We tried to stay for the better part of seven years inside the government trying to get the government to recognize the unconstitutional, illegal activity that they were doing and openly admit that and devise certain ways that would be constitutionally and legally acceptable to achieve the ends they were really after. And that just failed totally because no one in Congress or — we couldn’t get anybody in the courts, and certainly the Department of Justice and inspector general’s office didn’t pay any attention to it. And all of the efforts we made just produced no change whatsoever. All it did was continue to get worse and expand.
(So Snowden did the right thing?)
Yes, I think he did.
William Edward Binney is a former highly placed intelligence official with the United States National Security Agency (NSA) turned whistleblower who resigned on October 31, 2001, after more than 30 years with the agency. He was a high-profile critic of his former employers during the George W. Bush administration, and was the subject of FBI investigations, including a raid on his home in 2007.
Binney has continued to speak out during Barack Obama’s presidency about the NSA’s data collection policies, and in recent years continues to be interviewed in the media, regarding his experiences and his views on communication intercepts by governmental agencies of American citizens. In a legal case, Binney has testified in a sworn affidavit that the NSA is in deliberate violation of the U.S. Constitution.
3 NSA veterans speak out on whistle-blower: We told you so
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/06/16/snowden-whistleblower-nsa-officials-roundtable/2428809/