Oh so now we're implying Snowden could be compared with MLK, eh? Despite declining to do so earlier.Vrede wrote:... a drunken rush hour stumble down the middle of the Edmund Pettus Bridge is different from what happened on Bloody Sunday.
I've got a story for you. Back in the stone age when I was in a group whose main project was keeping up with Middle Eastern events, we collected whatever signals found their way to the giant antenna farm. You might look for specific signals, which changed frequencies frequently, but the work also involved a lot of scanning. Many signals found were not exactly "targets" but often proved worthwhile. Signals monitored included a wide variety of entities, not everyone of whom would have been considered "opposition." Not all of whom were governmental or military. But by having a "wide angle" view, we could pick out the good stuff in context, and in the course of being pretty good at our jobs, managed to make a difference - to affect future events, if you want to be accurate but overly dramatic. One of the monitors was running open channel international teletype, and among the mundane, you might occasionally find something to chuckle over. But I can't imagine anybody in that group having the time or interest to do anything with those messages. Of course, now, somebody might post it on FaceBook or Tweet it, but that's a different issue.
But intelligence gathering has a lot of pretend and hypocrisy attached to it. The Russians knew our antenna field didn't go with a beachfront resort; we knew their "fishing boats" weren't after snapper. There was a hot-shot Egyptian pilot that wanted to shoot down one of our planes, and his ground control told him, "don't worry about it - it's just an American reconnaissance plane that flies there every Wednesday." But knowing something, and having it public are two different things. Much like Louie Anderson's joke about being fat - "people look at me and think, 'I wonder if he knows he's fat.' No, I just woke up one morning and looked in the mirror and said, 'oh shit! I'm fat!'" But knowing he's fat, and knowing you know he's fat isn't the same as posting a picture in ridicule. Elizabeth probably knew John was a scum bag, but her response had to be different once the Enquirer went public with it all. The intelligence community isn't very honest - that's part of the job description, but everybody knows it. When forced to face knowledge publicly, things get different - and not usually for the best.
