Thanks for the info young Mr. Snowden, but you are a traitor…

The government is spying on us, tapping into our phone calls and email. That is chilling. It’s like we have the Gestapo or the Stasi or the KGB or whatever. It’s like the George Orwell police state come true.

And we can thank the misguided young man Edward Snowden for this information. As you know, he worked for a private security outfit connected to the government and then blew the whistle on all this.

But as I say he is apparently misguided. He either wittingly or unwittingly, maybe in his desperation and confusion, has become a traitor to his country, the United States of America.

He must be rather ignorant of history if he thinks Russia, the old Soviet Union, will offer him a better deal than America, or if any other of our detractors or not so friendly nations will.

If what he was doing for the government or what he was involved in bothered his conscience he should have resigned and maybe seen a lawyer — a good one, and then figured out what to do.

I doubt that he was a plant of enemy agents but he has made himself appear that way.

Maybe our government (the USA) should offer him some kind of immunity if he just agrees to come back and maybe meet with representatives of the executive and legislative branches of government, as well as intelligence officials (part of the executive branch really) and talk things out. I’m not sure on that, just an idea.

He may have done nearly irreparable harm to our intelligence programs. And we need intelligence — it is a dangerous world with many bad actors ready to do us all harm.

But we cannot completely sacrifice our freedom for security. We don’t want the all-powerful state (the government) to rule us by fear that each one of us could be arrested for subversive thoughts or actions, even when we are just practicing our right to freedom of speech and expression (and in a police state, even totally innocent people get caught in the net). Becoming Nazi Germany or the Old Soviet Union with people spying on our private lives and people ratting on each other for their own advantage would defeat the purpose of what we are trying to protect — our freedom.

Yes I know that President Obama has assured us that the government is not spying on you or me, just bad people. But when he was asked for specifics about how it is determined who will be spied upon he gave one of the longest and most ambiguous answers I have ever heard. I realize that to give away to the bad actors what our methods are can be counterproductive but I also have come to believe that our intelligence gathering has gone out of control and we are approaching a real police state. And it is not worth it.