Snowden Deserves Petraeus-Like Deal, Backers Say: 'Gen. Petraeus violated the law to impress a girlfriend. Edward Snowden released confidential information in order to bring attention to overwhelming and pervasive constitutional violations.'

If the United States screws another country in a trade deal, the other country can simply back out of it or refuse to honor it.

I think you've got it a bit backwards. The other country is hurt more than America is by the breaking of any trade deal. Even if China somehow got pissed at us and stops trade with us, India is ready willing and able to step in and replace them. That move alone combined with China's insane number of citizens that they would have to take care of could bring them down within a decade.

As far as the tech advances from military spending every single one of those was far more substantially contributed to by private nonmilitary spending.

You're right, but only after the military developed them. The internet wouldn't exist without the military. Obviously they didn't make it what it is today, but you have to give them credit for coming up with the idea and building the initial infrastructure.

Engineers at Boeing can readily be working on civilian craft instead.

Nope. There's not enough volume.

Again, why make life difficult for the people we want to work collaboratively with?

Again, you're the only one making the assertion that we're doing that. I thought we were talking about the NSA and now we're somehow talking about trade deals.

The NSA is quite rightly viewed as having taken an anti industry position and jeopardized American companies in doing so.

People say the same thing about the EPA. Any time a company has a regulation placed on it by a federal agency, it's considered anti-industry. The fact is business needs to be regulated.

The NSA simply is not interested in saving American lives.

Citation needed. You can disagree with their tactics, but to question their motives and suggest that thousands of American citizens are actively uninterested in saving their own lives and the lives of their family members and countrymen is just silly.

They have worked against cyber security favoring offensive measures so instead of having safe control systems for our plants and infrastructure, the BSA has worked to keep the systems vulnerable in the hopes of using it against other countries.

They favor both offensive and defensive measures, but they're admittedly not the tech experts in this country, the tech companies are. Everything that the NSA does, tech companies allow them to do. Again, I'm not sure why you're blaming the NSA and not the tech companies. Well, yes I do. Because you're not willing to give up the tech industry's products. You can sit here and whine to me about the NSA and go on about your regular life as if you've done something about the problem.

Further what does the NSA care? Successful attacks result in an increase of budgets.

Wow, you're pretty naive there buddy. Successful attacks result in every department head getting fired and resources diverted from agencies that dropped the ball. Besides the fact that Americans get killed and confidence in our government and world safety falls through the floor. But sure, for a couple thousand bonus why not just willingly allow an attack to happen. As if the country didn't lose trillions the last time. But I'm sure if the NSA could get a bigger Christmas party out of it this year, they'd be cool with letting the world economy take another huge hit.

You must be about 17. You have a profoundly malinformed opinion of how the NSA or the CIA works, or even the difference between the two agencies. I get that you think this Snowden character is your hero because he purposely lied to the NSA and stole sensitive data because he thought (in his non legally trained opinion) that they were doing something wrong by collecting metadata. Not only was that not news to all of the grown ups in the world, but the more we dug we found out that the tech companies willingly routinely gave this data to them. We also found out that the program had oversight from federal courts and Congress. You feel like the NSA took this metadata information from you personally, when that's not the case at all. The data belongs to the telecoms, not you or me. If they want to sell it to advertisers or give it to the NSA that's their business. If you don't like it, switch companies. But blaming spies for spying is a bit like blaming dogs for barking. You're like those anti-vaxxers. You're so protected that you don't even realize the benefit of the thing you demonize for some minor ass problem. If you really valued your privacy, you wouldn't touch the internet. I hope if Snowden does ever set foot on American soil again that he gets a fair trial and is put to death for treason.

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