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.................Guardian

“We want you to be safe, we want you to be happy, but I know you’re your own man and you’re going to do what you feel that you have to do. I believe firmly that you are a man of principle. I believe in your character. I don’t know what you’ve seen, but I just ask that you measure what you’re going to do and not release any more information.

“I'm here because I'm really concerned about the misinformation in the media. He is a sensitive, caring young man. This is the Ed that I know. He just is a deep thinker.”  The interview with Fox journalist Eric Bolling has not aired in full, but several clips have been released.

He went on - "I don't want them reading my email. I don't want them reading my text. In my opinion they have no right. Not even under the guise of ‘Oh we need to keep you safe’. If we say, ‘Oh my gosh we're going to have to sacrifice our freedom because of the threat of terrorism,’ well then the terrorists have already won because it's our freedoms that make us Americans.

A 28-year-old artist and developer from Brooklyn, New York has found a fun way of warning computer users about potential government surveillance, and he’s incorporated one of the best-selling rock albums ever in the process. Justin Blinder released a plugin for the Web browser Firefox this week, and he’s already seeing a positive response in the press if not just based off of the idea alone. His “The Dark Side of the Prism” browser extension alerts Web surfers of possible surveillance by starting up a different song from Pink Floyd’s 1973 classic “The Dark Side of the Moon” each time a questionable site is crossed.

Blinder told the Guardian that he built the program over the course of four hours with the hopes he could "create some sort of ambient notification that you are on a site that is being surveiled by the NSA."  "I was really interested in the fact that, although the PRISM leaks were a shock to many of us, we pretty much already kind of know we're being surveiled a lot of the time and giving away so much data," he said.

Upon news of the phone tracking program, even members of Congress said they couldn’t get over how much information was being shared between the telecoms and the government. Walking out of a briefing this Wednesday, Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-California) said, "What we learned in there is significantly more than what is out in the media today,” and described her reaction as “astounded.” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) said the program “represents an outrageous abuse of power and a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution,” and the American Civil Liberties Union has sued the government with a similar complaint filed in federal court.

Separate from leaking a document about the NSA’s access to phone records, former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden also gave The Guardian evidence of Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL and others sharing private communications of customers with the government. When “The Dark Side of the Prism” is installed, users of those sites will be reminded with one of the most iconic albums of the twentieth century.

"I just Googled 'Prism' and the cover came up," Blinder said. It just so happened that the long-time best-seller also fits the mood for exactly what the programmer was looking for.

"I didn’t want it to be too jarring because a lot of us seem to be giving in to being surveiled on a daily basis. I feel like people already know that. I didn't want it to be alarming,” he said.

Twenty-nine-year-old Edward Snowden is an American you should admire. He dropped out of school and took high school equivalency classes to achieve his GED. He nurtured an interest in and an aptitude for computers and information technology.

He joined the Army in 2003 because he wanted to do his part as an American to help the Iraqi people. He wanted to make a difference. He proceeded to break both of his legs during a training exercise and never became a Special Forces solider.

After discharge from the Army, Snowden took a job as a security guard at a National Security Agency office in College Park, Maryland. From that job, he worked his way up to IT security for the CIA and eventually landed at Booz Allen Hamilton, a major defense contractor. That job came with top-level security clearance and responsibility.

If the story ended here, CNN and USA Today would write about Snowden, claiming him a success story. He overcame adversity. He showed initiative and motivation, something we're conditioned to believe is missing from the millennial generation.

As of this writing, however, Snowden is in hiding. A few days ago, he was in Hong Kong. That's because he recently released details of the US government's PRISM surveillance program to reporters from The Guardian, including civil liberties writer Glenn Greenwald.

You're going to hear volumes in the days and weeks ahead about why Snowden deserves extradition and prosecution. You'll read that he's a traitor. You'll read that he has compromised national security. I'd respectfully like to dissuade you from accepting these stories at face value.

What I recommend you do instead is keep in mind that this young man, as recently as a decade ago, was on the fast track to nowhere. That he overcame serious and threatening adversity to achieve, before the age of 30, a high-level security clearance says something about him.

To me, it says Snowden is a driven and liberty-conscious American who accepted great risk to expose to the American people the extent of a surveillance program we need to discuss.

It's time for rubber-stamp oversight from Congress to end. It's time America took a close look at the Bill of Rights. Edward Snowden could be solely responsible for that conversation.

Snowden has said he doesn't want to be the story. He wants the Constitution to be the story. He wants the information he has disclosed about PRISM to ignite a national debate on whether or not we as Americans are prepared to live in, for lack of a better term, a totalitarian state where all communication is subject to scrutiny.

Make no mistake. That America is already here. This should alarm you. It should make you question your Congressperson and the decisions they've made in the past decade.

If you say surveillance matters only to those who are up to no good, you're missing the point.

Starting with the Patriot Act in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, we as Americans have repeatedly given away liberty in exchange for the illusion of security.

Edward Snowden could make an entire country finally reconsider what we've lost and perhaps begin to take steps to reclaim a fundamental right to privacy in communication.

There's more to the story, of course. And any right-thinking observer will withhold final judgment until Snowden's story, and the facts behind what material he has released, withstand a full and public accounting.

One side of the coin:
After months of investigation, Obama administration officials said the weapons have been used "on a small-scale" to kill up to 150 people, crossing what President Barack Obama had marked as a "red line" for US intervention in the conflict.

Foreign Secretary William Hague said the UK agreed with the US assessment.  Mr Obama's deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, said the president had decided to provide "direct military support" to the opposition in light of the evidence.

But he did not specify whether the support would include lethal aid, such as weapons, which would mark a reversal of Mr Obama's resistance to arming the rebels.....Sky News

The other side of the coin:
However a senior pro-Kremlin Russian politician said the information was fabricated to justify United States intervention in the conflict.  "Information about the use by Assad of chemical weapons has been fabricated in the same place as the lies about (Saddam) Hussein's weapons of mass destruction," Alexei Pushkov, head of the foreign policy committee in the lower chamber of the Russian parliament, said on Twitter.  "Obama is taking the same path as George Bush." ...........Sky News

Defence lawyer Craig Weintraub said after Wednesday's hearing: "Mr Castro currently faces hundreds of years in prison with the current charges.  "It is our hope that we can continue to work toward a resolution to avoid having an unnecessary trial about aggravated murder and the death penalty."