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Monday, January 20, 2014

Would You Feel Differently About Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange If You Knew What They Really Thought?

A fascinating article in The New Republic: 
"Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange hardly subscribe to identical beliefs, and differ in their levels of sophistication. They have held, at one time or another, a crazy-quilt assortment of views, some of them blatantly contradictory. But from an incoherent swirl of ideas, a common outlook emerges. The outlook is neither a clear-cut doctrine nor a philosophy, but something closer to a political impulse that might be described, to borrow from the historian Richard Hofstadter, as paranoid libertarianism. Where liberals, let alone right-wingers, have portrayed the leakers as truth-telling comrades intent on protecting the state and the Constitution from authoritarian malefactors, that’s hardly their goal. In fact, the leakers despise the modern liberal state, and they want to wound it."

h/t Marvin W

1 comment:

Reader said...

I think the most telling thing about Snowden is how when he was working as a system administrator at Booz Allen Hamilton he abused the trust of his co-worker by telling them as the administrator for security purposes he needed their user ids and passwords.

That was how he downloaded the 1.7 million documents, using his co-workers identities.

Some 20-25 co-workers who trusted Snowden all lost their jobs and security clearances because they trusted him.