Snowden joins Manning as true American hero

Pvt. Bradley Manning will likely be sentenced to life in prison when his foreordained guilty verdict is handed down in his ongoing courts martial for releasing thousands of military documents to Wikileaks. Now he's joined by Edward Snowden, former NSA contractor, who may also, if Uncle Sam can get his tentacles around him in his Hong Kong hideout, end up in the pokey for life. Snowden outed the National Security Agency's (NSA) program of massive surveillance of every American phone call in the claimed interests of national security, effectively ending the 4th Constitutional Amendment guaranteeing privacy for the last 222 years. Both of these men are true American heroes. Manning, ensnared in helping carry out our criminal Iraq war, followed his conscious and gave us a painful opportunity to see aerial footage of American gunships blasting innocent civilians, including 2 news correspondents, to kingdom come. Snowden, by spilling the surveillance state story, denied by all manner of governmental officials for years, revealed that this includes, besides every phone call, access to search history, the content of emails. file transfers and live chats. Snowden, in an interview with American journalist Glenn Greenwald, summed up his breathtakingly courageous action thusly: “The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards. I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things … I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.” Mainstream media pundits are already currying favor with the government by employing character assassination against Snowden just like they did against Manning, calling Snowden bizarre and exhibiting an incoherent ideology. These folks don't know the meaning of patriotism or courage or decency when they engage in such shameless shilling for a government that makes senseless war permanent policy and tosses the 4th Amendment on the trash heap of history. There aren't too many folks I look up to on the national scene today. But when Pvt. Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden stood up and sacrificed their freedom to the bullies prosecuting those wars and eliminating privacy, they earned my complete respect. They've earned the respect of every American who cares about the future of this country.