Snowdon is a dummy

I think you have a point that Snowden did not trust the US institutions to do anything with the info, other than report him to the FBI. Otherwise he would have tried that route. He thought his only option was to leak it to the press so that the PEOPLE would know.

I will finish this, Olivier.

Quote:

I will finish this, Olivier.

If that's so important for you, I can let you finish it anytime... Or do you want to drag it down to the shaking 'n rolling emoticons stage? You know, the part where it becomes real wild here on A2K, and I get to leave, shaking my head in disbelief at the--what were your words again?--the “decent arguments and willingness to take on simplistic thinking” so typical of this place…

If he illegally copied documents and then attempted to give them to senators or congressman or some kind of civil rights group, I would hope they would turn in him to the FBI.

However, that is not what I and others (such as that long article from slate I posted)have suggested he should have done. What he should have done, was just simply tell people what he had seen and witness with his eyes if he found so much abuses going on at NSA.

He didn't have to break the law by copying the documents, giving it to unauthorized persons who have those documents to do with what they want anywhere in the world, or worse, someone else being able to copy them. After all it was done once, despite all the precautions being taken to safeguard it, someone if they want will be able to figure it out sooner or later.

The rest is just scaremongering.

Talking about the surveillance programs to someone not accredited would have been breaking his oath just the same

At least then he would have had at a chance of a whistleblower status

Here we go...

Aaaaaargh! That chicken just killed me.... I can stand the heat of your puerile arguments, Frank.

As an aside (because I'm actually reading scripts of phone calls of the period):
- in Berlin alone 486 Stasi officers listened 24/24 in 40 "studios" to phone calls. But even in 1989, in all of the GDR the Stasi could only listen to 4,000 calls at the same time.
That Stasi department MfS-Abteilung 26 was the largest in Berlin. The situation in other regional Stasi headquarters was similar.

The reason for this surveillance (which was in more than 90% illegal to the official GDAR-law) was quite simple: getting "capitalistic terrorists" and their domestic partners.
None was found by phone call surveillance.

Okay, back to Frank vs. Olivier.

That should read: I CAN'T stand the heat of...

Sorry for the lapsus.

There is no whistleblower exception in the Espionage Act.

Even if they wanted to...it is virtually impossible.
That's what the Stasi noticed as well - the phone-hacking departments were there largest units, and they couldn't follow all calls (even with the small number of those in the GDR).

What they are looking for are indications and patterns of contacts with known suspects...so that a chance of intercepting something of consequences is more likely.