Tom Englehardt this morning: Edward Snowden appeared yesterday by video before a conference of technies and said, in part, of the NSA, “They’re setting fire to the future of the Internet. We need public advocates. We need public oversight. Some way [to have] trusted figures, sort of civil rights champions to advocate for us, to protect the structure. How do we fix our oversight? How do we structure an oversight model that works? The key factor is accountability... If we allow the NSA to continue unrestrained, every other government will accept that has green light to do the same. At the same time, Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman, whom Snowden entrusted with a tranche of key NSA documents, had an interesting assessment of the man and of his own experience working with him. “Snowden paid very careful attention to what had happened to other whistleblowers that hadn’t had a long-term impact, and was careful to produce the documents… If Snowden had asked me 6-8 months later [if this story and still been live] but he has got to have exceed every plausible estimation about impact. It’s because he didn’t release the documents all at once... Asked whether he has been harassed when writing about Snowden, Gellman said no. “I have not been harassed. I’ve had some interesting exchanges with government reps of various temperatures. But I speak to them before every story. If they want to demonstrate falsity I want to hear it, and if they want to tell me about specific damage I would be doing then it want to hear that too. I get warnings about the espionage act and I assume that I’m more interesting than I used to be. And Google has warned me that they believe a state-sponsored hacker is attempting to compromise my computer… I assume that is more likely to be a foreign agency.” “Do I worry about doing harm and putting lives at risk? Of course I do. There are things in the documents I don’t think should be published and there are things Snowden doesn’t think should be published… “He’s a very smart guy on a lot of levels, and a very nimble mind.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 14:12:22 +0000
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