Civil Disobedience as Espionage

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I find the uproar over Snowden to be interesting. Snowden is not the traditional Civil Disobedient in the mold of Gandhi, MLK Jr, or Nelson Mandela or any of the other political prisoners including Bradley Manning. The practitioners of classical civil disobedience all realized that paying the penalty for their disobedience was part of what they had to endure and the educative function of civil disobedience was the fact that they went to jail for their beliefs and their refusal to bend to the demands of then current political morality. 

Snowden did not (although he may yet do so) go to jail. That causes me to believe that CD is an ongoing  political event. That being said it does not mean that Snowden is not a whistleblower.  We probably all suspected the existence of the NSA program if we actually thought about the technology available to the Government and the Government's secret contractors such as Bozz-Allen.. All he did to earn the enmity of the right wing noise machine and the various servants of government overreaching such as Feinstein, Schumer, Graham and McCain,Obama and Holder and the lesser lights or dimmer bulbs if you will like King, Gohmert et al was to disclose the actual existence of a tornadic covert program that sweeps up everything its path. He gave us concrete proof, direct evidence if you will  that we are being surveilled by our own Government.  This is not the same as saying that we are currently being listened to by agents of the government or agents of the privatized government such as Snowden's former employer. What he has established is  that all of what we say, hear, speak and write is being vacuumed up and stored for later use. Archived if you will. As someone said recently this is not a search and seizure. It's a  seizure and the search is yet to come. Snowden is going to be used by Chinese and Russian politicians. There is no doubt about that.  That does not make him a bad guy (at least as I understand the term) and much more importantly it does not mean that his disclosures are any the less important to us as citizens off the US. What we make of this is up to us.

Snowden's actions are certainly less criminal than the lies told by James Clapper under oath to congress this past spring nor less criminal than the disclosure of the identity of a CIA operative by Dick Cheney...something that deprived our nation of the services of Valerie Plame as a covert agent of our government.  That was certainly more of an espionage operation than Snowden's disclosures.

US Senate Skips Town for Fathers' Day Gfits

By law the Congress is charged as the lawgivers in our Nation with overseeing the operations of the the executive branch of government. This includes our national security infrastructure including the National Security Agency (NSA) that is busy turning our Nation into a textbook example of the national security state.

On Thursday last only days after Edward Snowden released documents showing the existence of the PRISM program at the NSA that indiscriminately vacuums up incredible amounts of what is called metadata from the phone calls, emails and Internet site visits of ordinary Americans the NSA held a classified briefing for the entire membership of the US Senate in a secure room in the basement of the US Capitol building. This was reported in The Hill which is a smallish circulation newspaper that reports mostly on goings on in the Government of the US.

What made this article unusual and worthy of note is that more than half of the membership of the Senate decided they would skip that briefing. That's right you read it correctly 53 members of the senate balanced their duty to oversee the structure of the national security state that has been created since the attack on the US by foreign nationals against their desires to get home early for the Fathers' Day weekend and the weekend won..

What really frosts my butt about this story is that the identities of the members who chose to get home early in order to be on time to receive their Fathers' Day gifts and accolades were secret and their names not disclosed to The Hill. Apparently the gift-receiving culture of our national politics was more important to them than doing the jobs they were elected or in some cases appointed to do. What gives here? Has the US Senate just blown us off big time?!