> Oh stop whining. You can't just accuse someone of being a spy and expect upvotes. Accusations without evidence (hint hint) are not 'truth'.
Snowden is the first guy I'm aware of who fled to China (and later, to Russia) to protect his own free speech. Color me a little bit suspicious of him.
> Well for most crimes the police have traditionally gotten along fine without such vast metadata. For that crime specifically maybe they could use a warrant to the phone company? That seems easy to do without NSA interception. Or the police could keep track of calls to them and not have to do anything more than find the owner of a phone number.
> (A) a judge of the court established by section 1803 (a) of this title; or
The law we're discussing requires a judge to sign off on it. Its not necessarily a "warrant" per se, but do you think elevating these powers to require a warrant would suffice?
These are the kinds of questions we need to be asking ourselves if we actually want to progress.
> Snowden is the first guy I'm aware of who fled to China (and later, to Russia) to protect his own free speech. Color me a little bit suspicious of him.
There aren't that many countries who would not release Snowden to the US.
Ecuador has proven itself reliable with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. It proved itself reliable _long_ before Snowden decided to pull Chinese-specific information from the US Spy agency, fly to China, release Chinese information and (probably) beg to stay.
Instead of going to a reliable country like Ecuador, he went to China. Snowden isn't a dumb guy either, he was clearly keeping up with the news. He chose China because the data he pilfered was Chinese specific.
Once in China, after the reveal, Snowden became trapped. He couldn't fly over any other country that had US influence. He furthermore got trapped in Russia (it is extremely sketchy. I think Russia wanted him, and they got him. Russia probably won't let him go.)
I don't think Snowden is working with Russia. He was trying to get to Ecuador IIRC with help from Julian Assange. But based on what he did in Hong Kong, it is clear to me that he expected help from the Chinese Government. If Snowden went to Ecuador from the start, I'd have a much easier time believing that what he was doing was for good-will.
Snowden would not have been safe from kidnapping in South America. Once his location was known, he would have been as good as captured. Only Russia or China have the kind of military might that could deter the US from attempting to take him back by force.
Snowden was going to Ecuador only after he went public, because at that point it was about politics, not black ops. A little-known individual can be easily taken out in US-friendly countries (see CIA "extraordinary renditions"), that's the threat he neutralized by being in Hong-Kong -- which is not just "China", it's a very complex country with a separate political system where both China and China's enemies have to tread carefully; by saying "he went to China" you're just pushing your own frame -- but then again, you already know that, don't you?
Snowden is the first guy I'm aware of who fled to China (and later, to Russia) to protect his own free speech. Color me a little bit suspicious of him.
> Well for most crimes the police have traditionally gotten along fine without such vast metadata. For that crime specifically maybe they could use a warrant to the phone company? That seems easy to do without NSA interception. Or the police could keep track of calls to them and not have to do anything more than find the owner of a phone number.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1861
> (A) a judge of the court established by section 1803 (a) of this title; or
The law we're discussing requires a judge to sign off on it. Its not necessarily a "warrant" per se, but do you think elevating these powers to require a warrant would suffice?
These are the kinds of questions we need to be asking ourselves if we actually want to progress.