News Genius Editors - 5 Most Inane Things Said About Edward Snowden (So Far) lyrics

5. We know he was irresponsible because of documents we haven't seen "These were legally authorized programs; in the case of Verizon Business's phone records, Snowden certainly knew this, because he leaked the very court order that approved the continuation of the project. So he wasn't blowing the whistle on anything illegal; he was exposing something that failed to meet his own standards of propriety. The question, of course, is whether the government can function when all of its employees (and contractors) can take it upon themselves to sabotage the programs they don't like. That's what Snowden has done. What makes leak cases difficult is that some leaking—some interaction between reporters and sources who have access to cla**ified information—is normal, even indispensable, in a society with a free press. It's not easy to draw the line between those kinds of healthy encounters and the wholesale, reckless dumping of cla**ified information by the likes of Snowden or Bradley Manning. Indeed, Snowden was so irresponsible in what he gave The Guardian and the Post that even these institutions thought some of it should not be disseminated to the public. The Post decided to publish only four of the forty-one slides that Snowden provided. Its exercise of judgment suggests the absence of Snowden's." -Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker, 6/10/13 4. His defenders are a unified, "braying mob" "Dare I suggest that a small dollop of skepticism is required here? There is an instinct, indulged by journalists and activists, to reflexively anoint the leaker—or the whistleblower, depending on your point of view—saintly status. And the braying mobs of Snowden supporters, who nicely overlap with the pa**ionate Julian Assange fans and Ron Paul devotees (Snowden himself donated $500 to Paul's campaign in 2012), will doubtless dismiss any incertitude as the grumblings of Obama-administration flunkies or Bush nostalgics." -Michael Moynihan, The Daily Beast, 6/10/13 3. He's a traitor to everyone and everything ever, including his own cause "If you live a life unshaped by the mediating institutions of civil society, perhaps it makes sense to see the world a certain way: Life is not embedded in a series of gently gradated authoritative structures: family, neighborhood, religious group, state, nation and world. Instead, it's just the solitary naked individual and the gigantic and menacing state... For society to function well, there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures. By deciding to unilaterally leak secret N.S.A. documents, Snowden has betrayed all of these things. He betrayed honesty and integrity, the foundation of all cooperative activity. He made explicit and implicit oaths to respect the secrecy of the information with which he was entrusted. He betrayed his oaths. He betrayed his friends. Anybody who worked with him will be suspect. Young people in positions like that will no longer be trusted with responsibility for fear that they will turn into another Snowden. He betrayed his employers. Booz Allen and the C.I.A. took a high-school dropout and offered him positions with lavish salaries. He is violating the honor codes of all those who enabled him to rise. He betrayed the cause of open government. Every time there is a leak like this, the powers that be close the circle of trust a little tighter. They limit debate a little more. He betrayed the privacy of us all. If federal security agencies can't do vast data sweeps, they will inevitably revert to the older, more intrusive eavesdropping methods." -David Brooks, The New York Times, 6/10/13 2. He seems chipper! "In the video, he seems comfortable in his own skin—he will strike some as too at ease, or even pleased. His affect is not that of a haunted informant in the dark corner of a bar. He is the cheeriest major leaker one is likely to come across. That may just accentuate what he is leaving behind by coming forward. (The Guardian said that he got tears in his eyes when discussing the effect this all will have on his family.)" -Amy Davidson, The New Yorker, 6/9/13 1. He is making government officials very sad "For me, it is literally – not figuratively – literally gut-wrenching to see this happen because of the huge, grave damage it does to our intelligence capabilities....This is someone who, for whatever reason, has chosen to violate a sacred trust for this country." -James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, 6/8/13