BigAlski said:

Shite like this is the reason I moved out of California, living in good old Saint Paul, Minnesota now. Oxnard California is like a mini-Oakland. Here I have a 3000sf home built in 1901, 1 mile from downtown and no worries. My daughter is 10mos, one due in July, and we so enjoy walks in the neighborhood in the summer. My stepson walks to baseball 1 mile away, we meet him there pushing baby and walking dog, walk home as an American Family. It makes it all worth while. My wife is a CPA but I am a blue collar truck driver.

I think there are ALL KINDS of problems that lead to places like this in Cali... Fresno is almost as bad. Parts of the low desert are very bad, etc. If you want to write 2 page posts defending your view of WHY, maybe that's one of the reasons why as well, and you should define it, man up, and put it in there at number 12 or whatever. Sure "democratic stronghold" is part of the problem. American counter-culture has also been rewarding consumerism above all else for decades. Asians, Latinos, and Blacks cash in today and sell out tomorrow. The west coast is also way too expensive, real estate is too high, and money is the only incentive.

Obviously there is a problem. The left wants to look at answers that sound might or will help but accountability cant be ignored. The right wants to go to war and justify a police state when we are all Americans defining our on future together.

As a side note I might have had 10-15 encounters with these types over the years in and around Oxnard and if their skin was white and I was armed, maybe they would have died...or me. Who knows, there are always more than one way to deal with a problem. In the end the minorities pay the price and it isn't fair. They get worse jobs, their property isnt worth ShXXt, their children receive a poor education. Cookie-cutter whites, in the end, benefit on the left. The drive their Volvo SUVs on highways to schools or doctors or what have you paid for by the masses.

@bobknight33 @Trancecoach

Christians were once the majority in Lebanon, and they made Beruit "the Paris of the Middle East." But that era is over. They lost a battle of the cradle.

It's the same story with Oakland and Detroit. Detroit was once "the Paris of the West," but the people who made it that way were forced out, and the culture, mismanagement, and corruption of the new caretakers couldn't maintain what had been built.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki survived devastation and rebuilt. Baltimore survived the siege from the British, which spawned the penning of the national anthem. But Oakland, Detroit, Baltimore, and an ever increasing list of U.S. cities will never recover.

We now live in a different world than our parents' 1960s, when most of our current ideas were invented. (I'm speaking to the minority of people from all ancestries who are on the side of civilization.)

@dag and @gwiz665 Don't let this happen to your countries

radx said:

And here I thought the claims around his four laptops were put to rest in July of last year or, at the very latest, after his meeting with Ray MacGovern, Jesselyn Radack and Thomas Drake in October.

There was nothing of substance on those laptops and to suggest otherwise with any credibility demands extraordinary proof.

Why?

Because of two primary reasons, as far as I am concerned:

- Any of Snowden's claims has yet to proven false. The entire apparatus is trying and they failed miserably so far. Probably because Snowden actually knows what he's talking about, unlike such cranks as Rep. Peter King.

- Snowden spent years working within the intelligence industry (CIA, NSA, private contractors) and he has proven to be careful and meticulous. Unlike the public (or the British MoD), he'd know better than to transport any sensitive information on a device like a laptop or a smartphone. Or an external harddrive. Or a disk. He'd use flash memory, possibly a thumb drive, probably an SD card -- the less embedded controllers a device has, the better. Heavily encrypted, of course, and if anyone doesn't believe that crypto works... tough luck, I'm done trying to convince people otherwise.

So, the only people who received data from him are Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. American journalists reporting on American issues, just like he said.

As for the the revelation of "tons of national secrets and techniques": he has revealed nothing. Let me say that again: Snowden has revealed nothing.

He has empowered members of the press, the fourth estate, to do their bloody jobs and fullfil their role as watchdog over the government, something they failed at miserably in this particular regard. All revelations happen at the discretion of those journalists who are now the sole proprietors of the Snowden-documents.

If, however, you don't subscribe to the notion of a free press as a line of defence against government abuse, then I can't change your mind.

By the way, "putting American lives at risk" should have received a trademark by now, the way it has been waved around to kill uncomfortable conversations. I vividly remember how desperate they were to find proof that the Afghan/Iraqi War Logs and the Gitmo Files were endangering lives. As far as I know, they never found any. And as far as I know, all releases based on Snowden-documents were carefully chosen and redacted where neccessary to protect the identity of human assets. All claims to the contrary need to provide evidence.

But I'm glad to see that the "American industry" has found its way into the argument. At least we don't have to pretend that this is solely about terrorism anymore. Industrial espionage, diplomatic advantages and... keeping your own population in check.

Yay! It's just like the old days.

Oh wait, I forgot. My country has been under full scale surveillance by the US, the British and the French since the late '40s, so it's actually business as usual.

People like you just dont want to hear the truth, and thats why you are trying to discredit everyone who says the truth. You just did it again on me.