Eugene Robinson: We should thank Edward Snowden

[No Elephants]

Eugene Robinson: We should thank Edward Snowden

By EUGENE ROBINSON
Columnist


Edward Snowden’s renegade decision to reveal the jaw-dropping scope of the National Security Agency’s electronic surveillance is being vindicated -- even as Snowden himself is being vilified.

Intelligence officials in the Obama administration and their allies on Capitol Hill paint the fugitive analyst as nothing but a traitor who wants to harm the United States. M

any of those same officials grudgingly acknowledge, however, that public debate about the NSA’s domestic snooping is now unavoidable.

This would be impossible if Snowden -- or someone like him -- hadn’t spilled the beans. We wouldn’t know that the NSA is keeping a database of all our phone calls. We wouldn’t know that the government gets the authority to keep track of our private communications -- even if we are not suspected of terrorist activity or associations -- from secret judicial orders issued by a secret court based on secret interpretations of the law.

Snowden, of course, is hardly receiving the thanks of a grateful nation. He has spent the last five weeks trapped in the transit zone of Sheremetyevo Airport outside Moscow. Russian officials, who won’t send him home for prosecution, wish he would move along. But he fears that if he takes off for one of the South American countries that have offered asylum, he risks being intercepted en route and extradited. It’s a tough situation, and time is not on his side.

You can cheer Snowden’s predicament or you can bemoan it. But even some of the NSA’s fiercest defenders have admitted, if not in so many words, that Snowden performed a valuable public service.

[Enthusiast]

1. Even Eugene Robinson.

Things are heating up.

[No Elephants]

2. Yep. even Eugene Robinson.

In 1976, he began his journalism career at the San Francisco Chronicle; his assignments included the trial of publishing heiress Patty Hearst. He joined The Washington Post in 1980. Working his way up through the ranks, he was first a city-hall reporter at the paper. He then became the assistant city editor; a foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and London, England; and, most recently, the assistant managing editor of the paper's style section. He began writing columns for the opinion page of the paper in 2005, also writes a twice-a-week column on politics and culture, and conducts a weekly online conversation with readers.

Robinson appears frequently as a liberal political analyst<2> on MSNBC cable-TV network's programs such as Morning Joe, PoliticsNation with Al Sharpton, The Rachel Maddow Show, The Ed Show, Hardball with Chris Matthews, and Countdown with Keith Olbermann (now discontinued on MSNBC). In addition, he is often a panelist on NBC's public affairs program Meet the Press.

Robinson was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in recognition of his columns that focused on the first African-American U.S. presidential candidate to win votes in the electoral college, Barack Obama, who eventually won, during the 2008 presidential campaign.<3>

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Robinson_%28journalist%29

I wonder if and when people will ever stop using "liberal, "progressive" and "registered Democrat" as though they were all interchangeable terms.