Maybe it's just me ... but I don't get why so many peoples' panties are in a twist over this ~ do I like it? ~ NO! ~ but it has been actively going on since the Patriot Act was enacted ~ all of Congress, INcluding the now suddenly outraged GOP/TPers are well aware of it and said/did nothing about it during the recent extension of the Patriot Act ~ ~ Sooz

NYT Editorial Board Slams Obama On Tracking: ‘Administration Has Now Lost All Credibility’
Igor Bobic - 4:22 PM EDT, Thursday June 6, 2013

The New York Times editorial board pilloried the Obama administration on Thursday, after it was reported that the National Security Agency actively collects phone log records of millions of Americans under a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) order.

"The administration has now lost all credibility," the Times' editors write. "Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the 9/11 attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers."

They added: "We are not questioning the legality under the Patriot Act of the court order disclosed by The Guardian. But we strongly object to using that power in this manner. It is the very sort of thing against which Mr. Obama once railed, when he said in 2007 that the Bush administration’s surveillance policy “puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.”

http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/nyt-editorial-board-slams-obama-on-tracking-administration

Obama is black. He is a Dem. He was supposed to be a one term President.

Aw people now...this is one of those situations like a two headed coin: it could be said that when the repugs did it it was horribly evil, but since Obama's doing it it's ok because he wouldn't do evil....

Gotta call it like it is: it ain't nice, no matter who does it!

Post 9/11 fear worked.
Now deal with the consequences of an Al Qaeda victory.

Here's the info in a nutshell ~ I still don't like the broad mandate, but I think a solid case can be made for keeping this warrant alive with respect to certain people/numbers ~ and I'm guessing the NSA and any other agency involved are focused on specific people/numbers called or calling ~ Sooz

What You Should Know About The Government’s Massive Domestic Surveillance Program
By Igor Volsky on Jun 6, 2013 at 9:29 am

The Guardian newspaper revealed on Wednesday night that the National Security Administration (NSA) is collecting information about the telephone records of millions of Americans through a warrant obtained in a secret court under authority granted in the Patriot Act. This is the first public confirmation that widespread surveillance of Americans, initiated under President George W. Bush in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks, has continued under the Obama administration. The program captures phone numbers and other information, but not the content of the conversations.

Warrantless surveillance began shortly after the September 2001 terrorist attacks. The Bush administration began a secret surveillance program in 2001, asking AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth to turn over communications records to the National Security Agency (NSA). The agency’s goal was “to create a database of every call ever made” within the nation’s borders, the USA Today reported in 2006.

Program fell under court supervision in 2007. Following public uproar, the administration placed the program under the surveillance of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). In 2008, Congress expanded the Act to allow both foreign and domestic surveillance “as long as the intent is to gather foreign intelligence.” The measure also provided “retroactive immunity to the telecom companies that assisted the Bush administration.”

Congress extended the law through 2017. In December of 2012, Congress voted to reauthorize The FISA Amendments Act until 2017. The Act “allows federal agencies to eavesdrop on communications and review email” with a warrant from the secret FISA court. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), a critic of the program, offered an amendment during floor debate that would have required the NSA disclose an estimate of how often information on Americans was collected and require authorities to obtain a warrant if they wish to search for private information in the NSA databases. In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Wyden, along with Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO), wrote, “We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted section 215 of the Patriot Act.” Wyden and Udall also noted that the administration promised August 2009 to establish “a regular process for reviewing, redacting and releasing significant opinions” of the court, though “not a single redacted opinion has been released.”

What the Verizon order says. The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ordered Verizon — which has 121 million customers — to turn over metadata “on an ongoing daily basis” for a three-month period between April 25, 2013 and July 19, 2013. The order does not require Verizon to turn over the content of the calls, but it must share information about the numbers dialed, received and length of call.

What civil libertarians say. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) criticized the administration’s order, noting that “From a civil liberties perspective, the program could hardly be any more alarming.” “It’s a program in which some untold number of innocent people have been put under the constant surveillance of government agents,” Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU’s deputy legal director, said in a statement. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) also criticized the order. “This bulk data collection is being done under interpretations of the law that have been kept secret from the public,” he said. “Significant FISA court opinions that determine the scope of our laws should be declassified. Can the FBI or the NSA really claim that they need data scooped up on tens of millions of Americans?”

What the Patriot Act says. The order falls under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allows the government to make broad demands on telephone carriers for information about calls. Under the law, the government isn’t required to show probable cause, but rather, “there are reasonable grounds to believe” that the tangible things sought are “relevant to an authorized investigation . . . to obtain foreign intelligence information. . . or to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.” An expert told the Washington Post that the order “appears to be a routine renewal of a similar order first issued by the same court in 2006.” The order is apparently “reissued routinely every 90 days and that it is not related to any particular investigation by the FBI or any other agency.”

How the government is responding. The White House responded to the Guardian story by insisting that the data is a “critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States.” “It allows counter terrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States,” an official said. Officials say they will investigate the source of the leak to the Guardian.

Update: During a press conference, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) said that the order the Guardian obtained is “the exact three-month renewal” of program underway for the past seven years. “It’s called protecting America,” she said. Asked if other phone companies are giving similar data to NSA, the senators said, “We can’t answer that.”

Update: The Week has more on how the information is stored and accessed.

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2013/06/06/2111741/what-you-should-know-about-the-governments-massive-domestic-surveillance-program/

This is an interesting read ~ the one thing the author seems to suggest that is misleading is that this has been happening "... since April" ~ apparently the warrant is only "live" for 90 days, so every 3 months it is renewed ~ in fact, this has been happening for a number of years ~ Sooz

What telephone metadata can tell the authorities about you
By James Ball, The Guardian
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 21:22 EDT

When does mass data collection get personal? When it comes to the contents of our communications – what we say on the phone, or in emails – most people agree that’s private information, and so does US law and the constitution. But when it comes to who we speak to, and where we were when we did it, matters get far hazier.

That clash has been highlighted by a top secret court order obtained by the Guardian, which reveals the large-scale collection by the NSA of the call records of millions of Verizon customers, daily, since April.

The court order doesn’t allow the NSA to collect any information whatsoever on the contents of phone calls, or even to obtain any names or addresses of customers.

What’s covered instead is known as “metadata”: the phone number of every caller and recipient; the unique serial number of the phones involved; the time and duration of each phone call; and potentially the location of each of the participants when the call happened.

All of this information is being collected on millions of calls every day – every conversation taking place within the US, or between the US and a foreign country is collected.

The government has long argued that this information isn’t private or personal. It is, they say, the equivalent of looking at the envelope of a letter: what’s written on the outside is simple, functional information that’s essentially already public.

That forms the basis of collection: because it’s not personal information, but rather “transactional” or “business” data, there’s no need to show probable cause to collect it. Collection is also helped by the fact this information is already disclosed by callers to their carriers – because your phone number is shared with your provider, you’re not treating it as private.

But that is not a view shared by privacy advocates. Groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation say that by knowing who an individual speaks to, and when, and for how long, intelligence agencies can build up a detailed picture of that person, their social network, and more. Collecting information on where people are during the calls colours in that picture even further.

One recent case that highlights this tension is the recent subpoenas of the call records of Associated Press journalists, which led to clashes between the media and the White House over what was widely seen as intrusion into a free press.

The information collected on the AP was telephony metadata: precisely what the court order against Verizon shows is being collected by the NSA on millions of Americans every day.

Gary Pruitt, the president of the Associated Press, set forth how monitoring even these “envelopes” could become a serious intrusion: “These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.”

The view on whether such “transactional” data is personal, and how intrusive it can be, is also being tested in the appellate courts, and the supreme court is likely to see more cases on the issue in the near future.

Discussing the use of GPS data collected from mobile phones, an appellate court noted that even location information on its own could reveal a person’s secrets: “A person who knows all of another’s travels can deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups,” it read, “and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts.”

The primary purpose of large-scale databases such as the NSA’s call records is generally said to be data-mining: rather than examining individuals, algorithms are used to find patterns of unusual activity that may mark terrorism or criminal conspiracies.

However, collection and storage of this information gives government a power it’s previously lacked: easy and retroactive surveillance.

If authorities become interested in an individual at a later stage, and obtain their number, officials can look back through the data and gather their movements, social network, and more – possibly for several years (although the secret court order only allows for three months of data collection).

In essence, you’re being watched; the government just doesn’t know your name while it’s doing it.

Until now, such actions have been kept a tightly guarded and classified secret, speculated upon, suspected, and occasionally disclosed by sources, but never proven by documents.

Now the confirmation is in the open, the American public have the opportunity to decide which definition of private information they prefer: that of the privacy advocates, or that of the NSA and White House.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/06/05/what-telephone-metadata-can-tell-the-authorities-about-you/

Gosh, that reminds me of the big ears at Raisting, a small village in Upper Bavaria, where the Americans listened to phone conversation within Bavaria and long distance calls to everywhere else in the world. That was common knowledge back in the 80s and nobody even wondered about warrants from the NSA. It's been dismantled by now since new technology was introduced making the huge listening dishes obsolete.

The court order doesn’t allow the NSA to collect any information whatsoever on the contents of phone calls, or even to obtain any names or addresses of customers.

The government already has the content of every phone call, cel call, e-mail and fax. the ECHELON program is a five country program that has been running for decades and records every phone/cel/fax and e-mail sent. It's freaking incredible and scary.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

See, I look at it very differently. It's not scary, because they haven't ever had, do not have now, nor will ever have enough people to look at all of that stuff. How many people would be in those five countries? Around a half billion. As I said in another thread, they look for key words and then take another look. If that amounts to nothing, they move on. I'm sure they are very adept at weeding out the crap when they need to.

Recording it and looking at it are two different things. Every visit to your doctor is recorded, every birth, marriage, divorce or death. Somewhere, your entire life is recorded.

This commentary, coupled with roseanne's prior post, pretty much sums up my own feelings ~ and apparently the NYT has modified it's blistering original editorial by adding the italicized/bolded words in the sentence that now reads "The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue." ~ the world has "advanced", becoming MUCH more complicated and dangerous since the days of Ozzie & Harriet ~ and while some information is readily available, other [hacked] information often lacks context and knowledge ~ while I still do NOT like the broad mandate, I recognize the necessity for the program as part of a comprehensive security measure ~ there are "live links" to more/corroborating info in the original ~ Sooz

As NY Times Attacks Obama, Records Declassified To Put NSA Program In Proper Perspective
Author: Lorraine Devon Wilke 3:04 pm

Oh, to be president. To be in a position of such responsibility, demand, trust and foresight. To be expected to solve problems, prevent problems, imagine problems that will need to be solved later and then solve them now… and do it all while making everyone in every group, faction, subculture, race, religion, creed, color, or political party happy. Can’t be done, can it?

But every president tries. We at least believe that. Unless you decide to believe that a president is, at his core, a Machiavellian, manipulative, conniving, amoral puppet-master out to ensnare his electorate into a web of entrapment and oppression, sucked dry of civil liberties and a presumption of privacy. Do we believe that about our current president? Some do… certainly we’ve heard from a lot of them over the years of Obama’s administration And now, it seems, venerable 4th Estate behemoth, The New York Times, does as well. Or at least enough that their Editorial Board has written a scathing editorial titled, President Obama’s Dragnet, in which they excoriate Obama in response to the recent reveal of the national security phone records program:


So, based on the article of another paper, they’ve decided to take a loud, public stand against the president. Hmmm. Here are just a few of the salient comments in response to the editorial:


Of course, there are just as many comments in fierce agreement with the NY Times; I’m not including them only because we know that drill; the heated rhetoric has reached oversaturation point, widely disseminated and zealously conspiratorial: our president is Satan, Stalin, Machiavelli, the sum of all evil, so on and so on. What was more interesting to me were the counterpoints; the comments of those who seem willing to look at the history of this situation (and as much as the right HATES when things are blamed on Bush, they really cannot erase the chronology of the Patriot Act), the nuances required of a president in balancing national security against civil liberties, and the general sense that President Obama is NOT twirling his mustache (I know he doesn’t have one…) while gloating over his oppression of the masses. Of course, if you hold to the notion that he is, and many people do, any and all nefarious intent can be applied to his actions… and they are. Even by the New York Times.

Curiously, or perhaps in purposeful timing, the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, made an “unusual late-night statement” Thursday night, taking his own strong stand against those who leaked the highly classified documents that outed the phone records programs in the first place, claiming it puts security at risk by alerting America’s enemies to the tactic, causing them, among other things, to change behaviors accordingly, making their intentions and potential planned actions harder to detect. From the Huffington Post:


Of course it is, but the problem with the way information is processed in this country, by an electorate that has long proven its willingness to believe lies, dismiss truth, eschew nuance, scream conspiracy, and denounce fact, is that nothing is ever viewed on face value, on its sheer reality. Instead, lines are drawn, sides are taken, intractable positions are held. From there, based on party affiliation, one’s level of embrace of conspiracy memes, or their general half-empty/half-full philosophy of life, people often reject truth. Reject information as it is presented. Suspicion reigns, with eyes close, ears plugged and mouths opened.

As various members of Congress spoke out harshly against the phone records program (Rand Paul, R-Ky, called it an “astounding assault on the Constitution”), officials from Clapper’s office, as well as from the Justice Department, NSA, and the FBI, briefed 27 senators late Thursday in an attempt to clarify the fine-points of the program.


I laughed when I read the word “accidentally,” knowing full well that this verbiage will surely stir up conspiracy theorists to heatedly parse just what’s “accidental.” I can hardly blame them on that one!

But the President himself spoke out about this for the first time today, making what, to many, is the most elemental point:


Certainly civil liberties are essential to every American; our country was founded on the principle and we hold dear our rights to privacy in every area of our lives. But we are no longer in the world of the 17oos; we are in a world of sophisticated terrorist networks, thuggish criminals hell-bent on fulfilling zealous crusades; global enemies who have no compunction about inflicting mass destruction on a country once protected by muskets and bayonets. And far from the days of town criers and the Pony Express, we now have a brilliant, instant and international information network that allows communication between our enemies to be transacted in the blink of an eye. And it is in this world we expect our leaders to keep us safe. Can we reconcile the challenge of that?

It would seem many cannot. As one commenter put it, we cannot have it both ways; we cannot expect our leaders to leave no stone unturned to protect us from terrorists and those who would do us harm, then caterwaul when one of those stones is the accrual of phone records that might assist in identifying a planned attack. But still… we do.

Even The Guardian, which was the source many other media outlets’ information and opinion (including the New York Times), made the following point on which the Huffington Post extrapolated:


The fact is, as many commenters on the NY Times editorial pointed out, the Patriot Act was birthed by the Bush Administration and most on the right not only supported it, but felt it was an essential tool to preventing another 9/11. It either has or no other such attack was planned anyway… we’ll never truly know. But do we, as Americans, feel confident enough that it won’t happen again that we’d push against measures such as these in lieu of our privacy? Or, just as we’ve gotten used to taking off our shoes and subjecting ourselves to airport scans, can we accept that these times demand a personal sacrifice of some privacy for the greater good. as the President stated?

The NY Times editorial concludes with this:


Perhaps, however, what the President discovered upon taking office is the fact of governing, not the presumption. Perhaps upon bearing the title and responsibility of President of the United States, he came to find the demand for hard choices, decisions and actions that, prior to the presidency, he had not been fully aware existed… just as none of us can presume to know the minutia, details, and sheer glut of expectation and responsibility a president faces every day in making those exact choices between “liberties we cherish and the security we provide.”

As for this president, the one the New York Times has decided to take to task, if one chooses to believe the man is, indeed, Satan/Stalin, one will see his intent as malicious. If, instead, one believes he is a moral, compassionate, but dedicated leader who understands the demand of his office and meets it as best he can despite choices that are not popular, choices that we, as constituents, may not fully understand or see the nuances of, then you’ll stand firm and take a temperate, hopeful view. Half-empty or half-full.

For what it’s worth, and despite the knee-jerk tendency of Republicans to kick Obama any chance they get, I’ll leave you with GOP attack dog Senator Lindsay Graham’s take on the whole thing:


http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/06/07/as-ny-times-attacks-obama-records-declassified-to-put-nsa-program-in-proper-perspective/

Okay, there is a thread here called "NSA/Spying". GREAT TITLE! It's descriptive. I posted my comments there.

Then there's this thread titled "Something else I don't understand" which has 50,000 posts about the NSA/Spying issue!

I don't mean to sound critical, but how is someone looking at the Table of Contents page supposed to know that this thread is a discussion about the NSA issue?!

I'm leaving my post in the other thread since that has the better title. You can all go over there to read it!

sooz, you can move my thread into this one, if you want. When I posted that, I had forgotten where this thread was, or the title. If I had taken a moment to do a search, it wouldn't be an issue. My apologies. When I post from work, sometimes I don't have the time.

I will be posting here from now on.

I didn't even know we have a "table of contents".

Not a problem, roseanne ~ we've all done that at one time or another ~ myself AND SciFi included ~

Sorry you don't like some of our titling, SciFi ~ most of us click on threads to see what they're about ~ and, FTR, if this thread had "50,000 posts", it would most definitely improve our recent numbers ~ also FTR, I replied to your thread in the other thread ~ I didn't see it as a hardship ~

Sooz

I've been considering all of this and from reading some articles, I wondered if Edward Snowden is mentally ill. The few snippets of things I've read certainly indicate that he is paranoid and delusional. He says that he has "been a spy most of my adult life". Huh? It almost looks like he took the job at NSA with the express purpose of exposing their programs and may have been in cahoots with the reporter. I'm sure we will find out eventually.

Here is just one line from an article I read this morning:

He's worried he's being watched and puts a red hood over his head and laptop when he enters passwords.

http://news.ca.msn.com/top-stories/what ... rd-snowden

As roseanne noted above, something is just "off" about Ed Snowden ~ here's some background on him, which opens/leaves MANY questions in my own mind ~ Sooz

A Guide To The Career Of Edward Snowden
Eric Lach- June 10, 2013, 3:44 PM

At the start of the video that served as his coming out to the world, the man behind the recent National Security Agency leaks looked, for a moment, directly into the camera.

“My name is Ed Snowden, I’m 29 years old, I work for Booz Allen Hamilton as an infrastructure analyst for [the] NSA, in Hawaii,” Snowden told The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, in an on-camera interview the newspaper put online on Sunday. “I have been a systems engineer, a systems administrator, [a] senior advisor for the Central Intelligence Agency’s solutions consultant, and a telecommunications information systems officer.”

And with that, the NSA leak story had a face. Snowden, who sat for the interview with The Guardians’ Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras in Hong Kong on June 6, wore a button-down shirt left open at the top, partially rimless glasses, and a sweep of stubble. The accounts he gave to both The Guardian and The Washington Post, along with a few other press reports, have provided the first sketches of the man behind what may turn out to be one of the most significant national security leaks in American history.

“I’m no different from anybody else,” Snowden told The Guardian. “I don’t have special skills. I’m just another guy who sits there day to day in the office, watches what’s happening, and goes, ‘This is something that’s not our place to decide, the public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong.’”

Here are the bits and pieces of what we know so far about the life and career of Edward Snowden.

Growing Up

Various news outlets have confirmed Snowden’s date of birth with the U.S. Army: June 21, 1983.

Snowden told The Guardian that he grew up originally in Elizabeth City, N.C., but that his family later moved to Maryland where, according to The Guardian, they lived near the NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade.

Snowden’s father, Lonnie Snowden, spoke briefly with ABC News on Sunday, and said he last saw his son a few months ago for dinner. The Allentown (Penn.) Morning Call reported on Monday that Lonnie Snowden and Karen Snowden, Edward Snowden’s step-mother, currently live in Upper Macungie, Penn. (On Monday afternoon, the couple was visited by two people who identified themselves as FBI agents, according to the Morning Call.)

High School

Snowden told The Guardian that he was not a very good student in high school. He attended a community college in Maryland, and took computer classes, to try to get the credits he needed to graduate, but did not finish his coursework. He later got his GED. (According to The Post, meanwhile, “Snowden said he did not have a high school diploma.”)

The Army

In 2003, Snowden enlisted in the U.S. Army, he told The Guardian, and began a training program to join the Special Forces.

“I wanted to fight in the Iraq war because I felt like I had an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression,” Snowden told The Guardian.

But his time in the military did not last. According to Snowden, he was discharged after he broke both legs in a training accident. The Army confirmed Snowden’s enlistment to The Guardian on Monday, but did not provide details about his service record. According to the Army’s records, Snowden enlisted in 2004, not 2003.

“His records indicate he enlisted in the army reserve as a special forces recruit (18X) on 7 May 2004 but was discharged 28 September 2004,” an army spokesperson told The Guardian in an email. “He did not complete any training or receive any awards.”

The NSA

Following his stint in the Army, Snowden got a job working as a security guard for one of the NSA’s secret facilities at the University of Maryland, Snowden told The Guardian.

The CIA

From that NSA job, Snowden moved on to the Central Intelligence Agency. He worked on IT security and, according to The Guardian, “His understanding of the internet and his talent for computer programming enabled him to rise fairly quickly for someone who lacked even a high school diploma.”

In 2007, Snowden said he was stationed with diplomatic cover in Geneva, Switzerland, where he was responsible for maintaining computer network security. Snowden told The Guardian that his few years with the CIA “led him to begin seriously questioning the rightness of what he saw.”

From The Guardian:


Back To The NSA, But As A Contractor

In 2009, Snowden left the CIA, he told The Guardian. He took a job with a private contractor and was assigned to a NSA facility on a military base in Japan.

Booz Allen Hamilton

The Guardian reported Snowden spent the last four years working for various outside contractors, “including Booz Allen and Dell.” On Sunday, Booz Allen Hamilton, a major government contractor, confirmed that Snowden had been an employee of the firm for the last few months.

“Booz Allen can confirm that Edward Snowden, 29, has been an employee of our firm for less than 3 months, assigned to a team in Hawaii,” the company said in a statement. “News reports that this individual has claimed to have leaked classified information are shocking, and if accurate, this action represents a grave violation of the code of conduct and core values of our firm. We will work closely with our clients and authorities in their investigation of this matter.”

Until last month, Snowden had been living in Hawaii with a girlfriend. According to Civil Beat, a local news website, Snowden lived in a quiet suburban neighborhood on Oahu. The house he lived in is already up for sale. The place comes furnished, and is listed for $555,000

“You live a privileged life,” Snowden told The Guardian, of his life working and living in Hawaii. He claimed to make a salary of around $200,000. “You’re living in Hawaii, in paradise, and making a ton of money.”

A former senior U.S. intelligence official told the Post it wasn’t clear why a contractor for Booz Allen like Snowden would have would have access to material as sensitive as a court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

“I don’t know why he would have had access to those … orders out in Hawaii,” the former official said.

Snowden told The Guardian that he made his final preparations three weeks ago. At the NSA office where he worked, he copied the last set of documents he wanted to make public. He told his NSA supervisor that he would need a few weeks off work to receive treatment for epilepsy. He packed his belongings, and told his girlfriend that he had to go away for a few weeks.

On May 20, he boarded a plane for Hong Kong.

Hunter Walker contributed to this report.

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/06/edward_snowden_career.php?ref=fpb

I hear this Snowden fellow is being treated as something of a hero down there and that there are petitions for Obama to pardon him if he committed any crimes. Why should he be treated any differently that Bradley Manning, the Wikileaks guy? In fact, in some ways Snowden is worse since the stuff Manning released wasn't even secret. It was available to just about anybody in government.

I don't like this program. By itself it's bad enough but, when taken in conjunction with all the other extra-constitutional powers granted under the Patriot Act, the potential for abuse is way to high. The bar for being considered a potential "terrorist" isn't set very high so someone having even normal contact with someone the government suspects could easily find you on the "no-fly" list or even just "disappeared" under one act or another.

NYT is not liberal, despite what the right says.

I read that Mr. Snowden has "disappeared".

Snowden left his Hong Kong hotel and is thought to be in a "safe house" ~ he apparently gave some kind of interview today, still claiming that he's "not hiding" ~

Sooz

is thought to be in a "safe house"

Whose?
Has the US gummint ordered him assassinated?

why wouldn't they?

Because Republicans adore him for providing anti-Obama ammunition. Our young hero gives them a way to pretend they had nothing at all to do with what's going on, and they're "Outraged, outraged that the evil muslimsocialistliberalwhowasn'tbornhereandshouldn'tbeinoffice personallyorchestrated the whole thing and betrayed us all!!!" <wave the flag and praise god>

Indeed. It wouldn't be the first time. The only thing that has changed is that we now know that the US government orders assassinations whereas before we could only assume it.