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" I hate to give the president advice, but this really should be the last time he ever mentions the name &amp;quot;Edward Snowden&amp;quot; in public again. At a press conference this afternoon, President Obama announced that he&amp;#039;s taking a series of steps to restore Americans&amp;#039; trust in the U.S. intelligence community and safeguard their privacy. But his agenda may have been obscured when he was asked if he thought NSA leaker Edward Snowden was a patriot. Obama replied, &amp;quot;No, I don&amp;#039;t think Mr. Snowden was a patriot.&amp;quot;  The question was stupid. It never should have been asked, but it really never should have been answered. The president should leave the decision on Snowden&amp;#039;s patriotism, or lack thereof, to the people of the country to fight about. He was out there trying to pitch his program for increased transparency in the programs that Snowden revealed to the people who pay for them, and all he did was get back into the ongoing mudfight over whether or not Snowden should have a statue on the mall or a cell in Pelican Bay. If this administration has done anything right in this whole mess, it&amp;#039;s damned sure eluded me what it is. Just shut up and let the guy remain the guest of lifetime ACLU member, Vladimir Putin. Otherwise, the president&amp;#039;s proposals are about as far as any president is likely to go in our lifetimes. The FISA process is a mess, its purpose completely twisted from the original, which was supposed to guard people against programs like the ones the NSA has been running. The FISA court now serves only as another vehicle for the metastasizing secrecy within which the mischief gets done. Having someone come into a secret court proceeding and argue against the government&amp;#039;s case for a secret warrant based on secret evidence, and then (probably) making sure that the case against the warrant is classified, too, doesn&amp;#039;t get us very far out of the rabbit hole. And the &amp;quot;privacy officer&amp;quot; at the NSA is going to be the loneliest person in Washington. One thing that we know now, and we know it because of Edward Snowden, International Man Of Luggage, is that the surveillance state is a permanent factor in our lives. Hanging pretty curtains on the blockhouse windows doesn&amp;#039;t really help very much. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a19223/the-snowden-effect-and-today-at-the-white-house/>