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发帖数: 8463 | 1 三位前国安局雇员称赞爱德华·斯诺登
3 Former NSA Employees Praise Edward Snowden
See the link below:
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http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/3-former-ns
3 Former NSA Employees Praise Edward Snowden, Corroborate Key Claims
The men, all whistleblowers, say he succeeded where they failed.
Conor FriedersdorfJun 18 2013, 8:30 AM ET
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Reuters
USA Today has published an extraordinary interview with three former NSA
employees who praise Edward Snowden's leaks, corroborate some of his claims,
and warn about unlawful government acts.
Thomas Drake, William Binney, and J. Kirk Wiebe each protested the NSA in
their own rights. "For years, the three whistle-blowers had told anyone who
would listen that the NSA collects huge swaths of communications data from U
.S. citizens," the newspaper reports. "They had spent decades in the top
ranks of the agency, designing and managing the very data collection systems
they say have been turned against Americans. When they became convinced
that fundamental constitutional rights were being violated, they complained
first to their superiors, then to federal investigators, congressional
oversight committees and, finally, to the news media."
In other words, they blew the whistle in the way Snowden's critics suggest
he should have done. Their method didn't get through to the members of
Congress who are saying, in the wake of the Snowden leak, that they had no
idea what was going on. But they are nonetheless owed thanks.
And among them, they've now said all of the following:
His disclosures did not cause grave damage to national security.
What Snowden discovered is "material evidence of an institutional crime."
As a system administrator, Snowden "could go on the network or go into any
file or any system and change it or add to it or whatever, just to make sure
-- because he would be responsible to get it back up and running if, in
fact, it failed. So that meant he had access to go in and put anything. That
's why he said, I think, 'I can even target the president or a judge.' If he
knew their phone numbers or attributes, he could insert them into the
target list which would be distributed worldwide. And then it would be
collected, yeah, that's right. As a super-user, he could do that."
"The idea that we have robust checks and balances on this is a myth."
Congressional overseers "have no real way of seeing into what these agencies
are doing. They are totally dependent on the agencies briefing them on
programs, telling them what they are doing."
Lawmakers "don't really don't understand what the NSA does and how it
operates. Even when they get briefings, they still don't understand."
Asked what Edward Snowden should expect to happen to him, one of the men,
William Binney, answered, "first tortured, then maybe even rendered and
tortured and then incarcerated and then tried and incarcerated or even
executed." Interesting that this is what a whistleblower thinks the U.S.
government will do to a citizen. The abuse of Bradley Manning worked.
"There is no path for intelligence-community whistle-blowers who know wrong
is being done. There is none. It's a toss of the coin, and the odds are you
are going to be hammered."
The fact that former NSA employees have said these things doesn't
automatically make them true. All have reason to identify with Snowden (
though one thinks he may have crossed a line by talking about surveillance
on China). What this interview does mean is that some of Snowden's
allegations seem even more credible than they did when he was the only one
making them. |
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