https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/stupid-corrupt-tyrants-expect-everyone-else-to-be-stupid-and-corrupt-too/

The geniuses at the NSA think they can bribe Edward Snowden into silence: one of them wants to offer him amnesty in exchange for his returning whatever documents he hasn’t yet released. “Rick Ledgett, who runs the NSA task force assessing the damage on the Snowden leaks, told CBS’ news program ‘60 Minutes’ … that an amnesty deal is ‘worth having a conversation about. I would need assurances that the remainder of the data could be secured, and my bar for those assurances would be very high. It would be more than just an assertion on his part.”

Right. As if a guy smart enough to run rings around the NSA is dumb enough to take its liars at their word. Yo, Rick: your bar for those assurances would be in the basement compared with the height of Mr. Snowden’s for yours lest he wind up with a knife between his ribs one lonely night.

Meanwhile, in addition to wasting our taxes on reading our emails and eavesdropping on our phone calls, the NSA has also “’spent hundreds and hundreds of man-hours trying to reconstruct everything [Heroic Ed] has gotten, and they still don’t know all of what he took,’ a senior administration official said.” But that wasn’t all: “one of the task force’s fears was that Snowden might have left a bug or virus behind on the NSA’s network. So the agency removed all the computers he had access to on the agency’s classified and unclassified networks — including the cables that connected them — at a cost Ledgett estimated in the tens of millions of dollars.” We not only pay these Peeping Toms to spy on us, we pay to cover their tracks when patriots expose their crimes.

And the execrable Michael Hayden, “former NSA and CIA Director,” apparently hopes to win the Bill “It Depends on the Meaning of ‘Is'” Clinton Parsing Award. “We’re protected against unreasonable search and seizure. [The Constitution] doesn’t say that all searches must be based upon reasonable suspicion,” he opined. Like every sponging spook, this slime is lower than ol’ Rick’s comparative bar.

Ah, but Judge Richard Leon has just determined “that the NSA metadata collection program likely violates the Fourth Amendment.” (Full decision available at link.) “Likely.” See what 3 years of law school gets you?

7:14 pm on December 16, 2013

The Best of Becky Akers