RAND PAUL’S REALLY DUMB IDEA ON SNOWDEN-A Potential President Can’t Sound Like an ACLU Legal Gadfly….see note please
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303433304579304791043726948?mod=Opinion_newsreel_3
Son of Ron should give up his presidential ambitions….he has never governed…..and the GOP must avoid another of those debate marathons with incompetent wannabes like Santorum, Bachmann and now Rand Paul…..rsk
Rand Paul has made no secret of his presidential ambitions, but he has some work to do if he wants to be credible as a potential Commander in Chief. Consider his apologia for fugitive National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden.
On ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, the Kentucky Senator repeated his calls for leniency for Mr. Snowden, who has been indicted on three charges of theft and espionage and has sought and received asylum in Russia.
“I don’t think Edward Snowden deserves the death penalty or life in prison. I think that’s inappropriate. And I think that’s why he fled, because that’s what he faced,” said Mr. Paul. “Do I think that it’s OK to leak secrets and give up national secrets and things that could endanger lives? I don’t think that’s OK, either. But I think the courts are now saying that what he revealed was something the government was doing was illegal. So I think, personally, he probably would come home for some penalty of a few years in prison.”
Mr. Paul is exaggerating that “death penalty” bit, and he fails to mention that lower courts are divided on the legality of collecting metadata. But the key point is that he is in essence asking the government to offer Mr. Snowden a plea bargain, from his redoubt in Moscow and in advance of any trial.
Mr. Paul has previously called Mr. Snowden’s actions “civil disobedience,” but New York Democrat Chuck Schumer was right to remind Mr. Paul on the same TV show that the “grand tradition of civil disobedience in this country” includes the willingness to “face the consequences.” Martin Luther King spent time in the Birmingham jail, and even Daniel Ellsberg didn’t flee to Moscow after leaking the Vietnam War history known as the Pentagon Papers. He faced trial on charges that carried a maximum sentence of 115 years. A federal judge dismissed the charges.
U.S. Sen. Rand Paul Getty Images
As President, Mr. Paul couldn’t behave like some ACLU legal gadfly. He’d be responsible for setting standards for the entire security bureaucracy. To offer Mr. Snowden leniency on such terms would send a signal that any federal employee could leak any secret as long as he claims a higher moral cause.
If Mr. Snowden really had moral pangs, he had other options than stealing secrets, fleeing to the protection of two dictatorships and then claiming to be Tom Paine. He could have taken his concerns to Congress’s intelligence committees. Or he could have resigned from Booz Allen, his employer and federal contractor, and begun a general public campaign against government spying.
There’s also much we still don’t know about Mr. Snowden’s motivations, specific actions and outside assistance. His supporters portray him as a patriot who was shocked by what he found in government. Yet he seems to have taken his contracting job at Booz Allen with the express intention of stealing secrets.
Upon arriving in Hong Kong in June, he told the South China Morning Post that his Booz Allen job “granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked. That is why I accepted that position about three months ago.” Reuters reported in November that Mr. Snowden lied to at least 20 colleagues to obtain passwords to steal more secrets. A friendly New York Times NYT +1.11% New York Times Co. Cl A U.S.: NYSE $15.52 +0.17 +1.11% Jan. 7, 2014 4:04 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 726,817 AFTER HOURS $15.52 0.00 0.00% Jan. 7, 2014 4:27 pm Volume (Delayed 15m): 8,547 P/E Ratio 5633.67 Market Cap $2.30 Billion Dividend Yield 1.03% Rev. per Employee $352,201 15.8015.6015.4015.2010a11a12p1p2p3p4p 01/07/14 Rebuffed by New York Times, Ch… 12/19/13 New York Times to Introduce ‘P… 12/13/13 What Your CEO Is Reading: Goog… More quote details and news » magazine piece in August said Mr. Snowden first contacted former Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald in December 2012, four months prior to joining Booz Allen, and the two men used encryption to hide secrets they later released.
Mr. Snowden also contacted documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras months before joining Booz Allen. Mr. Greenwald and Ms. Poitras are on the board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation that funds WikiLeaks. Fellow fugitive and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has confirmed that his organization paid for Mr. Snowden’s legal counsel and travel out of Hong Kong. Who else was in on what might have been an organized heist?
We also don’t know the extent to which Mr. Snowden has shared U.S. secrets with foreign intelligence services. Mr. Snowden swears he provided nothing to Russia or China, but then he already is an admitted liar.
A Russian newspaper has reported that he spent three days at the Russian consulate in Hong Kong. And it’s hard to believe the Russians and Chinese didn’t scan Mr. Snowden’s thumb drives while he was seeking asylum. Mr. Snowden hasn’t released any details of China’s or Russia’s hacking operations against the U.S.—records of which are likely in his NSA files.
We also still don’t know the extent of the harm his leaks have done to national security. He has certainly damaged U.S. relations with friends like Germany and Brazil, and our sources say his revelations have caused al Qaeda to modify how it communicates to evade NSA snooping.
As Fred Kaplan recently catalogued in Slate, Mr. Snowden has also released sensitive information about “NSA’s interception of email traffic, mobile phone calls, and radio transmissions of Taliban fighters in Pakistan’s northwest territories; about an operation to gauge the loyalties of CIA recruits in Pakistan; about NSA email intercepts to assist intelligence assessments of what’s going on inside Iran” and NSA’s worldwide efforts to “look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.”
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Senator Paul glides over all of this as if it barely matters, focusing instead on the NSA’s metadata collection that he says is a “generalized warrant” of the kind that inspired the American revolution. If Mr. Paul wants to make that case, he can do so in the GOP primaries. We don’t agree, and we doubt the courts or the American public will either. But arguing that Edward Snowden is some kind of national hero shows an unseriousness about national security that would make him unsuitable to be Commander in Chief.
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