Quote:
Originally Posted by Rochard
You are comparing apples to poorly hung panda bears.
Mark Felt saw our government commit a crime and leaked information to the press. In the process, Mark Felt broke the law, was arrested, went to trial and was found guilty, and was later pardoned. This is understandable and acceptable - The laws he broke were minor compared to the crimes he exposed.
Snowden didn't expose any crimes. Yes, he exposed that our government was collecting meta data on phone calls but (correct me if I am wrong) this was never considered illegal, and no one has ever been charged with a crime. On the other hand, Snowden was the worst leak of classified information the United States intelligence agencies has ever had. Basically he told terrorists how we were trying to track them through Europe and the United States.
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One of the things we found out from the Snowden leaks is that our intelligence agencies are allowed to act when doing surveillance and collecting data without a warrant if they feel it is something that must happen right now in order to be effective. They are supposed to then go get a warrant after the fact in order to prove they were acting within the law and in good faith. This has happened a lot, but with one little problem, in many of the cases they never bothered to then go to the court and get the warrant. That is against the law.