Yeah, I think I said something about that. You can't track the two exactly, but that's the whole point of their trying every "terrorist" they can get their hand on in a military tribunal. Congress is scared to death to let the civilian criminal justice system try some of the GITMO folks, even though ti would have been called for.

Snowden wouldn't have been given the due process Ellsberg was given, not today.

Why Rich Lowry is wrong about Snowden and Civil Disobedience

My first thought was the same as Lowry's, civil disobedience requires one to make the system deal with them, to show through public trial and humiliation the wrongness of the policy/tax/cause being protested.

But compare the treatment of Daniel Ellsberg and the Nixon Administration to recent leakers:

Ellsberg was
1. arrested,
2. granted bail,
3. released and
4. allowed to participate in demonstrations against the War/White House/System
5. His trial was conducted in a public courtroom by the regular judicial system
6. All the cards were on the table in public view: gov't wiretapping, gov't break-ins, etc.

Now take recent whistleblowers, like Bradley Manning
1. Arrested
2. Charged and denied bail
3. stripped naked nightly
4. limited contact with the outside
5. in solitary confinement, limited human contact inside jail
6. no press contact
7. military trial, a great deal of it conducted secretly out of view of observers
8. access to secret courts, secret witnesses, secret information withheld from defense

(yes, I know why it's a military trial, but we all know that all court martials are essentially rigged. The UCMJ is to ensure obedience to regulations and good order, not truth and certainly are weak instruments when it comes to larger American policy changes. The same can be said of the GITOMO trials. Nothing more unAmerican since we locked up the Japanese).

Our Government has become a much crueler, less fair-minded, and more manipulative government since Nixon. I'd run too. Snowden would have gotten a "fair trial" by the government, but it would not be open and fair by American standards. It would be more of the kind of "fair trials" show trials we used to see in the USSR and Red China.

Why Matt Miller is Wrong About the NSA (from a Quora answer I wrote).

Rick H. Kennerly's answer to:

NSA Monitoring of Phone Records (June 2013): What is wrong in the data collection programs by the NSA and United States?

View All 7 Answers

Rick H. Kennerly, Reader, Thinker, Beekeeper, Gardener Edit Bio

The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.
--Wole Soyinka

What NSA is creating is a database of relationships in the US. What they're doing is called Signals Intelligence, something the military and spy agencies have been perfecting for hundreds of years.

WHAT is being said in the conversation is pretty much irrelevant. What matters are the RELATIONSHIPS. Consider this:

The gun folks were up in arms about the possibility of background checks being retained as a "confiscation list."

But the signals from two cell towers (two, so you know where the signals overlap) that both cover a gun store or gun range is even better. Grab every phone number (metadata) connected to the tower and store it. Relate positional information to the gun store or gun range.

Then begin tracking what NEW telephone numbers the telephone numbers you collected at the gun store/range contact and who they contact. This collection cascades into a master relationships database: some deadends, some "of interest," but all keepers because all data has value.

You'll also have their movements via cell tracking (even if GPS is turned off). So you can determine who met with whom, where and when. More importantly, the government will be smoking out those gun owners who'd purposely flown beneath the background check radar by only buying from individuals or at gun shows.

Instant confiscation list.

With powerful HADOOP processors in an array of servers with nearly unlimited storage and using sophisticated NO SQL search engines, you can, within a short time, pull together all the RELATIONSHIPS you should target.

Then, add in and link to web and email traffic (not the content, just the relationships) and the government has a nearly complete picture of your and your movements, your core beliefs, and your contacts.

It's also been revealed that the USPS has been electronically recording the address information on the outside of mail, so add that to the relationship mix, too.

Finally, the police have been deploying license plate readers on patrol cars. These readers process every plate the police car encounters in traffic comparing it with wanted and stolen plates. However, the data is retained. So, when linked with DMV records and your cellphone, add that to the data pile of what the government knows about you and can track....even if you turn off your cellphone. Notice all the traffic cameras around: at intersections, along freeways.

License plates are easy to read and catalog and the software is getting better all the time.

Now, if you believe that the government is benign and you've got nothing to hide, that's naive. Maybe not this administration, but some administration --maybe some administration in your child's adult days-- will be tempted to use this information against the citizens...or more likely, some subset of citizens.

Add in the various "watch lists" the government maintains and you should be concerned, at the least.

You'll notice how quickly the politicians and the administration are to label some person or group a terrorist. So, who can be targeted as "terrorists" using this data:

Gun Owners
Occupy Wall Street protesters
Anti-G8 protesters
People of religion or a subset of some religion
anti-war protesters
animal rights activists
school reformers
the poor
the rich
business owners
environmentalists
oil-frackers
soccer moms
Republicans
Democrats

All it takes for your government to turn on you is for you to join some group actively opposing what government or some subset of government is doing and you, too, can be labeled a terrorist.

And, because this information is actually in the hands of security contractors, any business can come after you as well.

All of us would have trouble trying to account for every movement, every verbal shot fired in anger on the internet, every meeting, every telephone call. They --business or the government-- can break you just by keeping your in court for years.

The real danger is that you let the fear of being targeted keep you from participating, from correcting the government when it's wrong. All it takes is a few highly publicised examples to have a chilling effect on any resistance to the government's will.

Sure this Texas kid was dumb, but this is what happens when the government turns the full weight of the system on you because of an immature joke:

'LOL, JK': Texas teen faces 8 years in prison for making 'terroristic threat' online 'LOL, JK': Texas teen faces 8 years in prison for making 'terroristic threat' online

little rough on the coasties, aren't you? If I were a young man looking for an adventurous life of service, I'd join the coast guard: search & rescue, drug interdiction, port security.

I'd certainly not recommend the Army right now, just for promotion reasons. The fighting is just about over for this generation of soldiers. Those who didn't get bloodied are going to be severely handicapped in the Army without a CIB.

No, military compensation is the cost of citizens paying substitutes to avoid military service themselves.

OTOH, our generous compensation also what allows our civilian minders to waste military resources in poorly thought out interventions.

I agree. The whole premise is flawed.

California seems to be an example of the worst excesses of both liberalism and conservatism. What's amazing is the lack of political guts in the legislature to actually deal with the crisis.

So, what caused the current problem?

What's most troubling about this bust is that we didn't get anything for it. After the .com bust we were left with a massively overbuilt fiber optic backbone (thank's WorldCom). After this bust all we are left with are a bunch of shitty-built houses in places nobody wants to live that has no jobs.

Insurance providers taking a profit is not what has broken our system, lack of choice is why things are bad.

Oh, I disagree. I think that this the heart of the matter. In order to earn a profit, a company should provide some value added aspect to a participant's health care. I just don't see it in this system for the reasons I listed when I started this thread.

I cannot help but notice that the post just above me correctly corrects Adrianna's misreading of the Bible. (Christian and Jewish proscribe homosexuality. But she is right that it is not mentioned 100th of the time that concern for the weak and poor is.)

But her broader point is that there are a lot of prohibitions in the Bible that are routinely ignored as well: eating shellfish, pork, and growing beards come to mind. The Bible is pretty much an ala carte book in the West.