jamiethekiller wrote:china would be the last place i would go right now.

Swiggers wrote:

jamiethekiller wrote:china would be the last place i would go right now.

North Korea says hi.

td11 wrote:i understand how grave the implications of being charged with treason are, but like, he violated a National Security Agency contract...

The disclosure on the eve of a two-day summit between the U.S. and Chinese presidents highlights what has become a persistent source of tension between the two global powers: Beijing’s aggressive, orchestrated campaign to pierce America’s national security armor at any weak point – in this case the computers and laptops of top campaign aides and advisers who received high-level briefings.

Advertise | AdChoicesThe goal of the campaign intrusion, according to the officials: to export massive amounts of internal data from both campaigns—including internal position papers and private emails of key advisers in both camps.

Officials and former campaign officials now acknowledge to NBC News that the security breach was far more serious than has been publicly known, involving the potential compromise of a large number of internal files. And, in one case, it included the apparent theft of private correspondence from McCain to the president of Taiwan.

Cyberattacks by the Chinese are expected to be at the top of the president’s agenda this weekend. U.S. officials say that such intrusions – many of them traced to a unit of the People’s Republic of China in Shanghai – have gotten even more brazen since the 2008 campaign.

Luzinski's Gut wrote:It would very difficult to convict him of treason since we are not technically at war (and haven't been since the end of World War II).

http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/treason

Barry Jive wrote:

Luzinski's Gut wrote:It would very difficult to convict him of treason since we are not technically at war (and haven't been since the end of World War II).

http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/treason

they convicted someone in 2006, so that's not really the reason. the reason is that you have to actively aid the enemy. that's not what this is

Assertions in the press that our compliance with these requests gives the U.S. government unfettered access to our users’ data are simply untrue. However, government nondisclosure obligations regarding the number of FISA national security requests that Google receives, as well as the number of accounts covered by those requests, fuel that speculation.

We therefore ask you to help make it possible for Google to publish in our Transparency Report aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures—in terms of both the number we receive and their scope. Google’s numbers would clearly show that our compliance with these requests falls far short of the claims being made. Google has nothing to hide.

In an official interview transcript released on Sunday by Democratic Representative Elijah Cummings, the manager said he and an underling set aside “Tea Party” and “patriot” groups that had applied for tax-exempt status because the organizations appeared to pose a new precedent that could affect future IRS filings.

Cummings, top Democrat on the House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee conducting the probe, told CNN’s “State of the Union” program that the manager’s comments provided evidence that politics was not behind IRS actions that have fueled a month-long furor in Washington.

“He is a conservative Republican working for the IRS. I think this interview and these statements go a long way toward showing that the White House was not involved in this,” Cummings told CNN’s “State of the Union” program.

The excerpts of interviews with IRS workers released by Cummings indicate that the IRS manager and an underling first decided to contact Washington, D.C. IRS officials for guidance on the cases from groups aligned with the anti-tax Tea Party movement.

They did so to consolidate them, as they might be precedent-setting for future cases, the manager said, according to the interview transcripts.

It was an unidentified Cincinnati IRS worker who reported to the manager, identified as John Shafer by committee aides, who identified the first Tea Party case. That individual has not been interviewed by the committee yet.

Investigators asked Shafer if he believed the decision to centralize the screening of Tea Party applications was intended to target “the president’s political enemies.”

“I do not believe that the screening of these cases had anything to do, other than consistency and identifying issues that needed to have further development,” the manager answered, according to a transcript released by Cummings.

Asked if he believed the White House was involved, the manager replied: “I have no reason to believe that.”

The same people freely allowing and justifying [PRISM] are often the same people who talk about Communist Russia and China and how "at least we aren't like those countries." Well, yeah...I guess technically you're right...because this is WORSE. It's official...we are in the WORST such situation of all the draconian movements in world history.

Luzinski's Gut wrote:http://thehill.com/blogs/defcon-hill/policy-and-strategy/304573-sen-feinstein-snowdens-leaks-are-treason

Senator Feinstein, the Democrat from California, believes Snowden is a traitor.

Interesting.

"Whistleblowers speak up because they love the organisation they work for, then they experience pretty much the same sequence of events. 1) They are ignored. 2) They are demeaned. 3) They are dismissed. 4) After they speak up, they are publicly rubbished. 5) Everybody, even the people who were their friends, scatter like the four winds.

Think about the emotional upset of a child who gets treated really unfairly. It's a very deeply wounding thing, but you can get over that relatively quickly. What is most difficult is the way your friends scatter. It takes a very long time to come to terms with that.

If Snowden has gone through a proper process to try to get this issue dealt with internally, and that hasn't worked, then absolutely he should speak up. It is only by people like that speaking up that we actually see things.

I thought about killing myself numerous times. If it hadn't been for my wife, I would probably be dead."

Hong Kong politicians and lawyers questioned why the man behind the National Security Agency surveillance leak picked the former British colony as a refuge, noting the territory’s longstanding cooperation with the U.S. on legal and economic matters.

...

“Hong Kong is the worst place in the world for any person to avoid extradition, with the possible exception of the United Kingdom,” said one lawyer who’s worked on a dozen extradition cases both in the U.K. and Hong Kong, citing a number of murder and drug smuggling cases in which Hong Kong authorities have helped render suspects back to the U.S. While an exception for political cases exists, lawyers said Monday they weren’t aware of any specific instances in which it had been tested.