I know I'll get downvoted for this. Please be a contributing community member of HN and state why.
Have any of the NSA leaks told us anything we don't know? Haven't the majority of the leaks told our foreign enemies how to avoid being tracked more than anything? I have yet to see any serious abuse of the NSA's power. The fact that they know that low level employees were spying on potential love interests means that they have a system in place to track such abuses. Leaking those kind of emails can be spun to state the opposite, when those emails are direct evidence that such abuses are tracked and presumably punished.
I've seen articles that have said "what if they use this power to subvert political dissidents" Well, what if they actually have checks built into this system as they have claimed and this new information proves? Such rumor spinning gets us nowhere as a society. Wouldn't that make Snowden a spy with his own self interests at heart, not the interests of the American people? Leaking piece-meal like he has is in his interests, not ours.
Look at the scope of these systems. The fact that no abuses have come up (locally) is quite telling, imho. When this same type of hardware is in the hands of countries like China, we see these abuses. Is China seeing something we don't and just not telling us? I highly doubt it.
Have any of the NSA leaks told us anything we don't know? Haven't the majority of the leaks told our foreign enemies how to avoid being tracked more than anything? I have yet to see any serious abuse of the NSA's power. The fact that they know that low level employees were spying on potential love interests means that they have a system in place to track such abuses. Leaking those kind of emails can be spun to state the opposite, when those emails are direct evidence that such abuses are tracked and presumably punished.
I've seen articles that have said "what if they use this power to subvert political dissidents" Well, what if they actually have checks built into this system as they have claimed and this new information proves? Such rumor spinning gets us nowhere as a society. Wouldn't that make Snowden a spy with his own self interests at heart, not the interests of the American people? Leaking piece-meal like he has is in his interests, not ours.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_mass_surveillance_disclosu...
Look at the scope of these systems. The fact that no abuses have come up (locally) is quite telling, imho. When this same type of hardware is in the hands of countries like China, we see these abuses. Is China seeing something we don't and just not telling us? I highly doubt it.