Edward Snowden came forward as the source of NSA leaks. Cable news hosts treated it with as much subtlety and insight as they could muster.
TPM Reader FG hits on one of the points I’ve wondered about too. Should we really be so surprised that Snowden had the vast access he claims when Manning, a very junior Army intelligence analyst, had access to everything he did? Read More
Another take from TPM Reader DC …
First let me say that I greatly appreciate your thoughtful exploration of the whole NSA leak saga. Given a past history on my part of leftist kneejerkism, I am trying in this case to look more like a scientist and observer as what it all means, and what are the real facts versus the first news stories.
Apart from many of the concerns expressed by others (the need to look for terrorist threats that are indeed real, the need to prevent a high tech version of the domestic monitoring that took place in the red scare era and in the Vietnam war era) there are two things that stand out to me as big issues.
I’ve been writing out some notes for a piece about the starkly different reactions different people are having to the Snowden story and what different assumptions we bring to it. But first I wanted to flag a couple other points. We’re going to be doing a lot of reporting on Snowden’s pre-leak career, trying to piece together and confirm what we can about his background, what if anything doesn’t match up between his account and what we can find out from other sources and so forth. So that’s coming. One of the basic questions I’m interested in is whether Snowden really had quite the level of access and power he claimed in his interview with the Guardian.
In part this is just because it’s worth knowing the credibility and motives of someone at the center of such a major story. But there are two other reasons I’m particularly interested in this. Read More
I flagged yesterday evening the asides in the Guardian and AP pieces noting that police and/or investigators of some sort had visited Snowden’s former home in Hawaii on Wednesday – after the original Guardian revelation but well before he revealed himself over the weekend. New reports say counter-intelligence suspicion immediately fell on Snowden as soon as the first Guardian piece on the Verizon/FISA order appeared, in part because of his disappearance from Hawaii.
I just saw this fascinating thread over at TPMPrime “Wait, Josh Is On the Fence on Surveillance?” I just joined the debate. If you’re a Prime member, come on over and share your thoughts.
From TPM Reader SG …
Hi, longtime reader here. I want to register my opinion on a couple of things.
1. I am surprised at how much you are willing to be caught up in evaluating Snowden as a messenger. It seems to me the authenticity of the materials he has provided is not seriously in question. We have these “denials” from corporations, but the intelligence community seems not to be denying anything, but rather to be claiming that we in the public don’t really understand and that the release of the info is damaging.
My friend and mentor John Judis has a piece out in The New Republic putting today’s news in the context the low-level harassment and surveillance he was put under as a pretty unthreatening New Left radical journalist back in the 60s and early 70s. I can see that John and I are coming at this whole story from pretty different sides. But John’s a smart enough guy and I’ve seen enough times when he saw things that I missed and got things right that I got wrong that I wanted to link to his piece.