From a different thread, but more fitting here:
Of course Snowden is the exact enemy of the CIA. We all know that. Snowden isn't our enemy, but he is their enemy.
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I personally don't know that. I think it highly likely correct, but am not sure and never have been.
From the establishment's point of view you've got two major things at work here:
- Want the spycraft secret so you can catch unwitting people. This works less well as more information is out there.
- Want the surveillance public so that people are afraid to do things which might be construed as being against the will of TPTB. Obviously this intimidation doesn't work unless people know about it.
One can form a couple of curves here which have a meeting point.
The thing of it is, nothing really surprised me that much in the Snowden disclosures. Lots of the stuff had been leaked/inferred by attentive techies, and presumably by criminals/terrorists who are on top of things enough to be a genuine threat or otherwise of interest.
To the second point, after the Snowden disclosures and others I know for a fact that some less technical people are, at this point in time, nervous about so much as watching Infowars.com vids on youtube in case they get put on a 'watch list' of some sort.
It is at least possible that the Snowden affair was a psy-op designed to switch the surveillance system to more of an intimidation tool. I'm not saying I know one way or another, but until I have more confidence than I do currently I would not be in favor of letting Snowden totally off the hook.
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Manning and Assange are different (to me.) I have a high degree of confidence in (and a lot of gratitude toward) Assange at this point. I've always felt that Manning did the right thing for the right reasons. One of the few positive actions of Obama that I can think of was that he commuted Manning's sentence, though it is tempered with the knowledge that he had the guy tortured to suicide levels for however many years.
I think if I were prez and had the ability to do so I would have denied Manning his/her freedom to much on the premature side given his crimes (and they were crimes), but as soon as it was clear the reasons for his actions and any useful info had been extracted, I would have given him a sentence in a minimum security environment and made things as comfortable for him as realistic. I might even have given him some award or another as well. I would be mindful of the fact that it is an act of bravery to leak information when no other workable channels are provided, and the lack of these is in a military setting ultimately leads right up to the commander-in-chief's desk.
