Jay Rosen has a nice piece on The Snowden Effect, a term coined by Charlie Pierce.

The Snowden Effect covers actions and reactions that are a result of the information that Edward Snowden made available through the Guardian and the Washington Post. Examples cover the ‘debate’ that is now taking place over the balance between government information gathering and the civil rights of US citizens.

There is another series of things going on that I will call The Snowden Deflect. these are actions that are designed to deflect attention from what Snowden revealed, and focus attention on Edward Snowden. ‘Noz has an example of the celebrity type of coverage, while Digby covers the attack version.

John Kiriakou’s open letter to Snowden details exactly what the government is going to attempt to do if Snowden returns.

Edward Snowden will be kept incommunicado if he returns to the US. The government will maintain that everything is classified, so Snowden won’t be able to mount a real defense of his actions. People who claim that he exaggerated his danger when he revealed himself forget that he knows what the government has been doing, so he knows what they are willing to do. People may not want to accept it. but we are not nice people when anything can be excused by a claim of ‘national security’.

You really should read his Wikipedia entry for a nice overview of the man, who was a classmate of David Patraeus at West Point. Of real interest to me was the report that as the Brigadier General in command of the Army’s component of NSA, he is the individual that decided that the military should begin hoovering up the data of US citizens after 9/11, a policy that was adopted by Lieutenant General Michael Hayden, the then Director of the National Security Agency. That makes me believe that he might be more than slightly invested in defending the process.

Apparently he didn’t feel that his horizons were broad enough at NSA, so he pushed for the creation of US CYBER COMMAND [fanfare]: The command is charged with pulling together existing cyberspace resources, creating synergy and synchronizing war-fighting effects to defend the information security environment. [That is from the Cyber Command wiki, and is sourced to its official brochure.]

The thing that people need to understand about Alexander the Geek, is that he is a West Pointer. and he knows that NSA is only worth three stars, while his new ‘venture’ [yes, he has an MBA] is a four-star position, so he is going to favor CyberCom over NSA if there is a conflict, because USCYBERCOM is the FUTURE OF WARFARE!!!!!

Digby noted that Marcy Wheeler is already hinting that the War on Cyber-terrorists™ seems to be receiving more prominence than that stodgy old War on Terror™ [that is so ‘last decade’].

Badtux alerted me to a new post by Marcy that demonstrates how serious Zero is about that ‘debate on government spying’: he appointed DNI James ‘Joe Isuzu’ Clapper to handle the review. And the man wonders why people don’t trust him …