Especially if combined with metadata on emails, website visits and financial transactions that the agency is also amassing, that information is a potential treasure trove for political abuse — it can be used to ferret out the sort of information governments have historically used to blackmail and neutralize political opponents: who’s leaking, who’s organizing, who’s having an affair. The potential abuse of that information represents a grave threat to American liberty and privacy regardless of Snowden’s character and motivations.<\/p>\n

In an post last week, Buzzfeed<\/em>‘s Ben Smith makes the key point: “You Don’t Have to Like Edward Snowden.” Snowden, Smith argues, is “a source,” and the information sources convey is far more important than their “moral status” or the “fate of [their] eternal soul[s].”<\/p>\n

Smith mentions Mark Felt, the FBI honcho who served as Woodward and Bernstein’s “Deep Throat” during their investigation of the Watergate burglary and cover-up. Felt, it turned out, was simply settling scores in a bureaucratic power struggle. He had no scruples against criminal violations of privacy — in 1980 he was convicted of conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of Americans through warrantless break-ins as part of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program.<\/p>\n

It was important for Americans to know that their president was a crook. That Mark Felt was also a crook is neither here nor there. As Smith puts it, “who cares?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gene Healy says that it doesn’t matter what you think about Edward Snowden, you should care a lot about what he’s revealed: Here, the most disturbing aspect of the Snowden revelations is the NSA’s comprehensive, multiyear call-records database, with communication and phone-location information on millions of Americans. Especially if combined with metadata on emails, website […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,9,10,15],"tags":[925,476,282,913,154,911],"class_list":["post-20827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-law","category-liberty","category-technology","tag-edwardsnowden","tag-espionage","tag-fbi","tag-nsa","tag-privacy","tag-surveillance"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5pV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20827"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20827\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21355,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20827\/revisions\/21355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}