Edward Snowden: "This country is worth dying for"

Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we've been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it.  - Edward Snowden

Since the mainstream media, as directed by the Government and corporate entities who control the flow of news, is smearing Edward Snowden as a traitor and are flooding all of the news outlets with outright lies, I wanted to publish a follow-up open Q&A held by The Guardian  and Glenn Greenwald.  I've posted some of the most "piercing" answers from Snowden, including this one about Obama, which summarizes exactly what went through my mind about Obama after his first 100 days:

 Obama's campaign promises and election gave me faith that he would lead us toward fixing the problems he outlined in his quest for votes. Many Americans felt similarly. Unfortunately, shortly after assuming power, he closed the door on investigating systemic violations of law, deepened and expanded several abusive programs, and refused to spend the political capital to end the kind of human rights violations like we see in Guantanamo, where men still sit without charge.

 Here's a sample of some other quotes from Snowden, with the link to the Q&A at the end:

"I did not reveal any US operations against legitimate military targets. I pointed out where the NSA has hacked civilian infrastructure such as universities, hospitals, and private businesses because it is dangerous. These nakedly, aggressively criminal acts are wrong no matter the target. Not only that, when NSA makes a technical mistake during an exploitation operation, critical systems crash."

[Note:  think about the potential for the abuse of private information for political purposes by the Party in the White House with access to all this information.  Think about how J. Edgar Hoover or Nixon would have abused this.  Oh wait, the IRS under Obama has been abusing this, as has the Justice Department/Eric Holder]

"Initially I was very encouraged. Unfortunately, the mainstream media now seems far more interested in what I said when I was 17 or what my girlfriend looks like rather than, say, the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history."

"due to the FISA Amendments Act and its section 702 authorities, Americans’ communications are collected and viewed on a daily basis on the certification of an analyst rather than a warrant. They excuse this as "incidental" collection, but at the end of the day, someone at NSA still has the content of your communications"

And his coup de grace:

it's important to bear in mind I'm being called a traitor by men like former Vice President Dick Cheney. This is a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the way to deceitfully engineering a conflict that has killed over 4,400 and maimed nearly 32,000 Americans, as well as leaving over 100,000 Iraqis dead. Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.

 Here's the article:  LINK

FYI, one of the ranking Congressional Republicans smeared Snowden as being a high school drop-out.  That's incorrect.  He does in fact have a GED. However, here's a sampling of some famous  high school dropouts:

Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein (later returned), John D. Rockefeller, Walt Disney, Colonel Sanders, Charles Dickens (one of my favorite authors), Ray Kroc (McDonald's).