Update:  Have added link to White House petition requesting Snowden be pardoned.  See link below article.

NWCitizen stands with Edward Snowden.  As owner of NWCitizen, I appreciate the immense courage and patriotism of Snowden in revealing the existence and specifics of the the federal government's program for spying on all Americans.  And that is what it is - and has been for the last 11 years - under the so called Patriot Act.

I supported and voted for Obama twice.  I believe he has betrayed us.  He can redeem himself by his actions going forward, but I doubt he will.  We will apparently learn more from the British newspaper The Guardian over the next days and weeks.  The invasion of our privacy probably goes deeper than the revelations of the past few days.  It was a classic moment of history to watch Obama choke through nine minutes of empty rationalizing about the Prism program on Saturday.  Sad. 

We do not live in a time of any more danger than we have over the past 200 years of our history. When we look at the thousands of deaths each year from unsafe highways, guns in the hands of lunatics, socially accepted mass poverty, and the insane aggressive criminal wars of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, we can see that the supposed threats of terrorism pale to insignificance.  We are our own worst threat to our enjoyment of life and liberty.

The real culprit here is the U.S. Congress for making this atrocity a legal program. They knew, probably voted for the secrecy, and allowed this spy program to go forward - for years.  We are a strong country.  We, as a people, have and can make very intelligent choices about who to elect as our leaders.  After over 50 years of political activism and sometimes deep involvement in events, I firmly believe this.  But our election system is rigged to almost automatically reelect incumbents.  Unfortunately, we will continue with our corrupt and dysfunctional Congress until we make real changes in our election processes.

Edward Snowden needs the vocal and written support of all of us.  We are now able to have a national discussion about security and privacy and the validity of our Bill of Rights and how we want to proceed into the future.  We have Snowden to thank for this opportunity.  As Obama and the NSA jumped, within hours, to defend the program and encourage a "national debate" on it, we need to note that they ran it for years as super secret.  And they intended to keep it secret from us forever.  And we don't yet even know the full extent of it.  All those movies about the Nazi SS and Russian KGB spying can now be joined by the U.S. Federal NSA big brother invasion of everything about our personal lives.   Thank you Edward Snowden for informing us.  Thank you for your courageous patriotism.