Having read Barton Gellman’s book that describes and alludes to some of the details of what were in the actual (never published) Snowden files, I do not believe that the US IC would let him continue to live, even if he were fully pardoned.
I doubt it will ever be safe for him in the US again, despite his legal status.
In the modern zeitgeist anything authoritarian or that can be interpreted from the center-left to be slightly right of center is being called fascism as shorthand for "bad policy I disagree with". The conflation of authoritarianism vs policy difference is where some danger lies.
Apparently the documents that he provided to the press had specific descriptions of names, cities, places, and events that had occurred that Gellman didn’t find specifically newsworthy but that the IC really, really wanted kept secret.
The view of people familiar with the matter is that anything placed into the unskilled hands of people like Greenwald or Gellman (although the latter did get professional assistance and take a lot of steps to protect it) got accessed/copied by any of a half-dozen other state-level intelligence services, so presumably the US IC was concerned about these particular not-published-in-the-media secrets being available to the public. (This is not to say they weren’t concerned about them being known to other intel agencies, just that based on the unprofessional hands in which it was placed, that ship had probably already sailed once it was given to those incompetent in safeguarding it.)
Personally, I wish the original unredacted PRISM deck had been published in full to the public. The state derives its authority from the consent of the governed; it is impossible to consent to something of which you are unaware and uninformed.
I heartily recommend reading Gellman’s book about Snowden, Dark Mirror. One of the things he mentioned that surprised me was that Snowden told him that they (the IC) would not hesitate to assassinate him (Gellman, a US citizen on US soil) instantly if they thought it would prevent the leak from going further.
If the US didn’t freak out when they found out the 4th amendment was simply smoke and mirrors, they wouldn’t freak out if the CIA assassinated one of their own. They’re not freaking out while the CIA slowly tortures a journalist (Assange) to death in prison, in full view of the press and international media.
I think most Americans don’t know or care who Ed Snowden is. The Last Week Tonight segment with him was rather instructive.
Snowden does not have the files. Did not have them when he arrived in Russia. That's why it took so long for the Russians to let him in. They could not believe he did not take any intelligence with him.
Trump's pardoning of Snowden would lose more presidential election support than it would win. Sure, there are plenty of people who would support the decision to pardon Snowden, but I can't see them being the type of people to vote for Trump based on that. Existing Trump supporters, on the other hand, I could see "punishing" Trump for his weakness in pardoning a "traitor who fled to Russia".
He can pardon him to test the effects on polling. If it helps, great. If it hurts him, get Snowden back, arrest him, and claim it was a trick to get the traitor that Obama couldn't get all along.
Is un-pardoning a thing? I'd have figured that a pardon would mean that Trump wouldn't be able to follow it up with his arrest and claiming the pardon was a 'trick'.
Just writing that, though, it feels dirtily and precisely "Trump".
You pardon certain crimes. As an example, you pardon Snowden for "all crimes related to NSA leaks," and then charge him with some kind if tax avoidance. It'd be dirty as hell, and make any trial much longer, but it's possible.
The media and the DNC would spin it as proof Trump is controlled by Russia. That's far more certain than some Republican voters disagreeing with the idea after considering this judgment.
No, they like Russia, and would be happy to consider Snowden's previous masters 'the Deep State'. The trouble there is that it only furthers a status where 'everything that is not literally Trump is the Deep State and must be destroyed'.
It's seriously weird to have a President and a large faction of Americans actively working to fight America as it currently stands. I'm sympathetic to ideas of reform, but they're not talking about reform, they're talking in terms like rounding up all those people and putting 'em in camps as unredeemable criminals/enemies. Nobody going on about 'Deep State' or 'Pizzagate' etc. are talking about reforms, they are behaving like it's an occupying army of absolute monsters that could never possibly be reformed or improved.
You assume it is possible for Trump to lose presidential support. Just as he said, "I could shoot somebody in the middle of 5th avenue and not lose voters". People don't care who gets elected, they really just vote party-line.
However, if Snowden were pardoned, and Cannabis were legalized, I do think Trump would win centrist and libertarians.
I don't see how anything else could happen here, unless the USA is truly a lawless country where the rich and powerful is in control without any consequences. So yeah, Snowden will still be on the run.
The US is not a member of the ICC, if the Europeans want to pretend to matter outside of Europe then they can force the issue and see how well that goes. Otherwise, they should stick to being a trade pig for the rest of the world.
International law doesn’t exist as we would understand it, the global system’s inherent anarchy and thus lack of law, or lawlessness, is essentially axiomatic in IR.
It may seem nitpicky, but I genuinely don’t think people understand how utterly anarchic geopolitics is, even at the height of unipolar stability in decades past.
Since this court ruled that another court was incorrect when ruling that the program was legal and allowed it to proceed it is not outside the realm of possibility that another court would find this one was incorrect. I certainly wouldn't say it is anywhere near guaranteed though.
Trump's base is very pro-military and a lot of them believe that Snowden put military lives at risk (and also confuse him with Chelsea Manning / Julian Assange). So I don't see how that could ever happen.
That might prevent it from happening before the election, but win or lose he's still President between November and January and win or lose this is his last election.
You would think that with all the baseless complaining he’s been doing on Twitter about Obama “spying” on his campaign in 2016 he’d say see! This was illegal after all. Let’s pardon Snowden and fix this so that future presidential candidates can’t be spied on like I was. He’d have the support of both the left and the right even though he wasn’t actually illegally spied on.
Why should anyone think that would happen? Trump has no particular moral standard, does not particularly care whether or not laws are being followed, and only does what he believes will get some applause from his base at any given moment (and his base could not care less about Snowden).
So, are the espionage charges against Snowden going to be dropped? Otherwise they want to convict a man of exposing illegal activity, which doesn't make a lot of sense.
There are legal and illegal ways to disclose illegal activity. The fact that the activity was illegal, doesn't automatically make any disclosure of it legal.
Not arguing one way or the other here, as I simply don't know enough about the situation.
Here in the UK the security services run the show. You could be forgiven for thinking the UK is a democracy, its easy to manipulate politicians with Whitehall providing the data leading politicians to arrive at a conclusion that isnt accurate. Always do your own research, trust no one, people will go to great lengths to protect their positions, wages and pensions and show me were any of you have agreed to the laws forced on you. Its just legal fascism.
Don't be daft. They'll argue that in the exceptional case of state security, exposing any kind of secretive information (illegal or otherwise) is still a crime. They'll just argue that only "normal citizens" shouldn't be barred from reporting criminal activities.
Of course it is bullshit .. but since when did that stop them? Exceptionalism has been the key word, used almost every time the government violated a laws or moral boundary (both domestically and abroad).
Why would anyone expect sense, from a government that will never receive actual jail time from any national court, in a country were potential punishment appears to be the main motivator for powerful people to not do everything illegal?
Why on earth would anyone still expect any sense, after the USA went as far as creating laws to justify military invasion of a foreign country, if an international tribunal would ever charge them with violating international law?
Why are so many American citizens still so naive about the real nature of their own government. Always thinking it's the other party that's the bad guys .. never wanting to accept that the party really doesn't matter (just ask any foreign country that received an unhealthy dose of "freedom and democracy").
US government is complicated. There ARE many good parts to it, and many good elected and unelected people who genuinely serve their people. There is also a big dark part to it as well. Issues with police that are being exposed recently and widely is one example. There is corruption. And there are extremely secretive and dark aspects as well, but the average person isn't aware of them, and would have a hard time reconciling them with the genuine good that I mentioned previously. Things are not black and white, and that's my opinion, a non-American who lives in the US.
I get what you are trying to say, but I don't think that's ever a valid argument. Illegal actions are just that: illegal, no matter who commits them. I don't see why a "good" person should get away with it.
To drive that point even a little further, the mafia (the actual one, in Italy) also had done many good things, helping many local people out, often when it was the government that totally failed those people. But none of that made it any less of a ruthless criminal organization.
Should any of the US government's good deeds (if any, because I have never seen the USA do anything abroad that wasn't first and foremost good for them, only in second place for the local population) ever excuse any of their criminal activities?
I don't see what is complicated here. To me, the answer is just as clear as with the Italian mafia (during its heydays): no! Crimes are crimes, no matter who commits them.
There are other ways of expressing yourself that don't involve insulting the other party. You could've just said "I doubt it" and then continued with your rant.
In Australia there is a case going on which is also prosecuting the whistleblower and his lawyer while the politicians that committed the crime get away scot free. The Australian govt ordered the bugging of the East Timorese cabinet room by the security services while negotiations into the sharing of gas rights were ongoing so they could get the upper hand over one of the poorest countries in the world. This also largely benefited the oil company Woodside who then gave various roles and contracts to the politicians involved when they left public life.
Here is one of the many articles about this case known as Witness K
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/17/witnes...
Since there are multiple comments about how the US government must/should pardon Snowden now, I'd like to make a top level comment to clarify some things about how this does not obligate the government to change his status.
1. The court only found that a single program exposed by Snowden was illegal. Snowden released a bunch of other information that was a violation of the NDA he signed when he was given a security clearance.
2. Even if all the information he disclosed revealed illegal activity, Snowden's actions make him ineligible for whistleblower protection. Whistleblower protection for the intelligence community[1] is only provided if a person follows the proper procedure to securely notify their Inspector General and/or Congress. Since he's not automatically protected, it would take Congress or the President to decide to offer him protection. Snowden (allegedly) did not even attempt to notify the proper authorities before going public with the information, so not only is he ineligible, it's not likely that anyone will take pity on him.
3. There's a chance that this ruling won't stick as the legal system chugs along and a few more judges look at it, and even if they were willing to help Snowden, nobody in Congress is going to take action until there is some permanence with the ruling. IANAL, but I think this would be decided if the Supreme Court either decides to decline or hear the case. If it's declined, then it's pretty much final. If they decide to hear the case, then it could be another year or so before they make a decision.
1. All of the other things he exposed should also be illegal
2. He tried they denied him. I think the entire process of "exposing" illegal acts that has to be done through the very system that is committing the illegal acts is asinine, and anyone that is defending that process is complacent in the abuse of human rights
3. Highlighting the pure and total corruption that is the 3 branches of government, no longer is there a check and balance they have combined into a single corrupt abusive state
Just for additional clarity, Russia wasn’t his first choice. It was somewhere in South America. US decided to ground him in Russia (best optics for them really)
Russia was probably his only choice. Every other country would have extradited him.
I doubt he is happy with having to live in Russia - the main benefactor of his leaks. It's impossible to imagine that he is able to reconcile his hatred of US spying with the malicious actions of the government he now relies on for protection.
...and that's the ultimate crux of this whole thing. When you go up against the US government, you have to ask yourself - is there any major world power out there that's better?
edit: Saying Russia is the main benefactor of the leaks sounds like evidence of long lost cold war thinking to be honest.
Perhaps it would also be to the benefit of the targets of surveillance? Because if you wouldn't want to hand Russia a win, not subjecting the population to surveillance would have been quite the strategy in this case.
Would just like to point out, Putin was on record in an interview talking about Snowden, and was pretty open about how these programs make sense from an intelligence point of view, and pretty much said that Russia is doing the same thing. He wasn't pretending like they're not doing the exact same thing. I believe it's somewhat of a don't hate the player, hate the game from the perspective of the CIA/KGB/what have you.
Why can't we just be open about our smart TVs listening to us?
The "nothing to hide" argument mistakenly suggests that privacy is something only criminals desire. Fences and curtains are ways to ensure a measure of privacy, not indicators of criminal behavior. Privacy is a fundamental part of a dignified life.
He has the image of a dictator (rightly so) and doesn't need to hide it. He connects the image western people have of him to their own domestic actors. If he just condemned it, he would be the hypocrite. So he opted to redirect animosity towards him to others.
Pointing out mass surveillance isn't an attack on the integrity of the US, it is an attack on the practice you would expect from Putin.
That's one difference about Russian and American citizens -- the Russians have pretty much accepted this, and reserve all anti government talk to private conversations or avoid it altogether, while Americans are generally in denial or just ignorant about it.
>I doubt he is happy with having to live in Russia - the main benefactor of his leaks. It's impossible to imagine that he is able to reconcile his hatred of US spying with the malicious actions of the government he now relies on for protection.
You don't go nearly far enough. Every conviction for rape in the US benefits Russia by making the US government look weak. We should stop persecuting people for rape or be Kremlin stooges. Same for hate crimes. Only in total obedience to the President can we finally win against the Great Enemy. /s in case anyone is stupid enough to need it.
> ...and that's the ultimate crux of this whole thing. When you go up against the US government, you have to ask yourself - is there any major world power out there that's better?
Even if this ruling gets overturned it is irrefutable evidence that, after considering the issues, a person who understood the legal issues might conclude that the people behind the mass surveillance program were engaged in a literal criminal conspiracy.
Snowden wasn't going up against the US government, he was going up against a rogue branch of the military. I hope there is some consensus here that illegal programs aren't legitimate.
Out of the frying pan into the fire… but I think human nature suggests that he is making himself happy with it. He's dependent on being fine with everything about Russia, because it's that or be killed in one place or the other: last thing he could afford to do is antagonize Putin, he pretty much has to become 'All Russia, all the time' and that's a powerful motivator to persuade himself that now he is in the GOOD place, and it's the USA that was uniquely wicked and bad.
You know, Snowden has recently wrote and published something of an autobiography called "Permanent Record". You don't need to think or guess, he explained his motivations, thoughts and feelings fairly well there, and they don't quite align with your comment.
Clarification: He was in Russia when the US cancelled his passport stranding him there, his intended destination was Ecuador. I think stranding him in Russia was a deliberate choice to discredit Snowden and it seems to be working very well.
What leads you to perceive that being stranded in Russia is discrediting Snowden?
I don't doubt that (almost) any other American taking shelter in Russia would make a dent on their reputation in US, but I'm curious about Snowden specifically. IMO, Those who know what he did and how he did (in general) seem to support him. A minority hates him. But the rest of public opinion?
One of the often repeated talking points from the government/intelligence community is that Snowden traded away US secrets to an enemy country. That narrative has way more impact - I think - when he is stranded in Russia instead of Ecuador. (Snowden denies this and says he didn't have access to the leaked materials any more when he left Hong Kong)
I think the intelligence community and establishment democrats & republicans are generally still out to get Snowden, while his support comes from the fringes left and (libertarian-)right, who have basically no actual power.
Public opinion seems to be mixed and a lot of regular people don't have strongly held opinions about Snowden (or mass surveillance in general). The Patriot Act is still in effect for god’s sake even after all these revelations.
Lately the whole russia-gate thing has made it really easy to get people to froth at the mouth at any Russian connection, and the fact that Trump said he wanted to look at Snowden (Even a broken clock is right twice a day) automatically will turn anti-Trump people against it. So I don't see public opinion turning more positive on Snowden in the short term.
EDIT: I realized that my writing looks very GTP-3 like, but I swear i'm not a bot, I'm just having trouble connecting these thoughts in a nice way.
You're right that whistleblower channels don't work, at the very least according to Snowden. But you're wrong about him fleeing to Russia, as that's not where he was going to, but where he ended up.
What you're saying is that the existing whistleblower protections are inadequate:
> 1. The court only found that a single program exposed by Snowden was illegal. Snowden released a bunch of other information that was a violation of the NDA he signed when he was given a security clearance.
Requirement of perfection and a superhuman level of ability to sift through more information than any individual could before sharing it with anyone who could help with doing so.
> Whistleblower protection for the intelligence community[1] is only provided if a person follows the proper procedure to securely notify their Inspector General and/or Congress.
Requirement to do something that can get you put on a list, and thereby either lose access to the information or get put under surveillance so that you can no longer release the information if the official channels are fruitless.
Moreover, "official channels" even when they work don't disclose the existence of the program to the public, which is a necessary public good, because otherwise even if that gets it shut down, the structures and incentives that led to its creation aren't addressed and it just happens again until they get it running with a group of people not willing to risk their own careers to report it up the chain.
> There's a chance that this ruling won't stick as the legal system chugs along and a few more judges look at it
So a whistleblower has to spend how many years in exile before they get their vindication?
Whistleblower protection are bit tricky to define.
When is something whistleblowing, when is it a leak, when is it malicious, and when is it espionage? It's easy to allow leaks about illegal acts, but if you start allowing leaks about secret but legal acts too, then things get blurry.
I personally don't think a government, ultimately a servant of the people, should be allowed to keep secrets from the people, but that's currently legal for e.g. military reasons, and thus needs to be considered.
Imagine for a second a parallel universe where the government wasn't evil, and while some of the released documents was showing illegal activity, others did not and in fact contained secret information about national security matters where releasing the information undermines the work (e.g. Russia/China/... monitoring, intercept measures, etc.).
> So a whistleblower has to spend how many years in exile before they get their vindication?
The legal system would be fundamentally broken if you could evade judgement by going into hiding, regardless of reason.
Snowden should have been pardoned a long time ago, but his time in hiding is and should be inconsequential from a legal standpoint until laws are changed and pardons are made. It's up to the citizens of the U.S. to fix their country and welcome him home.
The problem is that if you inform your citizens, you also inform your enemy (who can read your language, are among the citizens). With the globalization due to electronics and the Internet, this is even more true, compared to medieval times or Cold War times (where this was also true, but there was arguably higher latency on information, and a higher language barrier as well).
> The problem is that if you inform your citizens, you also inform your enemy
Indeed, but the enemy usually has the intelligence services to know it anyway, leaving your citizens uninformed as the only real side-effect.
I don't think secrecy is important in national security anymore. On the other hand, the secrecy is used for evil, such as keeping citizens in the dark around government plans to control popular opinion in their favor, falsely positioning themselves as the people's superiors.
> but the enemy usually has the intelligence services to know it anyway
Depends per subject and intelligence service and enemy (there is more than one).
> I don't think secrecy is important in national security anymore.
Why?
Think of it this way. I'm Dutch. Our secret services hacked into the GRU's camera system. This allowed attribution. Our secret services also did the physical last mile infiltration of Stuxnet.
Did I, as random Dutch citizen have to know this? No. As the enemy does not know it, and will know it when the Dutch population knows. These are two examples where a need to know basis makes sense, and is very limited.
There is a difference between operational secrets and methodological secrets. If you're about to stage an operation against the enemy, do you publish the fact that you're coming? No. But then when the operation is over, there is nothing more to keep secret, and the public can find out what has been done on a timescale that allows them to reasonably cause bad actors to be punished or prevent it from happening over and over.
By contrast, with something like a secret mass surveillance program, there is no "end" where you keep something a secret for 18 months but then everybody finds out about it through official channels, so things like that don't get to be a secret. One way or another the public needs to timely find out what's being done in their name.
>What you're saying is that the existing whistleblower protections are inadequate:
^^^Exactly THIS !
Missing the "Forrest for the tree's !
One day our kids will asked us:
Kids:"Why did you guys let it happen ?"
Parents: "Oh we wanted to stop them, but the people that could, they were not completing the correct forms !... So you know, better let the gov just kept on spying on us all... Can't have improper forms now !"
> Requirement of perfection and a superhuman level of ability to sift through more information than any individual could before sharing it with anyone who could help with doing so.
What you refer to as 'perfection' I would call 'reasonable due diligence and discretion'. If you don't know what's in the files you're releasing, you don't even know if you're providing sufficient information to prove your point. If a whistleblower can release any amount of unrelated information, whistleblowing becomes indistinguishable from espionage.
> Requirement to do something that can get you put on a list, and thereby either lose access to the information or get put under surveillance so that you can no longer release the information if the official channels are fruitless.
The requirement to notify congress would appear to give potential high-level whistleblowers a way to field complaints to sympathetic ears. Among the 538 representatives and senators, there are plenty of folks who would champion this cause while working to secure the anonymity of the whistleblower.
1. Snowden is not a US judge, and hasn't spent the last half decade deciding whether each US spying operation was legal or not. Snowden released the documents that allowed the courts to decide which programs were legal, so he cannot be held responsible for the decision that the courts made, because time machines don't exist.
Holding him responsible would be the same as a person calling the police to report a crime, the cops showing up and arresting a person, then months down the line the courts rule not guilty on the arrestee, so the police now go charge the original caller with false reporting. It's ludicrous to think he could've known which programs would be borderline illegal and which would step over that line. And if it took the US justice system 6 years and millions of dollars worth of man hours to actually make that decision, how could he possibly have correctly come to the same conclusion, beforehand, with no governmental support?
Non-us citizen nor lawyer, but doesn't a pardon require a conviction? Has Snowden been convicted?
Does _anything_ obligates the President to pardon anyone?
And why would those points you listed invalidate a pardon? If Snowden was considered (by courts, government) to be a whistle blower by legal definition, he wouldn't need a pardon, right?
> Non-us citizen nor lawyer, but doesn't a pardon require a conviction?
No, Nixon wasn't convicted either. He received a pardon nonetheless. Accepting a pardon implies though an admission of guilt.
> Does _anything_ obligates the President to pardon anyone?
AFAIK, not in the strict sense of the word. In the looser sense, public opinion.
> And why would those points you listed invalidate a pardon?
It would at most, because it influences public opinion. But technically, all those are reasons, why there is a pardon.
The law may say he is guilty, but there might be overruling concerns at hand.
I think it's time to get into discussing how Snowden should be judged or pardoned.
(1) There is no question that he broke the law, he is not denying it.
(2) There is very strong evidence and argument to be made that legal routes were blocked and/or broken and the only way forward was to go public outside the US.
Snowden paid attention to what happened to three earlier attempts to report illeagal activity using leagal means in the NSA global surveillance program–Roark, Binney, Wiebe, Drake and Loomis–for example.
They complained to their superiors, to the NSA general counsel, to the Defense Department Inspector General Office, and to both the Senate and the House intelligence committees. The DoD Inspector General Office violated confidentiality agreement and gave their names to the FBI and falsely accused them of leaking. FBI raided their houses and started to investigate them instead.
Pardon exists just for cases like this. Breaking the law for common good can be morally justified, even heroic.
Crimes are no issue for the persecution of Snowden.
Clapper lied, on camera, under oath, admitted it and has had zero consequences. Kept his job. Has not had to defend a prosecution. Now he's using is former position and influence to get rich. It's lawbreaking from the top. Nothing to discuss about it.
Sadly the rule of law and equality before it is a thing that needs to be re-established.
"None of the lawful whistleblowers who tried to expose the government’s warrantless surveillance – and Drake was far from the only one who tried – had any success,” Devine told me. “They came forward and made their charges, but the government just said, ‘They’re lying, they’re paranoid, we’re not doing those things.’ And the whistleblowers couldn’t prove their case because the government had classified all the evidence. Whereas Snowden took the evidence with him, so when the government issued its usual denials, he could produce document after document showing that they were lying. That is civil disobedience whistleblowing.”
All of this legal infighting is our tax payer dollars fighting tax payer dollars to stop the spending of tax payer dollars on the spying of the tax payers..
Ok but what is going to change? Is anybody going to be held accountable? Is Snowden going to be pardoned? If the answer is no to any/all of this, then this is just window dressing.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadI doubt it will ever be safe for him in the US again, despite his legal status.
The view of people familiar with the matter is that anything placed into the unskilled hands of people like Greenwald or Gellman (although the latter did get professional assistance and take a lot of steps to protect it) got accessed/copied by any of a half-dozen other state-level intelligence services, so presumably the US IC was concerned about these particular not-published-in-the-media secrets being available to the public. (This is not to say they weren’t concerned about them being known to other intel agencies, just that based on the unprofessional hands in which it was placed, that ship had probably already sailed once it was given to those incompetent in safeguarding it.)
Personally, I wish the original unredacted PRISM deck had been published in full to the public. The state derives its authority from the consent of the governed; it is impossible to consent to something of which you are unaware and uninformed.
I heartily recommend reading Gellman’s book about Snowden, Dark Mirror. One of the things he mentioned that surprised me was that Snowden told him that they (the IC) would not hesitate to assassinate him (Gellman, a US citizen on US soil) instantly if they thought it would prevent the leak from going further.
I think most Americans don’t know or care who Ed Snowden is. The Last Week Tonight segment with him was rather instructive.
Just writing that, though, it feels dirtily and precisely "Trump".
edit: grammar
It's seriously weird to have a President and a large faction of Americans actively working to fight America as it currently stands. I'm sympathetic to ideas of reform, but they're not talking about reform, they're talking in terms like rounding up all those people and putting 'em in camps as unredeemable criminals/enemies. Nobody going on about 'Deep State' or 'Pizzagate' etc. are talking about reforms, they are behaving like it's an occupying army of absolute monsters that could never possibly be reformed or improved.
I sometimes wonder if “President” will be the same.
However, if Snowden were pardoned, and Cannabis were legalized, I do think Trump would win centrist and libertarians.
It may seem nitpicky, but I genuinely don’t think people understand how utterly anarchic geopolitics is, even at the height of unipolar stability in decades past.
Even Communist countries held “elections”.
Not arguing one way or the other here, as I simply don't know enough about the situation.
Of course it is bullshit .. but since when did that stop them? Exceptionalism has been the key word, used almost every time the government violated a laws or moral boundary (both domestically and abroad).
Why would anyone expect sense, from a government that will never receive actual jail time from any national court, in a country were potential punishment appears to be the main motivator for powerful people to not do everything illegal?
Why on earth would anyone still expect any sense, after the USA went as far as creating laws to justify military invasion of a foreign country, if an international tribunal would ever charge them with violating international law?
Why are so many American citizens still so naive about the real nature of their own government. Always thinking it's the other party that's the bad guys .. never wanting to accept that the party really doesn't matter (just ask any foreign country that received an unhealthy dose of "freedom and democracy").
To drive that point even a little further, the mafia (the actual one, in Italy) also had done many good things, helping many local people out, often when it was the government that totally failed those people. But none of that made it any less of a ruthless criminal organization.
Should any of the US government's good deeds (if any, because I have never seen the USA do anything abroad that wasn't first and foremost good for them, only in second place for the local population) ever excuse any of their criminal activities?
I don't see what is complicated here. To me, the answer is just as clear as with the Italian mafia (during its heydays): no! Crimes are crimes, no matter who commits them.
Watching_the_watchmen_recursive has detected a stackoverflow and was aborted.
A core dump has been created and can be viewed at constituion.hex.
1. The court only found that a single program exposed by Snowden was illegal. Snowden released a bunch of other information that was a violation of the NDA he signed when he was given a security clearance.
2. Even if all the information he disclosed revealed illegal activity, Snowden's actions make him ineligible for whistleblower protection. Whistleblower protection for the intelligence community[1] is only provided if a person follows the proper procedure to securely notify their Inspector General and/or Congress. Since he's not automatically protected, it would take Congress or the President to decide to offer him protection. Snowden (allegedly) did not even attempt to notify the proper authorities before going public with the information, so not only is he ineligible, it's not likely that anyone will take pity on him.
3. There's a chance that this ruling won't stick as the legal system chugs along and a few more judges look at it, and even if they were willing to help Snowden, nobody in Congress is going to take action until there is some permanence with the ruling. IANAL, but I think this would be decided if the Supreme Court either decides to decline or hear the case. If it's declined, then it's pretty much final. If they decide to hear the case, then it could be another year or so before they make a decision.
[1] IC whistleblower protection is a little different than standard whistleblower protection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_Community_Whistle...
2. He tried they denied him. I think the entire process of "exposing" illegal acts that has to be done through the very system that is committing the illegal acts is asinine, and anyone that is defending that process is complacent in the abuse of human rights
3. Highlighting the pure and total corruption that is the 3 branches of government, no longer is there a check and balance they have combined into a single corrupt abusive state
I doubt he is happy with having to live in Russia - the main benefactor of his leaks. It's impossible to imagine that he is able to reconcile his hatred of US spying with the malicious actions of the government he now relies on for protection.
...and that's the ultimate crux of this whole thing. When you go up against the US government, you have to ask yourself - is there any major world power out there that's better?
I don't think he asked himself that question.
edit: Saying Russia is the main benefactor of the leaks sounds like evidence of long lost cold war thinking to be honest.
Perhaps it would also be to the benefit of the targets of surveillance? Because if you wouldn't want to hand Russia a win, not subjecting the population to surveillance would have been quite the strategy in this case.
Why can't we just be open about our smart TVs listening to us?
Let's demand that, and in the mean time wouldn't hurt to be honest.
Pointing out mass surveillance isn't an attack on the integrity of the US, it is an attack on the practice you would expect from Putin.
You don't go nearly far enough. Every conviction for rape in the US benefits Russia by making the US government look weak. We should stop persecuting people for rape or be Kremlin stooges. Same for hate crimes. Only in total obedience to the President can we finally win against the Great Enemy. /s in case anyone is stupid enough to need it.
Even if this ruling gets overturned it is irrefutable evidence that, after considering the issues, a person who understood the legal issues might conclude that the people behind the mass surveillance program were engaged in a literal criminal conspiracy.
Snowden wasn't going up against the US government, he was going up against a rogue branch of the military. I hope there is some consensus here that illegal programs aren't legitimate.
The last update on how he is treated:
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252487666/US-decision-to...
I don't doubt that (almost) any other American taking shelter in Russia would make a dent on their reputation in US, but I'm curious about Snowden specifically. IMO, Those who know what he did and how he did (in general) seem to support him. A minority hates him. But the rest of public opinion?
I think the intelligence community and establishment democrats & republicans are generally still out to get Snowden, while his support comes from the fringes left and (libertarian-)right, who have basically no actual power.
Public opinion seems to be mixed and a lot of regular people don't have strongly held opinions about Snowden (or mass surveillance in general). The Patriot Act is still in effect for god’s sake even after all these revelations.
Lately the whole russia-gate thing has made it really easy to get people to froth at the mouth at any Russian connection, and the fact that Trump said he wanted to look at Snowden (Even a broken clock is right twice a day) automatically will turn anti-Trump people against it. So I don't see public opinion turning more positive on Snowden in the short term.
EDIT: I realized that my writing looks very GTP-3 like, but I swear i'm not a bot, I'm just having trouble connecting these thoughts in a nice way.
> 1. The court only found that a single program exposed by Snowden was illegal. Snowden released a bunch of other information that was a violation of the NDA he signed when he was given a security clearance.
Requirement of perfection and a superhuman level of ability to sift through more information than any individual could before sharing it with anyone who could help with doing so.
> Whistleblower protection for the intelligence community[1] is only provided if a person follows the proper procedure to securely notify their Inspector General and/or Congress.
Requirement to do something that can get you put on a list, and thereby either lose access to the information or get put under surveillance so that you can no longer release the information if the official channels are fruitless.
Moreover, "official channels" even when they work don't disclose the existence of the program to the public, which is a necessary public good, because otherwise even if that gets it shut down, the structures and incentives that led to its creation aren't addressed and it just happens again until they get it running with a group of people not willing to risk their own careers to report it up the chain.
> There's a chance that this ruling won't stick as the legal system chugs along and a few more judges look at it
So a whistleblower has to spend how many years in exile before they get their vindication?
When is something whistleblowing, when is it a leak, when is it malicious, and when is it espionage? It's easy to allow leaks about illegal acts, but if you start allowing leaks about secret but legal acts too, then things get blurry.
I personally don't think a government, ultimately a servant of the people, should be allowed to keep secrets from the people, but that's currently legal for e.g. military reasons, and thus needs to be considered.
Imagine for a second a parallel universe where the government wasn't evil, and while some of the released documents was showing illegal activity, others did not and in fact contained secret information about national security matters where releasing the information undermines the work (e.g. Russia/China/... monitoring, intercept measures, etc.).
> So a whistleblower has to spend how many years in exile before they get their vindication?
The legal system would be fundamentally broken if you could evade judgement by going into hiding, regardless of reason.
Snowden should have been pardoned a long time ago, but his time in hiding is and should be inconsequential from a legal standpoint until laws are changed and pardons are made. It's up to the citizens of the U.S. to fix their country and welcome him home.
Indeed, but the enemy usually has the intelligence services to know it anyway, leaving your citizens uninformed as the only real side-effect.
I don't think secrecy is important in national security anymore. On the other hand, the secrecy is used for evil, such as keeping citizens in the dark around government plans to control popular opinion in their favor, falsely positioning themselves as the people's superiors.
Depends per subject and intelligence service and enemy (there is more than one).
> I don't think secrecy is important in national security anymore.
Why?
Think of it this way. I'm Dutch. Our secret services hacked into the GRU's camera system. This allowed attribution. Our secret services also did the physical last mile infiltration of Stuxnet.
Did I, as random Dutch citizen have to know this? No. As the enemy does not know it, and will know it when the Dutch population knows. These are two examples where a need to know basis makes sense, and is very limited.
By contrast, with something like a secret mass surveillance program, there is no "end" where you keep something a secret for 18 months but then everybody finds out about it through official channels, so things like that don't get to be a secret. One way or another the public needs to timely find out what's being done in their name.
Isn’t this the opposite of what it should be? How else can we hold government accountable?
^^^Exactly THIS ! Missing the "Forrest for the tree's ! One day our kids will asked us:
Kids:"Why did you guys let it happen ?"
Parents: "Oh we wanted to stop them, but the people that could, they were not completing the correct forms !... So you know, better let the gov just kept on spying on us all... Can't have improper forms now !"
What you refer to as 'perfection' I would call 'reasonable due diligence and discretion'. If you don't know what's in the files you're releasing, you don't even know if you're providing sufficient information to prove your point. If a whistleblower can release any amount of unrelated information, whistleblowing becomes indistinguishable from espionage.
> Requirement to do something that can get you put on a list, and thereby either lose access to the information or get put under surveillance so that you can no longer release the information if the official channels are fruitless.
The requirement to notify congress would appear to give potential high-level whistleblowers a way to field complaints to sympathetic ears. Among the 538 representatives and senators, there are plenty of folks who would champion this cause while working to secure the anonymity of the whistleblower.
Bureaucratic / political butt covering theatre.
What else could Snowden have done do to stop the crimes being committed?
Holding him responsible would be the same as a person calling the police to report a crime, the cops showing up and arresting a person, then months down the line the courts rule not guilty on the arrestee, so the police now go charge the original caller with false reporting. It's ludicrous to think he could've known which programs would be borderline illegal and which would step over that line. And if it took the US justice system 6 years and millions of dollars worth of man hours to actually make that decision, how could he possibly have correctly come to the same conclusion, beforehand, with no governmental support?
Donald Trump puts his money where is mouth is, pardons him and repatriates him.
Does _anything_ obligates the President to pardon anyone?
And why would those points you listed invalidate a pardon? If Snowden was considered (by courts, government) to be a whistle blower by legal definition, he wouldn't need a pardon, right?
No, Nixon wasn't convicted either. He received a pardon nonetheless. Accepting a pardon implies though an admission of guilt.
> Does _anything_ obligates the President to pardon anyone?
AFAIK, not in the strict sense of the word. In the looser sense, public opinion.
> And why would those points you listed invalidate a pardon?
It would at most, because it influences public opinion. But technically, all those are reasons, why there is a pardon. The law may say he is guilty, but there might be overruling concerns at hand.
(1) There is no question that he broke the law, he is not denying it.
(2) There is very strong evidence and argument to be made that legal routes were blocked and/or broken and the only way forward was to go public outside the US.
Snowden paid attention to what happened to three earlier attempts to report illeagal activity using leagal means in the NSA global surveillance program–Roark, Binney, Wiebe, Drake and Loomis–for example.
They complained to their superiors, to the NSA general counsel, to the Defense Department Inspector General Office, and to both the Senate and the House intelligence committees. The DoD Inspector General Office violated confidentiality agreement and gave their names to the FBI and falsely accused them of leaking. FBI raided their houses and started to investigate them instead.
Pardon exists just for cases like this. Breaking the law for common good can be morally justified, even heroic.
Clapper lied, on camera, under oath, admitted it and has had zero consequences. Kept his job. Has not had to defend a prosecution. Now he's using is former position and influence to get rich. It's lawbreaking from the top. Nothing to discuss about it.
Sadly the rule of law and equality before it is a thing that needs to be re-established.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/22/how-pentagon....
"None of the lawful whistleblowers who tried to expose the government’s warrantless surveillance – and Drake was far from the only one who tried – had any success,” Devine told me. “They came forward and made their charges, but the government just said, ‘They’re lying, they’re paranoid, we’re not doing those things.’ And the whistleblowers couldn’t prove their case because the government had classified all the evidence. Whereas Snowden took the evidence with him, so when the government issued its usual denials, he could produce document after document showing that they were lying. That is civil disobedience whistleblowing.”
he had to go live in exile and nothing changed
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24356741