And after three weeks the murder trial of George Zimmerman has been handed over to the jury. Will they find him guilty of 2nd degree murder? Of manslaughter? Or will he be found not guilty of either charge?

Open post…have at it!

DJStrata

OK, there is too much testimony for me to go through it all completely, so here is what I see so far (have not looked at the defense case at all yet).

Both sides are clearly giving it their all. There will not be an argument justice was not served here.

I am somewhat surprised by the prosecution’s case so far not being openly stronger. But I am thinking that this case will boil down to final arguments and I think they are leaving bread crumbs at each point to connect at the end.  They are not actually trying to win yet, just laying the foundation. Closing arguments are where I expect the prosecution to highlight all the issues with Zimmerman’s account and those of witnesses. And if the defense does not have a  counter argument presented, it could be big trouble for Zimmerman because at that point it is too late.

Interestingly, most witnesses are not eyewitnesses be aural (ear) witnesses. And this of course includes the key witness for the prosecution: Rachel Jeantell. I guess I am too accustomed to dealing with people with thick accents and broken English,  because I did not find her as much dumb as shy. People attacking her for her speech are grasping, and I am not sure an all woman jury is going to be hardened to her.

A lot of the key testimony came from witnesses who are not very good at speaking English. From the one neighbor who compared shadow sizes (e.g., silhouettes) and said Zimmerman was on top when the shot was fired, to the Chinese Medical Examiner to Ms. Jeantell and her Haitian Creole, the English language barrier could cause a problem for the prosecution. I am so used to foreign accents I really have no issues parsing and filling in where words fail people.  But I am not on the jury so who knows how that is playing out.

The prosecution has paced their case well. First were some ho-hum witnesses, then the officer who tried CPR on Trayvon. This was to establish the fact the police and state took this incident seriously and professionally.

This led into what I felt was the big wake up testimony. It involved the neighbor who lived across the top of the “T” and who literally broke down during her 9-11 call.  The horror in her voice really changed the matter at hand from the abstract to the tragic. It was pretty powerful.

The next big testimony was Ms. Jeantell’s, and while not good speaker, she was all 19 year old. And she never wavered. Her testimony is as valid as any of the others who heard the scuffle from their living rooms. Trayvon ran away from Zimmerman.  And she heard Zimmerman approach Trayvon. That is just not good for Zimmerman’s alibi which is not even close to that. Her testimony is as valid as hearing the screams and shot on the 9-11 call. The defense’s efforts were pretty lame in this part.  And if you watch the prosecution add stickers to their layout of the area, you can envision how this will play a big part in closing arguments. They will try and use other ear witnesses and not her, and that will just not work.

One of the big problems Zimmerman has are his various excuses for getting out of his car.  In the statement that night to Officer Singleton, Zimmerman says he went through to the other street to find a street sign.  As Zimmerman’s own lawyers pointed out in questioning Mrs. Lauer (who lives on the corner where Trayvon and Zimmerman gain entry to the dog walk area), there are no street signs nearby the cut-through they used to get behind the buildings.

Zimmerman’s problem came out during Officer Chris Serinos’ testimony when they played the reenactment video. It is just prior to time stamp 1:21:50 in this court video. At this point Zimmerman is in a police car talking through the incident. He and a policeman are parked in front of the club house and Zimmerman is explaining how Trayvon Martin – who he had seen back down the street a bit – had walked past his parked car and then down towards where he was staying.

The subconscious mistake Zimmerman makes is he automatically recalls the name of the street (Twin Trees Lane). I mean it just comes right out of his mouth. The same street he could not recall the night before! His claim he does not know the street name was the reason he gave for get out of his car (with a loaded gun with one round in the chamber). It was his following Trayvon taht of course led to the confrontation and Trayvon’s unnecessary death. But here, in this video, he recalls the street name instantly and easily. When the prosecution plays that, it will lay bare how much Zimmerman gilded his testimony.

What did catch me off guard was how little Officers Serino and Singleton cared about the obvious hate, spite and inconsistencies from Zimmerman. They really did not seem interested, or changed their view at some time. They definitely appeared better for Zimmerman, except they also gave prosecution a reason to play Zimmerman’s words back at him, I know understand why the case was taken over by the state. “F***ing Punks” and “A****Holes” are not indications of respect and should not have been casually dismissed. They were the result of Zimmerman profiling and confusing the guy arrested a few weeks earlier with this kid walking home. If that does come up, it will cause serious doubt in Zimmerman’s claims.

The testimony of neighbors had each one gaining an advantage in the fight.  I think both took turns on top.  One even seemed to indicate Trayvon was on the bottom and more on his side than back when shot.

Zimmerman was not near death, his injuries are minor. I have been hurt worse falling of my bicycle.

It is clear in the record Trayvon retreated many times. And under the law that means he trying to avoid a confrontation and therefore is not the aggressor. Zimmerman continues to push forward, and the LAST directive from non-emergency was to back off and wait.  All prior questions regarding what he was reporting become moot. This is really bad for Zimmerman.

I think the Medical Examiner was great. He was quite good at reminding everyone what he could and could not determine.  My guess is defense is going to keep poking at the chain of evidence, but that looks to be an act of desperation. I will know how desperate when I get to watching the defenses case play out.

But if Zimmerman was in such great shape, they would rest and not risk opening up any cans of worms. Which his lawyers did a couple of times.

So far I see a draw. No side has an edge.

Sorry for not posting in recent weeks.  Work is crazy busy, summer swim team events are at their highest pace, family issues bubbling up almost daily, and I am working my way through the video of the George Zimmerman trial.  Basically I have not time left in my day to even generate short posts.

But what I hope to do is write a first hand assessment of the trial, verses regurgitating what others distill down and write or report on. I am not going to be able to review all the testimony, but I will have watched many hours of the trial and focused in on key witnesses. So when I do post in a day or so, it will be from watching the trial itself and not second hand.

I am also ignoring the testimony of the families since I know that is almost all pure emotion and very little fact.

So please be patient, I hope to finish up reviewing the prosecution’s case and then recording my impressions and observations.

Update: BTW, this is the kind of jumping to conclusions with half the trial completed that really is silly. I don’t think the state is done shredding the defense on cross.

Happy July 4th America!

Hope to be back posting soon.

Knock, knock….

Is George Zimmerman screwed?

Royally.

Let me get this out of the way first. Has the world been warming up?

Yes it has. Especially if you look at the long term history of the world and realize the Little Ice Age, that occurred from about 1350 to about 1850, may have been the coldest period in the last 10,000 years:

There are in fact many scientific studies that show the Little Ice Age, which came to end in the late 19th C, was the coldest period in these regions for maybe 10000 years.

Cold snaps of this magnitude do not pass in a few days. They can take centuries to recover from. Along with the data that shows today’s climate is less than or equal in ‘warmth’ to the Medieval Warm Period that preceded the Little Ice Age, we can conclude that the warming  the Earth has been experiencing over the last 400 years is really just a return to the climatology of previous periods.

Periods prior to human generated CO2.

So now the question becomes: has the world been warming up naturally or from CO2 levels forcing a cascade of Green House Gas effects? Because there is another inescapable fact to face here: CO2 levels have been rising along with the Earth’s temperature.

Back in the day when the IPCC and other Global Warming alarmists were much cockier with their claims, they thankfully published how their Climate Models were showing CO2 forced warming.  And they did this by running two scenarios, one with CO2 driven warming and one without. Here is one example from a post I did back in 2009:

The red/pink shaded area in the graph shows the CO2 driven predictive results for South America, and the blue area is the IPCC model runs if there is NO CO2 forcing. It is that blue region we need to focus on (as well as to note the end of the graph is 2000). The original source of the graph was this post at WUWT which showed many graphs like this for many regions of the globe.

In my 2009 post I noted how the IPCC models gave us two possible answers and the measured temperature data would tell us which one would be true:

The CRU raw station data I have been looking over does not follow the black ‘observation’ lines at all. Those researchers tuning their AGW models to the CRU post ‘adjusted’ data have been chasing a ghost.

The CRU raw temp data actually follows the blue band, where the models say the temps will fall if AGW [human induced global warming] does not exist.

…

This is March-April-May for Argentina. It is fairly representative of South America has a whole. Now what happens if I overlay this CRU pre-adjustment historical temp data on top of the IPCC AGW model predictions – what will this data show?

No big surprise for me – it shows the CRU station data, unbiased by alarmists, follows the AGW models without CO2 forcing.

…

Conclusion from CRU data: It has been cooling in South America, not rising as the AGW models predicted for man made global warming driven by CO2.

Therefore, if we accept the AGW models as representing proof or disproof of AGW, then the models show CO2 forcing cannot be what is driving the Earth’s climate.

Many years have passed since these posts were up at Strata-Sphere and WUWT. We are now through a period of 15-17 years of flat global temperatures. The models are now completely off track with reality. And scientists are slowly starting to realize this:

Climate experts have long predicted that temperatures would rise in parallel with greenhouse gas emissions. But, for 15 years, they haven’t. In a SPIEGEL interview, meteorologist Hans von Storch discusses how this “puzzle” might force scientists to alter what could be “fundamentally wrong” models.

…

Recent CO2 emissions have actually risen even more steeply than we feared. As a result, according to most climate models, we should have seen temperatures rise by around 0.25 degrees Celsius (0.45 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past 10 years. That hasn’t happened. In fact, the increase over the last 15 years was just 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.11 degrees Fahrenheit) — a value very close to zero. This is a serious scientific problem that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will have to confront when it presents its next Assessment Report late next year.

I take issue with the claim the models are “fundamentally wrong“.  They actually appear to be correct – for the case where there is no CO2 forcing.

It seems strange to me thatboth the alarmists and the skeptics forget that the climate models were run to show two diverging scenarios. And the one scenario that has been born out in the measurements is the one where there is no CO2 forcing.

Seems we have validated the models – just not the way the IPCC and alarmists wanted.

Tags: AGW, Climate Models, CRU, Flat Temperatures, Global Warming

We experienced a database error the other day and it took a while to resolve.

Joe Digenova was on a local DC AM talk show this morning and said something very important about Benghazi and how the Pentagon and White House apparently decided to halt any efforts to provide support to our people being attacked in an unsecured consulate in Benhgazi.

His main point was that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the military, General Martin Denpsey, lied to Congress in recent testimony.

From the story behind the image above:

Army Gen. Martin Dempsey said timing and the need for the unit to help with casualties from Benghazi resulted in orders for the special forces to remain in Tripoli. Four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, died in two separate attacks several hours apart on the night of Sept. 11.

Gregory Hicks, a former diplomat in Tripoli at the time of the attack, told a House panel last month the unit was told to stand down.

Dempsey said that was not the case.

“They weren’t told to stand down. A ‘stand down’ means don’t do anything,” he said. “They were told that the mission they were asked to perform was not in Benghazi, but was at Tripoli airport.”

This is the dumbest  CYA excuse ever muttered, in my opinion. And apparently in the opinion of former US Prosecutor Joe Digenova. We know units were preparing to go to Benghazi and told to stand down from going to Benghazi. Of course that meant ‘staiing’ were they were at the time. Duh!

It has been well established that many forces were in the area and capable of responding and at least ATTEMPTING to save our people. I myself have met someone who was in the area that day. Their unit was not only alerted when the first incidents hit in Egypt earlier in the  day, they were packed and ready to go on a moments notice to support anywhere. Including back support to Tripoli if there was a need to move units from there.

And they too were told to stand down. That is why they unpacked and stowed their gear and went about the rest of their evening.

The problem with Dempsey’s BS is that so many forces were on alert for 9-11, were on alert because of protests in Egypt, were on alert since Tripoli had recently been ‘freed’ and was a major target of Islamo Fascist groups like al Qaeda that there are untold number of ‘witnesses’ to the stand down decision.

I would wager hundreds of people were staged and ready to go that day, and thousands were ready to support their efforts. You don’t just call these resources up by dialing 9-1-1 and they then race out the door like a fire truck company. Military units have plans for getting in, getting to their targets and getting out. Not something you throw together.

So Demspey has a problem. He has thousands of service members who know better. Who know resources were ready to go, and told not to move.

Dempsey basically admitted there was an order to stay in Tripoli and not attempt a rescue in Benghazi. This cover story will not hold.

Tags: Benghazi, Congress, Dempsey

In pondering the question that is the title of this post, one thing is known for sure: Obamacare will NOT lead to affordable care for all, or even affordable care for most.

Like all government run services, it will probably lead to expensive and mediocre health care for all  but the 1% richest (who will have escape hatches built into the law for themselves to buy the best care).

But that is not the real question for Obamacare. The question is more than whether Obamacare will be what it seems to be turning into: the most obvious big government mess ever conceived by the big-government lefty thinkers. The question I am pondering is whether this mess will have repercussions, whether the it will ignite something.

To know if there will be repercussions, we first need to see if Obamacare will be a big enough mess to ignite the ‘unintended consequences’ backlash. And so far, that is looking to be the result.

Example 1. Why liberals need to ‘frame’ an issue is nothing more than the need to employ false advertising. (I.e., how the “Affordable Care” act will produce just the opposite of what its label implies):

States are starting to roll out details about the exchanges, providing a look at just how affordable coverage under the Affordable Care Act will be. Some potential participants may be surprised at the figures: $2,000 deductibles, $45 primary care visit co-pays, and $250 emergency room tabs.

Those are just some of the charges enrollees will incur in a silver-level plan in California, which recently unveiled an overview of the benefits and charges associated with its exchange. That’s on top of the $321 average monthly premium.

…

California offers insight into how much participants will actually have to pay under Obamacare. The state, unlike most others, is requiring insurers to offer a standard set of benefits and charges in each plan level. The only variables are monthly premiums, doctor networks and carriers in your area.

One size fits all means disaster, since humans are not that similar in health care needs.  Worse, this is from the state that has run mind boggling deficits for decades and can’t get its fiscal house in order. Imagine the type of health care those politicians in California will be cooking up? Yeah, this will work. [images link to other articles worth reading]

More here (from the AP no less):

It’s called the Affordable Care Act, but President Barack Obama’s health care law may turn out to be unaffordable for many low-wage workers, including employees at big chain restaurants, retail stores and hotels.

…

The company can get off the hook, say corporate consultants and policy experts, but the employee could still face a federal requirement to get health insurance.

…

The law is complicated, but essentially companies with 50 or more full-time workers are required to offer coverage that meets certain basic standards and costs no more than 9.5 percent of an employee’s income. Failure to do so means fines for the employer. (Full-time work is defined as 30 or more hours a week, on average.)

But do the math from the worker’s side: For an employee making $21,000 a year, 9.5 percent of their income could mean premiums as high as $1,995 and the insurance would still be considered affordable.

One look at the California numbers above, and you can see Obamacare is not going to be a pleasant shock to country going through anemic economic times.

So what will most people do?

Probably run for the hills.  At least that is what we see those on Capitol Hill doing (Capitol Hills being where Congress resides, so these are the authors of Obamacare):

Dozens of lawmakers and aides are so afraid that their health insurance premiums will skyrocket next year thanks to Obamacare that they are thinking about retiring early or just quitting.

The fear: Government-subsidized premiums will disappear at the end of the year under a provision in the health care law that nudges aides and lawmakers onto the government health care exchanges, which could make their benefits exorbitantly expensive.

…

Sources said several aides have already given lawmakers notice that they’ll be leaving over concerns about Obamacare. Republican and Democratic lawmakers said the chatter about retiring now, to remain on the current health care plan, is constant.

This ability to retire and stay on their current health care plan is one of those back doors I mentioned earlier. No one else but government workers will have that option. It is pretty clear those under personal and company plans are going to be forced to switch. They have to, to show they conform with Obamacare. Here is a real good legal review on the President’s (framed) promise of keeping your health care – and why it is pure myth.

But is this bleak furturr really the only potential outcome of Obamacare – expensive mediocre care run by our inept governments?

No.

There is a chance Obamacare creates a backlash. One big enough to turn the entire health care question on hits head. And here is one small example of actually what could happen as a result of liberal over-reaching and over-promising (a.k.a. ‘framing’):

A Kansas physician says he makes the same income and offers better quality care to his patients after he dumped all health insurance companies.

Thirty-two-year old family physician Doug Nunamaker of Wichita, Kan., said after five years of dealing with the red tape of health insurance companies and the high overhead for the staff he hired just to deal with paperwork, he switched to a system of charging his patients a monthly fee plus the price of an office visit or test, CNN/Money reported.

For adults up to age 44, Nunamaker charges $50 a month, pediatric services are $10 a month, and for adults age 44 and older it costs $100 a month. Although Nunamaker calls the practice “cash-only,” he accepts credit and debit cards for the fees and services.

The best way to keep big government and big business out of our lives is to actually push them out of our lives. And then we can go back to our individual pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. And once we see how we can thrive without them, we can pull their funds and power.

I have a saying I like to use: Just because you CAN do a thing, does not mean you SHOULD.

This tenant seems incredibly appropriate given the story unfolding around the massive surveillance capability being built up under President Obama and the young man who sacrificed so much to expose it. On one side, just because the government has the technical know-how to collect massive amounts of data, does not means it should. And on the other side, just because you can leak sensitive documents, does not mean you should.

There are no easy answers here. Except to know:

• If the NSA and CIA were directed to do invade the privacy of Americans, they would have no choice but to implement executive/presidential orders
• If the NSA and CIA were going rogue and were invading the privacy of Americans without congressional and presidential concurrence,, the President (and agency leads) could have stopped it at any time. There is still an open question on how much Congress knew (or worse, were capable of comprehending).

The fact is, big moves like this will never stay under cover if they start to make the citizens working in the executing agencies concerned. And that is what happened here.

My problem with the Whistle Blower is he appears too young and part of the intel community for too short of time to have gained the wisdom to make such decisions as he made. On the flip side, our government is so out of control there is a chance he is 100% correct and may need a medal for what he did.  Only time will tell. It is too soon to take sides.

If this is a situation where poitical leaders overstepped, there will be more voices joining Edward Snowden – and very soon. I find it hard to believe he is the only one who realized the intelligence efforts had move well outside the bounds. This should open a dam, as we saw with the IRS targeting conservatives

For example, we have this statement from Snowden to consider:

That the NSA routinely lies in response to congressional inquiries about the scope of surveillance in America. I believe that when [senator Ron] Wyden and [senator Mark] Udall asked about the scale of this, they [the NSA] said it did not have the tools to provide an answer. We do have the tools and I have maps showing where people have been scrutinised most. We collect more digital communications from America than we do from the Russians.

If this is true, and Congress was deliberately misinformed – or left uninformed – then we have a real problem. I am guessing at the moment this may not be the case, given comments by Senator McCain on the subject:

Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union” McCain responded to host Candy Crowley asking if McCain had a problem with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) program, he answered, “No, not really.”

“I think we have to understand this issue in the context of what also has been going on,” McCain said. “I believe that the FISA Court system is an appropriate way of reviewing some of these policies.

…

“The Republican and Democrat chairs, and … members of the Intelligence Committee have been very well briefed on these programs,” McCain said. “We passed the Patriot Act. We passed specific provisions of the act that allowed for this program to take place, to be enacted in operation. Now, if members of Congress did not know what they were voting on, then I think that that’s their responsibility a lot more than it is the government’s.”

My concern with the Whistle Blower is his background. In this Guardian piece he is positively portrayed, but it does not help cover for his short comings:

By his own admission, he was not a stellar student. In order to get the credits necessary to obtain a high school diploma, he attended a community college in Maryland, studying computing, but never completed the coursework. (He later obtained his GED.)

In 2003, he enlisted in the US army and began a training program to join the Special Forces. Invoking the same principles that he now cites to justify his leaks, he said: “I wanted to fight in the Iraq war because I felt like I had an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression”.

He recounted how his beliefs about the war’s purpose were quickly dispelled. “Most of the people training us seemed pumped up about killing Arabs, not helping anyone,” he said. After he broke both his legs in a training accident, he was discharged.

After that, he got his first job in an NSA facility, working as a security guard for one of the agency’s covert facilities at the University of Maryland. From there, he went to the CIA, where he worked on IT security. His understanding of the internet and his talent for computer programming enabled him to rise fairly quickly for someone who lacked even a high school diploma.

By 2007, the CIA stationed him with diplomatic cover in Geneva, Switzerland. His responsibility for maintaining computer network security meant he had clearance to access a wide array of classified documents.

It is stunning to think this 29 year old was pulling in nearly $200k a year. He either is brilliant, or something else is at play. But the point is he did not have enough years in to understand the pros and cons of each decision. Yes, there are bad people in government, but not all soldiers want to kill Arabs. Most want to defend this country and kill bad guys. They share a common bond with law enforcement, who also have some really bad apples to deal with. You cannot take one example and extrapolate to the whole organization. That is just not fair to the people who work at doing good.

The Guardian piece goes on to describe how Snowden was repelled by the seedier side of intelligence. What happened to Snowden happens to individuals all throughout the government, military, police forces, etc who have the romance of youthful visions of the world  ripped away as they go to work and see what all these wonderful sounding jobs actually entail.

I can say for sure, working for NASA programs today is nothing like NASA’s prime days of Space Exploration during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo days. Right now it is all bureaucracy, wasted red tape and process, misspent funds, poorly managed programs, delays, overruns and basically rolling failures. There are bright moments and huge successes, but these are sadly becoming more and more rare as bureaucracy does its damage and creates waste and failure in place of success. It has not been very pleasant this last decade in the space business. And disillusionment is rampant. So can sympathize with the loss of wonder, hope and expecting better.

I can only imagine what it must be like for someone like Snowden, whose altruistic world-view would basically be destroyed in the seedy side of intelligence and law enforcement. Not sure he was the right kind of person for the profession he chose.

With that said, I also wonder if the intelligence push is not actually getting out of control. It is hard to tell from Snowden’s side of the argument. Here  is one of his statements and my take on what it implies:

“The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.

This is very different from getting a warrant to tap phones.  Nowadays the data is out there, it is a question of WHEN government gets visibility. Here is one key topic worthy of public debate. I might be OK with collection of said data if it was only stored for a month or so and was not always available for ‘use’. In other words, access to specific records in the over data store have to be through a FISA court warrant, based on a high standard of probably cause. But we should first ask is even this pre-collection warranted?

The problems we encountered on 9-11 – and what President Bush fixed with his changes to the FISA court (which congress approved overwhelmingly) – was identifying threats to the FBI. President Bush allowed for NSA-  and CIA-developed leads from overseas surveillance to be passed to the FBI when those targets entered the US. That seems to me to OK with me and was triggered on a case by case basis. Apparently the infrastructure to capture this information is being put in place today as well. But are we also now pre-collecting?

If we are, we seemed to have gone out of bounds in trying to collect everything so it is available when a specific threat arises. Prior to what has been done under Obama we did well enough on identifying the threat and then doing the surveillance. Now we seem to want to collect all the data from everyone and mine it later. That seems to be a step too far.

If Snowden is right and we are collecting a buffer of information from everywhere, he has done a service to this nation. We should have our privacy first and foremost. After all, we are all considered innocent until proven guilty. Which in my mind means we should be free of government scrutiny until a charge (or threat) is specifically made against us as individuals. Government should not have access to our lives ‘just in case’ someone might do something wrong.

Here I think Snowden nails the problem:

Over the next three years, he learned just how all-consuming the NSA’s surveillance activities were, claiming “they are intent on making every conversation and every form of behaviour in the world known to them”.

He described how he once viewed the internet as “the most important invention in all of human history”. As an adolescent, he spent days at a time “speaking to people with all sorts of views that I would never have encountered on my own”.

But he believed that the value of the internet, along with basic privacy, is being rapidly destroyed by ubiquitous surveillance. “I don’t see myself as a hero,” he said, “because what I’m doing is self-interested: I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity.”

We cannot use the threat of terrorism as an excuse for continuous or even random monitoring. We need to be able to talk over the phone, over the internet and even on the street corner with our friends, family and colleagues without fear of being monitored.

I agree, if we let this continue to run to this extreme conclusion – where everything is monitored – then we will have allowed the police state of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four science fiction classic to become reality. We will have left our children an oppressive police state, worse than East Germany in its technical ability to watch us. And once that mechanism is in place, people who swear they know what is best for all mankind will take control of those levers of power and enslave everyone.

For their own good.

Such is the ego of mankind.

Update: Ed Morrissey asks whether Snowden should have  set up a meeting with one of the congressional Paul’s (the congressman or the senator) who he supported politically. I would say this is an unfair question.  Because once you live the power of the bureaucracy, and those in Congress who feed from the trough, you understand anyone in Congress may just as easily be in cahoots as being a safe harbor in which to blow your whistle. Pols can lie with ease, it is hard to trust your life to them.

If Snowden is proved correct (that the security apparatus is well outside the assumed bounds and collecting data on everyone, not those under warrant from the FISA court), then his current approach is probably defensible. If he is a man with an anti-government agenda (which he does not fit the bill since he selected carefully what information was let out instead of doing the doc-dump crap), then no approach is defensible.

That is why Snowden is not a Manning. He let out just enough to open the eyes, not destroy our security or put people at risk. Morrissey and I agree on one thing though – it is way to early to pick sides in this one.

Tags: CIA, Edward Snowden, NSA, Whistleblower