Chidanand Rajghatta, TNN Jun 13, 2013, 05.59AM IST

WASHINGTON: Republican lawmakers, under whose dispensation the first pervasive intrusions into civil liberties began in the post-9 /11 era, were scathing against NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and his ilk of what they considered misguided youth.

According to one account, South Carolina's Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said the biggest threat US intelligence these days isn't so much Russian spies, but disaffected young men like Snowden; Private Bradley Manning, who is accused of being behind Wikileaks; and Aaron Swartz, the activist founder of social news site Reddit who committed suicide earlier this year after the government brought charges of wire and computer fraud for illegally downloading millions of documents on him.

"I think that there's a group of people, younger people who are not fighting the war, who are libertarians mostly, who feel like the government is the problem," Time's national security blog quoted Graham as saying, while maintaining that, "those who are trained to defend us are a bigger threat than those who are trying to attack us." Graham not only wanted Snowden to be brought to justice and punished severely so that "the next 29-year-old who thinks that they're going to be some cult figure will think twice," but he also recommended a government unit of "watchers watching the watchers.''

There have been some rare exceptions to this establishment credo of national security above all else. Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican whose libertarian father Ron Paul was the recipient of a $250 political donation from Edward Snowden, said Snowden's act was mere one of ''conscientious objector.'' Another outlier was Vermont's self-professed socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, who argued the debate really ought to be about excessive government intrusion.

But they were in a minority in a political establishment that largely backed the government's argument of national security imperative over civil liberties.

Meanwhile, the "Pardon Edward Snowden" petition on the White House website racked up more than 61,000 signatures as of Wednesday morning, about a third of the way to the 100,000 threshold that will merit a response from the White House.

Across on the west coast, tech giants Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter among companies caught in the flap, urged the Obama administration to allow them to disclose governments request for information, which is prohibited under current law. The tech giants, whose clientele include the kind of disaffected youth agitating against the older establishment, have also been embarrassed by suggestions that they are in cahoots with the government. Some experts have gone so far as to advise people to ditch these companies if they are found to have knowingly collaborated with the government.

See the original post here:

‘Libertarian’ youths face the wrath of Republicans