Snowdon is a dummy

Well, you know it's illegal to lie to Congress, but everyone lies to Congress. As soon as they raise their right hand, watch out! Clapper should be held responsible, but he won't be, because that's the condition we're in right now. In a just world, Snowden, we'd be having ticker tape parades for him. But that's not what's going to happen.

[....] We have the CIA, the FBI, a dozen other intelligence infrastructures. Frankly -- and I'm saying this with a lifetime's experience in government here -- it's time to punch the NSA's ticket here. They've ruined the brand. They've destroyed the idea of privacy. We need some kind of symbolic and profound approach here, that says, 'look, you've violated something that's very dear to the American people -- you don't get to do that.' We talk about the death penalty for individuals, which I oppose, but I think there needs to be for government agencies that so broadly betray the public interest, there needs to be a measure of responsibility. And if they go beyond the pale, which the NSA has, they just ought to be abolished. We don't need the spying.

LONDON - Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who first published the contents of classified documents provided by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden, said Monday that Britain will "regret” detaining and questioning his partner.

"I will be more aggressive in my reporting from now,” he told reporters in Portuguese at Rio de Janeiro’s airport where he met his boyfriend David Miranda who had flown from London to Brazil.
"I have many more documents to report on, including ones about the UK, where I'll now focus more," he said. "It'll backfire. I think they'll come to regret it."

As a free society we need to be aware of what we're doing in the world, both at home and abroad.

I see him as a whistleblower and ideologue who felt the need to expose what he saw as a serious miscarriage of our democracy.

On Snowden, in my opinion, he broke the law, he needs to answer for it,

On any compulsion with anyone breaking a law.

Earnest is asked again about Miranda's detention. He repeats his earlier assertion that it was a decision taken by the British government, "without involvement, and not at the request, of the United States government".

"In terms of the kind of classified confidential conversations that are ongoing between the US and our allies in Britain, I'm not able to characterise those for you."

Earnest's responses are prompting some scepticism online.

Earnest's responses are prompting some scepticism online.

Probably no problem.