The Big Chill
Fred Kaplan, Slate’s long-time defense correspondent, has a smart and tough piece arguing the reasons “Why Snowden Won’t (And Shouldn’t) Get Clemency.” His bottom line: Snowden didn’t just reveal the NSA’s domestic surveillance or spying on allies, but also also exposed the agency’s programs in places like Pakistan, Iran and China.
Senators Rand Paul (R-KY) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) disagreed on the Snowden clemency question on ABC’s This Week yesterday.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) sent the NSA a letter asking if the agency has spied or is currently spying on members of Congress or other elected officials, and the agency’s response, so far, is a non-denial, reports the Washington Post’s Brian Fung.
Lawrence Wright explores whether the NSA’s massive collection of phone metadata could have prevented 9-11, as Judge William Pauley recently argued in upholding the program, and concludes that it wouldn’t have made a difference, since the FBI already had the same capability. The real failure to prevent 9-11, he argues in the New Yorker, was the lack of cooperation between federal agencies, citing the CIA’s refusal to share critical intelligence with the FBI.
The seventeen groups that make up the conservative billionaire Koch brothers political network raised a whopping $407 million (at least) in 2012, the Washington Post and the Center for Responsive Politics