Edward Snowden, Lawrence O'Donnell, and the Failure of Fuzzy Land Thinking
Per SOP, since Edward Snowden began revealing the details of the NSA's Orwellian surveillance program, establishment pundits have been doing their best to denounce his actions and denigrate the man personally. This is an easy task for the reflexively authoritarian segments of the American audience, for whom denunciations from the likes of Peter King, John Boehner, or Dick Cheney will do. For the large audience of those who think themselves of an educated, liberal mind, with serious concern for issues of rights and privacy, a somewhat more complex assault on Snowden's actions or his person is necessary -- something that rings of those same concerns, and gleams with the patina of an intellectual exercise.
Thus, out come the big intellectual-ish guns, loaded up with some logical-ish ammunition, in order to oh-so-complexly critique what Snowden has done. For example, we hear from Geoffrey Stone, Professor at the University of Chicago Law School, who hired Barack Obama to teach constitutional law:
[I]t’s extremely important to understand that if you want to protect civil liberties in this country, you not only have to protect civil liberties, you also have to protect against terrorism, because what will destroy civil liberties in this country more effectively than anything else is another 9/11 attack. ... So it’s very complicated, asking what’s the best way to protect civil liberties in the United States.