Six months after exposing the NSA's secret surveillance program, Edward Snowden sat down with a Washington Post reporter, and over meals of burgers, pasta, ice cream and Russian pastries, explained that
his personal mission has already been accomplished,
reports Gawker.“I already won," he told the Post's Barton Gellman, one of the reporters he initially approached with the leak. "As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.”It also appears that Snowden is not anti-NSA, just bulk data collections. From Gawker:Snowden says this blind bulk data collecting is his biggest problem — he believes that individual targeting based on probable cause would be more appropriate.
“I don’t care whether you’re the pope or Osama bin Laden... As long as there’s an individualized, articulable, probable cause for targeting these people as legitimate foreign intelligence, that’s fine. I don’t think it’s imposing a ridiculous burden by asking for probable cause. Because, you have to understand, when you have access to the tools the NSA does, probable cause falls out of trees.”
Allowing individuate targeting is, in my book, just as bad. That will be stretched and stretched---as all government operations are.