And before Snowden, Russ Tice, Thomas Drake, Kirk Wiebe, Bill Binney (Ed Loomis has kept silent), were in an emergency to call on Dubya's illegal "warrantless wiretapping", also Diane Roarke who was not NSA but was the liaison of the NSA to the Congress (8% popular, Hitler was more popular in the whole world) Intelligence Committee, I'm not exactly sure, but she was sacked like the rest of 'em. But the NYT decided to sit on these 4 guys' whistleblowing in late 2004 as not to upset the elections (I guess if they hadn't, back in 2004 they would have said that they were puppets of Iran) and only published what Tice and Drake gave the NYT a year later in Dec. 2005 when it was too late to do anything about it and the FBI raided each of them in their houses in 2004, pulling Binney out of the shower naked. A guy that had the same power as Generals in the NSA on the civilian side. Snowden just confirmed what they were saying with material proof, which of course I understand that he ended up in Russia, only because, of course the US was not going to even attempt to extract him illegally out of Russia, where it has no extradition treaty with the US. Those guys faced the music, going "through the channels" and even government sanctioned whistleblower agencies such as the Office of Special Council and POGO (I forgot what it stands for). Why the OSC didn't work for them? John Crane, a pentagon whistleblower, was in charge of that office, and when he got sick and tired of all the illegal and unconstitutional, he was proven right by government agencies but was still sacked when he had enough. The kind of guy who keeps a pocket sized Bill Of Rights and Constitution in his wallet...not much publicity around this case, but it would unravel why going through channels didn't work, and he felt guilty that everything that ended up on his desk, he was force-tasked to add in a letter on top to the office of the President where all complaints disappeared into a black hole. Now that he was proven right, he wants his job back.
In any case, if you want to even know how everyone in government knew something was going to happen, I recommend reading "Fortress of Deceit" by Bogdan Djakovic, it's on amazon and kindle for cheapskates, he was a very high ranking FAA guy who had his own open source lateral "intelligence agency" and when he was moved to TSA when that was created, he shared it, newspaper/magazine clippings, radio and TV broadcasts that he kept in his computers since 1988, who was part of the Red Teams who try to bring contraband through TSA had a success of 80-95%. The stuff he collected and shared with fellow employees was more useful and predictive of what's in the future than the crappy memos he would get from other agencies, which were sanitized pieces of politically correct outright lies or just completely useless information. His most chilling revelation...I don't know if any of you remember, in 2007 there was a foiled plot by the British who have typical regular airplane security (at least at the time, the UK being even under more fascism since Theresa May is PM (and she'll get kicked out next elections easy) managed to stop something as bad as 9/11, 20 jetliners leaving the UK to the US were to be exploded over the Atlantic Ocean, it was in the news, but since it was foiled, and by a foreign country, I imagine most everyone don't know about it and it was sucked into the memory hole. The same day, TSA published on their website their whole system as a kind of a public service announcement. Any dark minds with a plot can look at that and reverse engineer it. I recommend reading that book, although I realize millenials are literally illiterate, with how public schools in the US in different states removed History and Geography from the curriculum...to me that's so awful I get nauseous, I've had History classes in 4th (regional history), 5th (provincial history), 6th (Canada history), 7th grade I had my first Geography class, although I was obsessed with maps and could recite all then 192 countries when in 6th grade or probably before that, had a huge world map that was in a magazine in the 90's on a wall in the basement as a kid. Then in 8th grade we had History again, going from Paleolithic times up to the Middle Ages and in 10th grade regarding more intensive Provincial and National history. I had picked History at the end of grade 11th where it was a class you could opt-in in 12th grade. Despite an average of 88% I wasn't accepted even if it was my second choice out of 3 options, because, I don't know, the teacher I had in 11th grade History was pretty sub-par, although I had grades over 85% often in the 90%+ zone, because I didn't do his stupid crossword puzzles homework for terms we had to knew by heart, which to me, a very auditive person, I didn't need to do, but homework accounted for 25% of your average grade per "ordos (I can't find think of the english equivalent, our school year was divided into 5 "ordos", google translate it into a proper noun "Ordo", anyway, I would have averages of 75-80% because I did not bother with his lame homework), I was robbed of it, so out of the three options I picked in my final HS year, there was Computers, Biology (which prepared well, was on par with Biology 101 in college) and...freaking Keyboarding, where you'd practice the "correct" way of typing with indexes on F and J...it took a whole year for the people our group of 6 on the first 2 tables as we were of course sitting in alphabetical order, but it turned out to be the 6 persons in class who already had the Internet in 1999, so we cruised through all that BS class made for future secretaries most of the time, took the rest of the class who actually did catch up to my speed of typing, not using the official method, with 60-65 words a minute, I ended up second only to a friend in that group of 6 who would talk out loud while typing faster than everyone else, through that boring keyboarding improvement software and later on, writing text in MS Word 2000.
Quite the tangent, but that History class was basically Advanced History which was pretty much the same as the optional class I took in college "History of The Occidental World from 1760 to early 20th century", which I cruised right through. How many Americans can pinpoint Syria on a map? I'd say less than 15%.. Anyway, I included the keyboarding class study to explain how I can make large to admittedly huge posts in a breeze, not bragging, years of IRC before I even got there helped big time. So yes, tl;dr I am, often, but I appreciate those who read it and then do the tl;dr resume in reply, not giving their own opinion, just to make a streamlined comment on how I make sense, you know who you are
As for Assange, I once considered moving to Sweden as I could have a job in the field I actually have a diploma in, and the Swedish embassy were happy with all my paperwork. But a Danish and another guy, a German, told me that Sweden, although I love so many things about it, the vibrant punk, hardcore and metal scene they have there and how the gap between rich and poor is one of the best in the industrial world, I've seen them go down on the UN's Human Development Index (as well as my own Canada which was #1 for like 10 years straight in the 80's and early 90's) lower and lower with time, with Norway surfing #1 since a long time now, I reconsidered, especially when I was told how PC by those 2 people who live near the country Sweden was, not the people necessarily, but the laws. Now that Canada has actually made soliciting prostitution illegal (prostitution laws we had were construed as unconstitutional so of course the then Conservatards used the "nordic model" and only the jacks get arrested here now, and Sweden is pretty much the place where that stupid law was invented. But also the definition of rape there...even if a woman consents, you can be accused of rape..which makes no sense, like Saudi Arabia's laws make no sense. There's no justification for this, so Assange did not infringe human rights as far as I'm concerned, fuck the laws made to protect the rich and for blackmail purposes, in all countries.
