Anthonyn Cordesman on Edward Snowden

Anthony Cordesman is a fine audio reviewer and a knowlegable foreign policy expert. Snowden has set us back so badly with his disclosures that it cannot be calculated. I consider myself to be a fairly liberal thinker and one who treasures the right of privacy that our justices have found in the Constitution. But I, like many, have no problem with our government obtaining massive amounts of meta data so that, when needed, it can be accessed to connect the dots of terrorist aspirants. I mean, isn't the defense of the country through use of available digital data a no brainer in modern society?
Snowden is a grandstanding joker who should be brought to justice and jailed.

Today are reasonable expectations of privacy are reduced from the days when
our Justices first enunciated the doctrine in the context of Fourth Amendment
jurisprudence in 1967--- sad to say. Companies use our cookies to see our
purchasing (and who knows what else) preferences, our cellphones are
utilizes quite freely by the courts to determine not only the fact of a call but
one's location when it was made. This info is of course available to our
telephone companies and indeed stored by them for a period of time in the
regular course. We hope and trust that they do not abuse it. We go through
EZpass, but do not want it utilized for the ulterior purpose of issuing
speeding tickets--, your cable company has your viewing preferences down.
Your credit card co knows how where and when you purchase things and what
your purchasing preferences are. Many businesses have hidden cameras that
monitor their streets and parking lots. They are recording our movements.
In this context, the disclosure that the US is able to and does collect metadata
(and not the content) of many millions of calls made me feel safer than
before. The stated purpose for this program was to preserve our ability to
retroactively, under the appropriate circumstances, connect the dots on those
who are in constant communication with terrorists or terrorist cells and
perhaps obtain subpoenas to monitor the calls in the future. This previously
undisclosed ability, now compromised, has resulted in a loss of a critical tool
in our national defense.
We can applaud a number of instances where an unauthorized release of
classified information led us to be a freer country with better restraints
against bad governmental conduct, e.g--the Pentagon Papers, Watergate. I
am not one who believes that whatever the government classifies should
remain so just because our government says so. Indeed, I believe there is far
too much classified information and much less transparency in government
than there should be.
Nevertheless, I cannot for the life of me see how, in the context of what we
know is known about us by any number of actors today, we can applaud
Snowden for undermining a key tool for our national defense under the guise
of being a champion of our privacy. He simply had no legal right and, more
importantly, no moral right to make these disclosures.