The New Year seems to have resurrected the slow fade-to-black of the Edward Snowden saga.
First, there’s a roiling case for the Justice Department to offer Snowden clemency or some kind of plea deal. It’s a bizarrely timed surge in pro-Snowden sympathy considering how his Christmas video was nothing but a series of wildly fabricated claims, such as his insistence that NSA watches literally “everything we do” and will soon possess the capability to record and analyze all of our thoughts, thus calling into serious question the credibility of earlier Snowden pronouncements as well as his, you know, grip on reality.
By all means, we should welcome this crank back to the U.S. as a free man with internet access and the blueprint for America’s national security apparatus. What could possibly go wrong?
Just beneath the clemency headlines, meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) wrote to NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander and asked point blank, “Has the NSA spied, or is the NSA spying, on members of Congress or other American elected officials?” The letter defined spying to also include metadata collection. It shouldn’t have (more on this presently).
An NSA spokesman told The Washington Post… [CONTINUE READING]