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  Nomen Nescio - 10 years ago

  I was once a member (albeit a very minor member) of the intelligence community. But so were/are many in my family. It seems to be a family trait that goes back generations.. Even before there was such a thing as a security clearance. ( MinAe kept me employed for 50 years, in a variety occupations.) I have a relative whose HOME is certified for storage of classified materials and classified meetings. Many of my long time friends and acquaintances are also cleared. So I have should be allowed some credibility in that area. So let me put forth a couple of things of note, truisms, or perhaps operating principles, or truths. The first is that ANY THING THAT CAN BE EXPLOITED, WILL BE EXPLOITED, PERIOD. And that explicitly means for both good and for evil, with political purpose the exact equivalent of evil. The fundamental truth is that ANY SECRET THAT IS KNOWN BY MORE THAN ONE PERSON, IS NOT SECRET...period. Secrets obey the three laws of thermodynamics: You can't win, you can't break even, ,and you can't even get out of the game. Secrets will always be 'outed' at some time. Like all things, secrets die, and that's what outing is to secrets. Live with it, and move on. Without having to have explicit proof, I can have complete certainty that this NSA system has been exploited for both personal and political nefarious purposes. Remember when it was revealed that people (legitimately) monitoring and recording phone traffic between military members overseas and their significant others here? And it was eventually revealed that the monitoring personnel were passing around the phone sex recordings of those they were secretly monitoring? Is anyone reading this enough of a Pollyanna to believe that ANY politician with sufficient power could EVER resist exerting his power for his or her own purposes? And that goes for from the President on down. So why should we be in the least surprised to hear that the entire NSA program has been corrupted, even to bypassing all safeguards, such as the FISA court, either by bypassing that court, or lying to it.... as in the Verizon matter? The NSA applied to the FISA court to monitor one entity and the FISA court said OK. But it turned out that the ONE ENTITY was all of Verizon. Absolute duplicity on the part of NSA. This omnivorous system, corrupted as it is, is more of a threat to all of America than all of the terrorists in the world. It is power beyond reckoning in the hands of people whose only goal in life is to promote themselves and advance their personal power, i.e. , politicians and governmental functionaries. This system is the opening of a modern Pandora's Box. Snowden is both a patriot and a hero in same mold as all of our Founding Fathers, who risked everything to free us from tyranny. He will be remembered as such if we are saved, or demonized if we descend into slavery. He is the Billy Mitchell of the 21st century. For those of you who have no idea of who Mitchell was, I will explain. First, he won the war in the Pacific, before the war. Between WWI and WWII he commanded the Army air Force with wood and fabric airplanes. He deliberately disobeyed orders during peacetime and had his airmen sink a captured German battleship we had here. The Navy wanted to build more invulnerable, unsinkable battleships that had guns that could shoot 24 miles. The Navy did not want to have anything to do with te idea that a battleship could be sunk by cheap cloth and wooden airplanes. Meanwhile, in the Pacific, the Japanese knew battleships could be sunk by aircraft, from hundreds of miles away. They built aircraft carriers. Because of Mitchell, so did we, and we prevailed in the long range Pacific naval war. Snowden is a hero in the same way as Billy Mitchell. He has exposed a great threat to America, in our bosom.