Edward Snowden reveals the 21th Centurys' Global Big Brother

That's not what happened in either of these cases though. I.e. none of the agencies involved "made policy". And there was political oversight in both cases as well. The public over sight was rather limited as it must be with classified material. Furthermore their are internal procedures for reporting abuses. I've seen no evidence that either Snowden or Manning tried to make use of them. In Mannings case it would I suspect have been useless as he didn't or should I say doesn't have a valid case.

Good thing we don't have any of them then isn't it? The agency was responding to tasking presented by the executive branch in Snowden's case and the efforts had been ok'd by the judical branch. Now they have arguably stepped over the line here but it took the executive branch request and some questionable decisions on the part of the judical branch or lack of oversite on either or both of these to produce the problem. There are also as I have said official channels to report abuses and/or excess of this sort. If Snowden tried to use them it's not at all clear at this point and the above appears to me to be completely irrelevant to the Manning case.

Could be, or not. In the first case there's too little data to really tell what the story is and in the second we have lawyers trying to make a case for their client. Certainly I don't see a strong case in the first one for them making laws rather than enforcing them although there can be a strong case for the law being worded poorely. Of course this isn't a new thing either. When I was thinking about getting a HAM radio license back in the 60's it was forbiden to transmit in secret codes or even a foreign language unless you were speaking to someone outside the US who knew that language and phones back then were often party lines.

One could argue just the opposite. Again they were operating under orders from the executive branch and their actions had been ok'd by the judical branch.

I suspect not many. The information simply isn't that useful for personal gain and very few are in position to use intel assets to spy on spouses or personal enemies. Now a lot of FOUO information is much more useful in regards to personal gain but there are pretty strong controls in place to prevent it.

 

If actions that directly lead to economic treaty negotiations breakdown, the banning of some US companies from international contracts, and other US companies going out of business are not policy I wonder what is. The NSA is not operating in a vacuum, though it obviously is looking at only one aspect, it's actions have had widespread consequences.
IMHO in a healthy democracy the right place for those wide impact decisions is much higher up, not in secrecy by an agency that will reap the benefits (if any exist besides more budget) while others end paying the costs. So by going ahead with those programmes and withoding info from the overisght the NSA perfectly fits the "out of control" definition.

 

How do you know at what level those decisions are made?

 

I don't know, actually I'm eagerly waiting (but not holding my breath ) for who actually made them to take resposability for them,. IMO one of the reasons for all the noise about Snowden, Assange and Manning is blurring the issue in order to avoiding aving to do that.
But one of the basics of democracy is that policy making is public as without public knowledge there can be obviously be no "informed consensus".
Some closed doors decisions are inevitable, but wideranging policy making MUST be a public process, closed doors decision equals blind (as in having no visibility) trust in the decision makers, not a good thing in general and more appropriate to an elective monarchy than a democracy.

 

Well for at least some of the things that I consider a bit overboard Obama has pretty much taken the postion that they were operating under his orders. You can't get much higher than that.

 

If a bunch of fanatics have made you give up your ideals ....... they have won (at least a big battle if not the whole fight, terrorist do not aim at directly destoiyng a nation state, they don't have the means for it, they aim at making it react in a favourable way to them. the òloss of "moral high ground" is a big vctory for the terrorists).

BTW there is an interesting "turf war" going on between NIST and the NSA as some of Snowden revelations showed the NSA advice had introduced weaknesess in security algorithms published by NIST (the exact opposite of what happerned with the DES standard years ago where NSA advice had improved it and it took independent cryptographers 10 years to understand what the NSA knew that prompted that advice).
This of course is a big failure of one of the two primary NSA missions "potect US comunications and gather intelligence from foreign comunications" as there is evidence the recent successful espionage attemps against US firms exploited the weakened algorithms. Looks to me the two missions are more and more incompatible in an interconnected world the NSA's contributions to open standards are known and you can bet the Chinese crypto specialists took a very deep look at those contributions.

 

I really don't see it as giving up ideals. Part of the difference in my opinion I guess is the fact that I didn't see the communications as that secure in the first place and tend to believe the government is more trustworthy with the data than some of the private players.

I like it better when the measures are clearly temporary however and their is proper oversight. Both of these are in question in this case. An example of how something like this (all be it a much less sensative example) is armor magazine. It was available to pretty much everyone on the web for years. During a sginficant period of our engagmenent in SWA it became unavailable to the general public as some of the issues discussed involved details of TTPs. The ability to discus and disseminate these within the Army was views as very useful thus the limitations. Since our commitments there have declined the more recent issues are available again.