[1]Like Henry David Thoreau and many others in protest movements in our country over the past century and a half, Mr. Snowden deliberately broke the law to bring to public attention government behavior he considered at odds with the U.S. Constitution, American values, and the rule of law. [2]One point he wanted to make was that we Americans now live under a government that precludes legal or political challenges to its own increasingly deviant behavior. [3]Our government has criminalized the release of information exposing such behavior or revealing the policies that authorize it. The only way to challenge its policies and activities is to break the law by exposing them.

Honestly, why are you so readily disposed to dismiss the conclusions of a guy who has spent the past five decades far closer to the action than you or I, and who might be expected from that to have bought into the precepts of the Deep State?

The very purpose of the state is the management of the nation’s defense. To do this, the authorities must have situational awareness and early warning of possible threats from both state and non-state actors. SIGINT, like other forms of espionage and diplomatic reporting and analysis, is part of the answer to this need. But SIGINT was invented to support actions on the battlefield. For the most part, it remains a military project. We do not – we should not – ask our military to exercise restraint when attacking perceived threats. Armies are not expected to play by the rules but to win. They are inevitably inclined to overkill. It has been said that “an elephant is a mouse built to mil-specs.” True to the military culture of excess from which it sprang, NSA is an intrusive collection apparatus that has evolved to “collect it all.” “All” is much too much.

Given their invisibility, secret programs have a particular propensity to expand beyond their original purposes. The view that activities that are not legal are not necessarily illegal, and that any and all technology should be exploited à l’outrance is what underlies the decision to “collect it all.” It is hardly surprising that this has become NSA’s self-proclaimed mission. Why does a chicken cross the road? Why does a dog lick its balls? Because it can. Why does NSA snoop on everyone everywhere online? Because it has the money and means to do so, not because what it collects meets any valid, externally determined national requirement, standard of efficiency, or foreign policy judgment. The fact that we are able to do things that violate the trust and privacy of others does not make it wise or appropriate to do them.

[...]

“The Shadow Factory,” Bamford’s rageful 2008 book about the N.S.A.’s current troubles, is probably the most relevant of Bamford’s books today. In it, he describes an agency that has become increasingly cavalier about what data it will collect, and from whom. As one official told Bamford, “It’s what the N.S.A.’s been doing since 9/11. They’re just sweeping the stuff up.” Hayden, by this time, has been made into “a three-star sycophant unwilling to protect the agency from the destructive forces of Cheney and [David] Addington,” Cheney’s chief of staff. Whereas “Body of Secrets” referenced Borges, “The Shadow Factory” alludes to Orwell.

Particularly irksome is the suspicion that, as far as spy agencies are concerned, the N.S.A. just isn’t very good: Bamford said it has “failed badly” in preventing attacks since the Cold War, missing everything from the first World Trade Center attack in 1993 to the recent Boston Marathon bombing. That’s partly because, as the agency has been inundated with so much data, it has perhaps lost the ability to evaluate information in a timely manner. You need people to point out patterns, to say what is relevant and what is not. Or, as Bamford puts it in “A Pretext for War,” the “N.S.A. needs human intelligence sources to help tell it where, and to whom, to listen.” In the past, a rivalry with the C.I.A.—which is largely responsible for human intelligence, in contrast to the N.S.A.’s general focus on data—had prevented that sort of symbiosis.

At the root of Bamford’s fixation on the N.S.A. is a fascination with Americans’ willingness to “buy the company line” of spymasters, who assure us that the letter of the law is being followed, that civil liberties are respected, even as evidence accumulates suggesting the opposite. It seems we want to believe that those charged with protecting us may occasionally break the law, but will only do it to keep us safe, the way the roguish patriot Carrie Mathison, played by Claire Danes, routinely does on the TV show “Homeland.”

All this has made Bamford increasingly outraged. Though he refused to gloat during our conversation, it was clear that he felt vindicated for all his years of dogged pursuit. And he is still angry, as angry as he was back in 1982, when few Americans had ever heard of Crypto City. Surprisingly apolitical, Bamford simply wants the spies to account for what they do before they do it: “You want to do this?” he says of the N.S.A.’s Prism program. “Put a bill through Congress. Have a public debate.”

Posted Sept. 26, 2013, at 7:41 a.m.

WASHINGTON — The head of the National Security Agency delivered a vigorous defense Wednesday of his agency’s collection of Americans’ phone records for counterterrorism purposes, saying the program was helpful in investigations of the Boston Marathon bombing and the suspected plots against U.S. diplomatic outposts this summer.

“It provides us the speed and agility in crises, like the Boston Marathon tragedy in April and the threats this summer,” Gen. Keith Alexander said at the Billington Cybersecurity Summit, a gathering of business and government officials.

Alexander’s address follows calls by some leading lawmakers to end the program because of concerns that it invades Americans’ privacy without having proven its value as a counterterrorism tool.

In a brief interview after his talk, Alexander said the program did not help identify the Boston suspects, brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev. But he said that by using the database of domestic phone call records, the NSA was able to determine that fears about a follow-up attack in New York City were unfounded.

Mr. Pickering was targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail covers, a forerunner of a vastly more expansive effort, the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images.

Together, the two programs show that postal mail is subject to the same kind of scrutiny that the National Security Agency has given to telephone calls and e-mail.

The mail covers program, used to monitor Mr. Pickering, is more than a century old but is still considered a powerful tool. At the request of law enforcement officials, postal workers record information from the outside of letters and parcels before they are delivered. (Opening the mail would require a warrant.) The information is sent to the law enforcement agency that asked for it. Tens of thousands of pieces of mail each year undergo this scrutiny.

At a previous hearing last year, Manning's lawyer, David E. Coombs, described the treatment he received like that of a "zoo animal." Manning also took the stand during that hearing and described contemplating suicide and making a noose while being held in Kuwait.

The Bureau of Prisons (BOP) projects his release date as November 21, 2015.[52]

According to a Haaretz article by Amir Oren, if Pollard is released in 2015, he will be escorted by FBI agents to the gates of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. and transferred to Israeli custody.[53] However, a Jerusalem Post editorial states that if Pollard is paroled, the US government will still be legally able to place restrictions on his freedom of movement, travel, speech, employment, and domicile for 15 years.[54]