It's a sad day because a citizen of our nation decided he needed to go to a foreign journalist instead of one of our own to break this story.
It's a sad day because that same citizen felt like he wouldn't get a fair trial in our justice system and might be treated the same way Bradley Manning was until he did get a trial.
It's a sad day because lots of decent, honest people who work in our intelligence services that are trying desperately to uncover the next possible attack are going to have to work much harder.
It's a sad day because those people are going to work harder because the leaders do not feel like they can trust the American people to understand and decide for themselves how much of their privacy they are willing to trade for the work that the government's intelligence services do.
It's a sad day because we demonstrated that we care more about the embarrassment of our duplicity being revealed than in the ideals of our commitment to civil liberties.
And I'm sad because I'm an American and I love my country and I want it to do better.
Living in Brazil, working with the Guardian, a UK Newspaper. Not saying that OP was right, just saying that there isn't much reason to split hairs here.
True but one has to assume he finds it easier to publish his reporting through a British newspaper otherwise why wouldn't he simply be on the NYT payroll?
1. Foreign means not from a country, Greenwald was born in Queens, NY - just because he lives abroad, that doesn't make him foreign.
2. He works for Guardian US, a US company based in New York.
3. According to the editor, it's actually easier for the Guardian to publish stories on this topic through their US subsidiary, rather than the UK, because free speech protections are stronger in the US, so the US connection is very important to them and they view themselves as a global media operation now (just moved to a .com domain for example).
The point I am trying to make is that Snowden took this story to a few local, bona-fide, 100% US-owned/operated/associated well-known media outlets and they passed.
He went to a UK-associated news outlet and got published.
When you're done focusing on the most irrelevant part of my post, please look closer and see if you can discern a forest amongst the trees.
Americans making "informed tradeoffs" about privacy defeats the purpose, from a SIGINT perspective. If everyone knows Skype is bugged, the bad guys who aren't idiots don't use Skype. The only way for a crime prevention dragnet to work is if nobody knows about it, and even then the nastiest bad guys will still probably take heavy precautions just in case.
Surveillance is about control; more nines of safety may or may not be a beneficial side product. There is no reason why mass surveillance would not expand to encompass other crimes: first murders and rapes, then tax evasion, then drugs and torrents, then joining "subversive" protest groups, etc.
I'm not sure there is any person or group trustworthy enough to own a unilateral monopoly on all knowledge.
It's a sad day because a citizen of our nation decided he needed to go to a foreign journalist instead of one of our own to break this story.
It's a sad day because that same citizen felt like he wouldn't get a fair trial in our justice system and might be treated the same way Bradley Manning was until he did get a trial.
It's a sad day because lots of decent, honest people who work in our intelligence services that are trying desperately to uncover the next possible attack are going to have to work much harder.
It's a sad day because those people are going to work harder because the leaders do not feel like they can trust the American people to understand and decide for themselves how much of their privacy they are willing to trade for the work that the government's intelligence services do.
It's a sad day because we demonstrated that we care more about the embarrassment of our duplicity being revealed than in the ideals of our commitment to civil liberties.
And I'm sad because I'm an American and I love my country and I want it to do better.