Edward Snowden is A Hero

Yesterday, the New York Times Editorial Board wrote:

Seven months ago, the world began to learn the vast scope of the National Security Agency’s reach into the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the United States and around the globe, as it collects information about their phone calls, their email messages, their friends and contacts, how they spend their days and where they spend their nights. The public learned in great detail how the agency has exceeded its mandate and abused its authority, prompting outrage at kitchen tables and at the desks of Congress, which may finally begin to limit these practices.

The revelations have already prompted two federal judges to accuse the N.S.A. of violating the Constitution (although a third, unfortunately, found the dragnet surveillance to be legal). A panel appointed by President Obama issued a powerful indictment of the agency’s invasions of privacy and called for a major overhaul of its operations.

All of this is entirely because of information provided to journalists by Edward Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor who stole a trove of highly classified documents after he became disillusioned with the agency’s voraciousness. Mr. Snowden is now living in Russia, on the run from American charges of espionage and theft, and he faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life looking over his shoulder.

Considering the enormous value of the information he has revealed, and the abuses he has exposed, Mr. Snowden deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and flight. He may have committed a crime to do so, but he has done his country a great service. It is time for the United States to offer Mr. Snowden a plea bargain or some form of clemency that would allow him to return home, face at least substantially reduced punishment in light of his role as a whistle-blower, and have the hope of a life advocating for greater privacy and far stronger oversight of the runaway intelligence community.

In my eyes, Edward Snowden is a hero for exposing the NSA's illegal and unconstitutional conduct. The President should grant him clemency. However, American politics make that virtually impossible.

More people should be concerned about the NSA collecting private information on millions of innocent Americans. Unfortunately, Obama loyalists and conservatives are more interested in demonizing the messenger.  

Sadly, many of my fellow progressives are more interested in defending the nation's first African American president.  That trumps everything, including logic and principle.  From their prospective, constitutional principles are practically irrelevant or an afterthought.  If any other person was in the White House, I doubt that those so-called progressives would vigorously defend the NSA's despicable practices. I guess if you put a black face on Orwellian policies that makes them acceptable. Have we forgotten about Cointelpro and its devastating impact on the black community? I guess so.

Many assert that the NSA's massive surveillance program is necessary to prevent terrorist attacks. When people have been programmed to be fearful, they will voluntarily surrender their constitutional rights to Big Brother. Here is the truth.  As reported on NBC News Investigative Reports,

A member of the White House review panel on NSA surveillance said he was “absolutely” surprised when he discovered the agency’s lack of evidence that the bulk collection of telephone call records had thwarted any terrorist attacks.

“It was, ‘Huh, hello? What are we doing here?’” said Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago law professor, in an interview with NBC News. “The results were very thin.”

While Stone said the mass collection of telephone call records was a “logical program” from the NSA’s perspective, one question the White House panel was seeking to answer was whether it had actually stopped “any [terror attacks] that might have been really big.”

“We found none,” said Stone.

Wake up, people.

Marijuana Should Be Legalized

Happy New Year, folks. Colorado celebrated the New Year by blazing up some weed. The Huffington Post reports that:

For more than 70 years, the sale of marijuana for recreational use has been criminally prohibited in the United States. But that ban, as it has existed for decades, ended Wednesday in Colorado.

The historic first, legal sales of recreational marijuana to those 21-and-older began in the morning at select dispensaries in Colorado -- the first state in the nation, and the first government in the world, to control and regulate a legal recreational marijuana industry.

A couple of months ago, the Nation reported that:

Over the last fifteen years, police departments in the United States made 10 million arrests for marijuana possession—an average of almost 700,000 arrests a year. Police arrest blacks for marijuana possession at higher rates than whites in every state and nearly every city and county—as FBI Uniform Crime Reports and state databases indisputably show. States with the largest racial disparities arrest blacks at six times the rate of whites. This list includes Alabama, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Nebraska, Nevada, New York and Wisconsin.

Big city police departments are among the worst offenders. Police in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York have arrested blacks for marijuana possession at more than seven times the rate of whites. Since 1997, New York City alone has arrested and jailed more than 600,000 people for possessing marijuana; about 87 percent of the arrests are of blacks and Latinos. For years, police in New York and Chicago have arrested more young blacks and Latinos for simple marijuana possession than for any other criminal offense whatsoever.

Other large urban areas that make huge numbers of racially biased arrests include Atlanta, Baltimore, Buffalo, Cleveland, Dallas–Fort Worth, Detroit, Fort Lauderdale, Houston, Las Vegas, Memphis, Miami, Nashville, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Tampa and Washington, DC. And across the United States, one-third of marijuana arrestees are teenagers; 62 percent are age 24 or younger; and most of them are ordinary high school or college students and young workers.

I do not condone the use of marijuana. I never have and will never use it. However, in light of the discriminatory enforcement of drug laws in this country, I believe that marijuana should be legalized and regulated like any other controlled substances. Everyone knows that the War on Drugs has been a complete failure. It has not stopped anyone from using drugs. As documented in Michelle Alexander's masterpiece The New Jim Crow, it has only led to the mass incarceration of black people.