Snowdon is a dummy

I'm curious as to how the US has bullied the UK.

I am an American and an Anglophile. I'm one of the minority of people who enjoy the Monarchy and am looking anxiously to the new arrival, the future king or queen of England to be born any minute. I remember setting my alarm to wake up and watch the marriage of Diana and Charles!

Of course there will always be individuals from any country who will rub us the wrong way, but nothing will ever alter my love for the UK.

Oh, as an afterthought, anytime a royal visits the US there is usually an overflow crowd.

The case of Edward Snowden remains in the international spotlight. Yet even in Europe, there's little protection for those who point out corruption, crime and wrongdoing, explains Transparency International's Mark Worth.

Mark Worth: The only country in the EU that has a strong whistleblower law and where there is a somewhat well functioning enforcement system is the UK. Britain has had a law on the books since 1998 that protects employees in the public and private and also the non-profit sectors. So if you follow the procedure to blow the whistle on wrongdoing, corruption, crime and so forth and it is in the public interest, then you'd be legally protected from being fired, demoted, harassed, or being transferred against your will. That law has been on the books since 1998.
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Hungary has a similar law that protects people in the private and public sectors ...
Three other countries - Romania, Luxemburg and Slovenia - have laws that protect whistleblowers but the laws are more limited in scope and in the case of Luxembourg and Slovenia are included in broader anti-corruption legislation. The other 22 EU countries either have very limited or basically no legal protection for whistleblowers specifically.
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The fact remains that whistleblowing is a proven mechanism to fight crime, expose corruption and wrongdoing. There is absolutely no reason that you should be retaliated against for doing the right thing. That doesn't make sense on any level.
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When a multinational company, as much American owned as British spilled oil on America's coastline Obama made a point of referring to it as British Petroleum, not BP.

Frank Apisa wrote:

We've actually got a better handle on things...than most powerful nations have been in the past.

Really? The thing is, Americans are very quick to condemn the British Empire, until that is, they are trying to explain their actions in the here and now.

America claims to have higher values, freedom, democracy, human rights and all that, but when their real, dollar orientated, fat cat capitalist, values are exposed, they cite imperialist nations as a precedent.

You can't have it both ways.

Why do you think the US is so wildly popular in Latin America? What could possibly cause Venezuela to grant Snowden political asylum?

Again, what benefits do you think the 'special relationship' has brought Britain?

Have your bases protected us, or have they just made us a target?

I think many Brits resent the fact that they pay the Royals over $60 million every year for what amounts to titular duties.

I'm not reviling you, just pointing out that you want to have it both ways. You can't attack previous imperial powers for disgraceful conduct, then use their historic actions to justify your own.

If you're willing to accept that America's actions are not that different from those of the British Empire we could come to an accord.

Is America the 'last best hope for mankind,' or just another superpower?

(If any of this intelligence gathering that we are doing leads to a high probability of an attack on some event or location in England...are the English going to say that they do not want to know about it because it was obtained in a way to which they have objections???)

"This was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.” Barak Obama.


I still fail to see how the mass collection of data about innocent people protects America in any way. I think a foreign, dominant power collecting data on me and my children is a threat to my freedom.

Frank Apisa wrote:

(If any of this intelligence gathering that we are doing leads to a high probability of an attack on some event or location in England...are the English going to say that they do not want to know about it because it was obtained in a way to which they have objections???)

We'd rather you didn't do it, especially if it's causing attacks in the UK.

If America discovered a terrorist threat in the UK I doubt very much that it would be as a result of prism type mass data collection.

If you look at the recent coordinated action against paedophiles, this came about by targeting certain websites, not mass data trawling.

I wouldn't automatically assume that if America did uncover a threat to the UK they would let us know.

It would all depend on prevailing conditions at the time. If the British public were decidedly lukewarm about the 'war on terror,' ( a ridiculous term btw that gives criminals the legitimacy of POWs,) the Americans may decide to let the attack go ahead in order to strengthen British resolve.

9/11, as I wrote at the time, opened the national checkbook to over-react and over-spend on intelligence. As a result what we as a nation are doing is recording every piece of data we can get. We say we are doing so to detect and prevent terrorist acts but more properly our agencies expect to use the data for post-event analysis — going back and figuring out what happened just as law enforcement did after the Boston Marathon blasts.

The biggest problem with these programs (there are many) is that we inevitably play fast-and-loose with the data, which is exactly one of the tidbits dropped by Edward Snowden. Feds and fed contractors are every day looking at things like their own lovers and celebrities they know they aren’t supposed to check on, but what the heck? And the FISA Court? It can’t take action against something it knows nothing about.

When I started working on this column my idea was to look at Snowden from a Human Resources perspective. If government and contractor HR were better, for example, Snowden would never have been hired or he would have been better indoctrinated and never squealed. Snowden is an HR nightmare.

But having talked to a couple really good HR people, I think the Snowden problem goes far beyond better filtering and training to an underlying paradox that I’m sure bedevils every administration, each one suffering more than the one before it as technology further infiltrates our lives.

Nothing is as it seems, you see, so every innocent (and that’s where we all begin) is inevitably disappointed and then corrupted by the realities of public service.

President Obama campaigned in 2008 as an outsider who was going to change things but quickly became an insider who didn’t change all that much, presumably because he came to see the nuances and shades of gray where on the campaign trail things had seemed so black and white. But when that shift happened from black-and-white to gray, someone forgot to send a memo to the Edward Snowdens, who were expected to just follow orders and comply. But this is a generation that doesn’t like to follow orders and comply.

Sitting as he did on the periphery of empire, Snowden and his concerns were not only ignored, they were unknown, and for an intelligence agency to not even know it had an employee ready to blow is especially damning.

So what happens now? The story devolves into soap opera as Snowden seeks refuge as in a Faulkner novel. Maybe he releases a further bombshell or two, maybe he doesn’t. But the circumstances strongly suggest that we’ll see more Edward Snowdens in the future, because little or nothing seems to be happening to fix the underlying problems.
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You are over the line.

Whatever. If you want to think that of us...nothing I will say will change your mind...so go with it.