Texas senator Ted Cruz, a Republican, told viewers on Fox News Monday morning that Americans should avoid a "rush to judgment" on the leaking of classified information by Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency systems analyst. The Washington Examiner has the video:
“I think it depends on what the contours of the program are and I don’t think we should rush to judgment or jump to conclusions,” Cruz said.
At Hot Air, Allahpundit notes the difference between Cruz's take on the NSA leaks and that of his sometimes-ally, Kentucky senator Rand Paul:
McCain lumps them together as “wacko birds” but I’m not so sure that’s true of Cruz on national-security issues. His alliance with Paul interests me because it strikes me as a personification of the uneasy libertarian/tea-party alliance. The groups overlap heavily on spending issues, and both are deeply suspicious of Obama’s expansion of government. The master stroke of Paul’s drone filibuster was that he found a sweet spot for both, making the philosophical case for due process while humiliating O for having turned into such a hypocrite about it. Even so, no matter how much Paul sometimes likes to pretend that the tea party is synonymous with libertarianism (for his own strategic reasons), various polls show that it just isn’t so. Tea partiers are more socially conservative than doctrinaire libertarians, they’re more likely to support entitlements, and they’re more traditionally Republican on defense/security issues. That’s not to say that they’re not becoming more libertarian — polls lately show Republicans are more skeptical about NSA surveillance than Democrats are, although that’s probably for partisan reasons — but they’re not all Ron Paul fans either.
After all, “It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force” (Federalist 1). Today, the resolution of that important question depends to an extraordinary degree on the vigor and good sense of American conservatism. For liberalism has unfortunately “progressed” beyond “that honorable determination which animates every votary of freedom, to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government” (Federalist 39). It is the conservative task to vindicate that honorable determination.
This means conservatives have to be the bearers of the wisdom of the American political tradition. And if that tradition teaches anything, it is that we can have limited and energetic government. We can keep America safe and free. We can support reducing the size and limiting the scope of the federal government at home and we can reject weakening its ability to protect us from enemies abroad. We can balance the desiderata of national security and the requirements of constitutional liberty. We can believe the times call for a healthy dose of domestic libertarian populism and a renewed commitment to foreign policy strength and leadership. We can love American liberty and American greatness. We can be the land of the free and the home of the brave.
To put it more colloquially—yes, we can walk and chew gum at the same time.
Edward Snowden says "lies" from the Gang of 8 are part of the reason he felt "compelled ... to act." He made the statement in response to a question about his motivations in releasing classified information on the Guardian's website.
In a Sunday evening statement, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence Public Affairs Office released this statement, meant to clear up information on the National Security Agency’s data program.
Members of the U.S. Senate were given the opportunity to attend a briefing on Thursday that would bring them up to speed on the NSA surveillance operations, among other things. The briefing would be conducted by James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, not some low-level staffer.
Friday evening, the State Department released a joint statement from the June 10-11 "U.S.-Germany Cyber Bilateral Meeting." The meeting was held in Washington.
Politics can seem frustratingly complex. It can be a challenge to grasp that the targeting of conservatives by Internal Revenue Service officials over the last few years constitutes a genuine scandal, while the lawful activities of employees of the National Security Agency do not. It can be a strain to distinguish the illegitimate and arbitrary use of government power to harass American citizens exercising their constitutional rights from the legitimate use of government power to protect the nation from our enemies abroad.
One might expect Keith Alexander to advocate on behalf of the two programs at the center of our national debate about terrorism and surveillance. He is, after all, the head of the National Security Agency, which runs them. “It’s dozens of terrorist events that these have helped prevent—both here and abroad—in disrupting or contributing to the disruption of terrorist attacks,” Alexander testified last week.
Should Americans fear the possible abuse of the intercept power of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland? Absolutely. In the midst of the unfolding scandal at the IRS, we understand that bureaucracies are callous creatures, capable of manipulation. In addition to deliberate misuse, closed intelligence agencies can make mistakes in surveilling legitimate targets, causing mountains of trouble. Consider Muslim names.
The Scrapbook’s hypothesis that the substance of blockbuster news stories tends to diminish with time—there’s less here than meets the eye—is borne out most of the time. Which, as nonscientific theories tend to go, is an enviable record.
NSA chief Keith Alexander says Edward Snowden's claim that he could tap any phone call or email is "false":
"I saw an interview in which Mr. Snowden claimed that due to his position at NSA he could tap into virtually any American's phone call or e-mails," said Senator Susan Collins. "True or false?"
The NSA chief said, "False. I know of no way to do that."
[W]e still don’t know (at least publicly) exactly what Snowden’s job was. So questions remain about whether he should have had access to the materials he passed along to the Guardian and the Washington Post. Or is there some “hole” in the NSA’s internal IT system that allowed him to get around and get to materials he should not have been able to see, let alone download?
When Edward Snowden decided he wanted to release details about the NSA's intelligence operations to the public, he reached out to Laura Poitras, a 49-year-old film maker and political activist opposed to the war on terror.
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