Policy

Snowden Took a Job To Leak NSA Secrets? Cool. Let's Have More Like Him at the DOJ, IRS …

|

Edward Snowden
The Guardian

Much has been made of Edward Snowden telling the South China Morning Post that he deliberately took a job with Booz Allen to gather up evidence of National Security Agency spying so he could leak it to the world. This makes the international man of government officials' mysteries even more traitorish to the authority-worshippers who already didn't like his revealing widespread surveillance by the U.S. For the rest of us, it means he set out to do a thorough job before giving the state a well-deserved kick in the 'nads. This is a guy who apparently deliberately infiltrated the security apparatus, got hold of its dark secrets, and imposed a little of that "transparency" we'd been promised. We could use a few thousand more like him at the IRS, the Justice Department, the DEA, in the Obamacare bureaucracy, local police forces …

From the South China Morning Post:

Edward Snowden secured a job with a US government contractor for one reason alone—to obtain evidence of Washington's cyberspying networks, the South China Morning Post can reveal.

For the first time, Snowden has admitted he sought a position at Booz Allen Hamilton so he could collect proof about the US National Security Agency's secret surveillance programmes ahead of planned leaks to the media.

"My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked," he told the Post on June 12. "That is why I accepted that position about three months ago."

Treason? Bullshit. More like, awesome.

In the age of Justice Department snooping on the Associated Press and Fox News's James Rosen, wouldn't we benefit from a whisteblower who deliberately took a position to find out just how many journalists the feds are spying on? I'll bet there are just a few more lurking in the files.

How about Internal Revenue Service targeting of political organizations? This is a recurring problem dating back decades. Rather than wait for IRS officials to slip revelations out themselves in hopes of minimizing the impact, an infiltrator or two would be a welcome way to keep a close eye on a long-abusive agency.

And now that the federal government is centralizing control over health care, wouldn't you like to keep a closer eye on how it wields its new power? Especially since we know that it will be sharing patient records without our consent? The government already considers our medical data to be a rich vein it can mine for its own purposes, and it does so with little respect for our privacy. As HeathCareITNews reports:

"The NSA justifies its actions using the war on terror," [Deborah Peel, MD, founder of Patient Privacy Rights] added. "The Department of Health and Human Services claims its actions are justified to lower healthcare costs. These are obviously very different agencies collecting different kinds of very sensitive personal information, but both set up hidden, extremely intrusive surveillance systems that violate privacy rights and destroy trust in government."

We could probably use a few Snowdens there.

Deliberately taking a job in order to spy back at the government? What an excellent idea! More, please.