They each had a duty to pardon Snowden, as he showed the American public incontrovertible evidence that the US Government is violating the Constitution by spying on Americans.
You might want to actually read the constitution before you spout off non-sense.
>The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
This is still an area of controversy, and the text you've highlighted explains exactly why:
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Most of our digital information is not gathered from places protected by the 4th Amendment - you sent that data to somebody else. Albeit unwittingly, but that's legally your fault, per the ToS.
Scalia, despite being a polarizing figure, was a staunch defender of the 4th Amendment, and even he admitted that this was a grey area[1]. This is because he was an originalist, and this scenario never could have been imagined by the forefathers. So there's no real "original intent" to look towards, which is very important to the Supreme Court in their rulings.
That said, I believe Snowden did the right thing, as this still highlights a gaping hole in our rights, and anyone who denotes him a traitor for it is bordering being one themselves.
Edit: I'll add that the CIA leaks are more troubling, if you'd like to see some true violations of 4th amendment rights. IANASupremeCourtJustice, but I think bugging a smart TV would qualify here.
My computer, or phone, or whatever is in my house or on my person therefore it applies.
"papers"
Files/emails/etc. these days are just digital "papers", there for it applies to all digital communications.
The spirit of the amendment is abundantly clear (despite Scalia's ignorance on this), and there is zero ambiguity. Anyone arguing that technically it doesn't apply to <insert technology that the writers could not possibly have fathomed here>, is someone who simply wants to subvert the constitution. I don't see how anyone could argue otherwise on any sort of solid ground, the spirit is so crystal clear the writers couldn't not have done a better job.
It seems that you've never realized that most of the stuff being gathered is not stored on any device that you have control over. Very weird to encounter on HN, but I guess you're part of today's 10,000...
Maybe if you were running an SMTP server from your home would the 4th amendment apply in the way that you think it does. Most people have trusted another entity to house their "digital papers", so your beef should be with the organizations who hand it over to Feds without a fight.
At least understand the nature of the problem before commenting so vehemently on it.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
> Nothing in the constitution says anything about spying on citizens being illegal. Moreover, you have no right to privacy.
Um, it does. The 4th amendment:
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Edit: and I don't think the Constitution or Amendments have anything to say about classified documents, nor national security. (After all, it was written at a time when there was fresh memories of a foreign army marching through America. There was no 'national security'.) I wouldn't be surprised if that whole bureaucracy gets ruled unconstitutional at some point.
That's exactly who he should have been spotlighting. The Five Eyes is an egregious Orwellian contruct, and STATEROOM is integral to its continued existence.
Secrecy is required to maintain empire. Where there is secrecy, there is always corruption.
Edit (in order to reply to David - I am somehow blocked from replying to him):
I'm not the government. I don't have the legal right to start a war, or to sentence a person to death. If you don't like what I have to say, you can just ignore me. But you can't do that with a government that keeps secrets. Official secrecy robs you of the knowledge required to participate in democracy.
This and your previous comment suggest that you're either a troll or truly some unique level of narrow-minded fool. Do you simply defend and applauds any sort of self-serving government rules or characterizations of others because they have vague, nebulous state power justifications on their side? Whistleblowers often get fired or worse for "submitting to the proper authorities". History is loaded with cases of them doing just that only to be brushed off and the information they revealed to be buried even further in obscurity. Surely you can't be so dense as to not have read about just how easily and frequently this happens before labeling someone a traitor for going outside official channels to disclose conduct that even the responsible government admitted was BLATANTLY illegal in many ways?
I'm a huge supporter and admirer of Snowden and wish him all the best, but there's no way that he would be protected under existing whistleblower laws. Government whistleblowers dealing with classified information are expected to use very specific, narrow channels such as making reports to agency inspectors-general. When their whistleblowing involves public disclosure of classified information, it's not at all protected by whistleblower laws, even if large parts of society end up agreeing with them.
Edit: This is even true if the government ends up agreeing with them about object-level issues (e.g. if the courts agree that something they revealed was illegal or the executive or legislature agrees to change policy).
Fair enough point. But self-defeating, no? This seems as idiotic as a police forcing being responsible for investigating themselves. What do you think would have happened if he had gone though "official channels"?
It's definitely ironic to suggest a whistleblower goes through the approved process of the entity against which he's blowing the whistle.
I'd say that really this just shows the limitations of the concept of whistleblower laws- essentially they're just a feel good concept that lets people blow the whistle against entities the people in power want them too (like the silly Facebook thing).
I don't really have an opinion about Snowden, but I'd say good or bad, if you're really planning on exposing "the system" you can't really expect any protection, and I think it's impossible to build in that kind of protection.
An simple and maybe flawed example would be vigilante justice. Someone can decide to kill someone extra judicially. They may be "right" in some way, but there is never going to be an allowance for it.
There are meaningful benefits from the existing whistleblower laws; they're just focused on a very different set of problems and concerns.
The existing whistleblower laws handle cases where a small number of people are, in fact, not following the official rules. This might be sexual harassment or embezzlement or something, or someone otherwise using government resources for personal aggrandizement. They don't really handle cases where a government entity has deliberately chosen (more or less following proper procedures or more or with the acquiescence or support of its leadership) to do something that some people think is bad. What someone might (perhaps dismissively) term a political objection to the entity's decisions or actions.
The official channel is Congressional oversight committees for intelligence. They all have clearances and are independent of the executive branch and the agencies they oversee. The extent to which you trust them is up in the air, I guess, but they're at least supposed to be representatives of the public. It's more like the city council investigating the police than the police investigating themselves.
As for what would have changed, what changed given he publicly disclosed instead? As far as I know, none of the programs he blew a whistle on were ever found to be illegal, no one in charge of them was fired or went to prison, and the major effects have been crackdowns in the way insider threats are mitigated, the depth that clearance investigations and polygraphs go into, the public has become less trusting of the federal government, and backers of authoritarian foreign regimes have a lot more ammunition to paint the USA as full of hypocrites if we ever take any effort to aid resistance to them.
I was meaning to write something about this elsewhere: it's tricky because the official government view of where whistleblowing is appropriate is generally against "waste, fraud, and abuse".
These notions are famously very narrow. A category that doesn't exist in the government's conception is something like "I think there should be a political debate about, or judicial review judging the legality of, this thing which has previously not been subject to political debate or judicial review because of its secrecy". Or "I think this thing is immoral, but it's not necessarily illegal".
It's easy to support whistleblowing on these grounds (especially if you personally agree with those judgments on the whistleblowers' part!), but it's not easy to integrate such exceptions into the official government secrecy system, not least because of their subjectivity.
There are various ideas for official mechanisms that would build in more official adversarial review or high-level transparency for classified government actions and programs. I remember it briefly seemed like Congress might have been willing to create the official FISA court advocate who would argue before the FISA court against the government's legal interpretations and argue that they should not be allowed to use new surveillance methods under prior legal authorities.
Snowden exposed disgusting stuff that the US government is probably still doing today (and probably doing even worst things now since this was exposed about 10 years ago)
He also exposed a bunch of programs that were doing their jobs: collecting foreign intelligence. He could have accomplished his goal without doing that.
So an American aid worker gets taken hostage and we're not going to collect cell calls in Africa because that would violate the right to privacy of uninvolved Nigeriens? Really?
And in foreign relations, it's best to remember the words of PM Henry Palmerstone in the British Parliament, 1848:
“We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.
The advantage to persistent surveillance with some buffer is the ability to go "back in time" to before the incident that caused one's attention to be on a certain area of, say, Niger.
At the end of the day, I'm okay with surveilling others. I don't think it's morally wrong other countries do it to us (barring agreements otherwise).
Why?
US people kill more US people than any other nation.
Seems more logical to keep yourselves under constant surveillance. Tight GPS tracking surely will help solving homicides.
>“Even in the Indiana Jones movies, there is a white guy who, ‘bang,’ shoots people, right? Japanese people who go along and enjoy with that are unbelievably embarrassing,” Miyazaki reportedly stated in a resurfaced interview. “You are the ones that, ‘bang,’ get shot. Watching [those movies] without any self-awareness is unbelievable. There’s no pride, no historical perspective.”
I think it’s very likely. If he’s a hero as some claim, it would be in the court record and there would be public pressure for clemency. He would have received media attention for his trial like Chelsea Manning, perhaps even more since he’s so outspoken.
The running like a coward part is always the pretense. It came down to being given a trial, 6th amendment. Let me tell you it's no easy feat getting your day in court, I've been waiting since February 6, 2009, and been suffering the punishment every day since.
"They" as in the countless spy agencies... I bet you don't even know how many of them are in the USA alone (They all share data anyways, so what's the point?).
That's a lot of "spy agencies", the word "countless" still applies as it's a figure of speech. Only on HN. This is why an engineer should never be president as much as many of you wish it to be so. You can't have a normal conversation without your ocd ticking off.
And it’s actually not a lot when you break it down. They each specialize in different areas of intelligence. NSA does SIGINT, NGA does GEOINT, military branches do intelligence for military intelligence in their respective branch, law enforcement intelligence for law enforcement, and so on.
To my defense, I wasn't only talking only about the USA in the first part of my sentence. But 17 is a shitload either way for the USA (there is probably some secret ones too... aka the black budget).
> Snowden’s lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, told Interfax that “since Edward didn’t serve in the Russian army and has no military service experience, he’s not liable for conscription.”
The mobilization order may say one thing on paper, but in practice they're just grabbing anyone they can. If you show up to protest against the mobilization and you're a man, they'll grab you and put you on a bus to the front.
Snowden's lawyer is either not aware of the specifics of the conscription order or is choosing to represent things in accordance with Putin's statements even though his statements don't align with the actual order, which is much broader. Here's a link to the full text, [1] which does not exclude individuals without military service.
There have also been reports of people without military experience being taken [2]
That said, I very much doubt they'd draft Snowden, I don't see what purpose that would serve. Also I'm not sure I'd consider him "outspoken" on the issue, but he has expressed criticism of the Russian government over the years, including their invasion of the Ukraine. In his own words, "It was not my choice to be here, and this is what people forget. ... It was not my choice to live in Russia."
I very much doubt he considers Russia any better than the US with respect to their military & espionage programs, especially because I'd bet there's a firm (and low) upper limit on how much outspokenness the government there would tolerate from him. His value to Russia is his continuous presence on the world stage serving as a reminder about how the U.S. operates with respect to intelligence gathering. Otherwise, he's probably only 2-3 furious anti-Putin diatribes away from being the next underwear nerve-toxin assassination target.
"This dude thought he was God"? I'd like to know how you developed this idea of him. Because such an overly inane and unsubstantiated description can only be in bad faith.
If you think your actions can change the perception of 400M people and their 90% approval rating of the military...then what else should be added.
The approval rating didn't bulge when the aforementioned organization sent thousands to die for essentially nothing (if you believe the US military miscalculated the war on terror) or oil (if you believe the war on terror was a subtle ploy to get in there and be in control of oil)
Destroying the military's credibility or liking was not the point of why he did what he did. He wanted to expose the likely unconstitutionality of what the US government is/was doing.
This is actually an interesting question. Just being granted citizenship doesn't mean you are automatically issued a passport. That requires a separate application process, where the government can probably refuse your request for any reason, or for none at all.
I don't know how it works in Russia specifically, but I think in most countries the issuing of passports is subject to executive discretion, and even if Snowden technically has the possibility of challenging such a refusal in court, I don't imagine a court ruling against the Kremlin.
Assuming he did have a passport, though, the question becomes "How could he escape Russia?". Russia probably has a system for recording the passport numbers of people who should be detained if they try to leave the country, but maybe that system isn't 100% effective when it comes to Russia's vast remote borders and enforcement officers who might be willing to take a bribe.
(If you were going to disobey your orders like that, though, you'd probably also want to seek political asylum in whichever country you were supposed to be guarding the border with, since Putin probably won't respond well to the news that his political pawn has slipped out of his grasp).
Then the problem becomes "How does Snowden remain a free man while the US are after him?". I don't know if he's on a secret Interpol wanted list, and they probably don't have his (hypothetical) new Russian passport number, so he might be safe for a while. But suppose he manages to get as far as Finland or Norway. Could he really then catch a flight to Ecuador without his plane being forced to land so he can be arrested on America's behalf?
I think his best bet would be to travel (visa free) to Georgia, in a bus or something. Then fly from Tbilisi to Doha, and from there to Caracas, with a final leg to Quito. Alternatively, if he wanted to live in a G20 nation without a formal extradition treaty with the US, he could travel east to Indonesia.
One final consideration is that Biden might actually want to pardon him (or at least pre-emptively reduce his sentence to some token amount, like one year, if that's even constitutionally possible). In such a scenario, it might be dangerous to announce this pardon while Snowden is still in Russia, since it makes him look like more of a flight risk, so the CIA would presumably have to contact him securely (I see the irony with that) and tell him that if he can get to a neutral third country, Biden will publicly announce the pardon. That would then make Snowden's travel out of Georgia (for example) a lot easier.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] thread>The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Most of our digital information is not gathered from places protected by the 4th Amendment - you sent that data to somebody else. Albeit unwittingly, but that's legally your fault, per the ToS.
Scalia, despite being a polarizing figure, was a staunch defender of the 4th Amendment, and even he admitted that this was a grey area[1]. This is because he was an originalist, and this scenario never could have been imagined by the forefathers. So there's no real "original intent" to look towards, which is very important to the Supreme Court in their rulings.
That said, I believe Snowden did the right thing, as this still highlights a gaping hole in our rights, and anyone who denotes him a traitor for it is bordering being one themselves.
[1]: https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/asked_about_nsa_stuf...
Edit: I'll add that the CIA leaks are more troubling, if you'd like to see some true violations of 4th amendment rights. IANASupremeCourtJustice, but I think bugging a smart TV would qualify here.
"in thier persons" and "in their houses"
My computer, or phone, or whatever is in my house or on my person therefore it applies.
"papers"
Files/emails/etc. these days are just digital "papers", there for it applies to all digital communications.
The spirit of the amendment is abundantly clear (despite Scalia's ignorance on this), and there is zero ambiguity. Anyone arguing that technically it doesn't apply to <insert technology that the writers could not possibly have fathomed here>, is someone who simply wants to subvert the constitution. I don't see how anyone could argue otherwise on any sort of solid ground, the spirit is so crystal clear the writers couldn't not have done a better job.
Maybe if you were running an SMTP server from your home would the 4th amendment apply in the way that you think it does. Most people have trusted another entity to house their "digital papers", so your beef should be with the organizations who hand it over to Feds without a fight.
At least understand the nature of the problem before commenting so vehemently on it.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Um, it does. The 4th amendment:
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Edit: and I don't think the Constitution or Amendments have anything to say about classified documents, nor national security. (After all, it was written at a time when there was fresh memories of a foreign army marching through America. There was no 'national security'.) I wouldn't be surprised if that whole bureaucracy gets ruled unconstitutional at some point.
Edit (in order to reply to David - I am somehow blocked from replying to him):
I'm not the government. I don't have the legal right to start a war, or to sentence a person to death. If you don't like what I have to say, you can just ignore me. But you can't do that with a government that keeps secrets. Official secrecy robs you of the knowledge required to participate in democracy.
Edit: This is even true if the government ends up agreeing with them about object-level issues (e.g. if the courts agree that something they revealed was illegal or the executive or legislature agrees to change policy).
I'd say that really this just shows the limitations of the concept of whistleblower laws- essentially they're just a feel good concept that lets people blow the whistle against entities the people in power want them too (like the silly Facebook thing).
I don't really have an opinion about Snowden, but I'd say good or bad, if you're really planning on exposing "the system" you can't really expect any protection, and I think it's impossible to build in that kind of protection.
An simple and maybe flawed example would be vigilante justice. Someone can decide to kill someone extra judicially. They may be "right" in some way, but there is never going to be an allowance for it.
The existing whistleblower laws handle cases where a small number of people are, in fact, not following the official rules. This might be sexual harassment or embezzlement or something, or someone otherwise using government resources for personal aggrandizement. They don't really handle cases where a government entity has deliberately chosen (more or less following proper procedures or more or with the acquiescence or support of its leadership) to do something that some people think is bad. What someone might (perhaps dismissively) term a political objection to the entity's decisions or actions.
As for what would have changed, what changed given he publicly disclosed instead? As far as I know, none of the programs he blew a whistle on were ever found to be illegal, no one in charge of them was fired or went to prison, and the major effects have been crackdowns in the way insider threats are mitigated, the depth that clearance investigations and polygraphs go into, the public has become less trusting of the federal government, and backers of authoritarian foreign regimes have a lot more ammunition to paint the USA as full of hypocrites if we ever take any effort to aid resistance to them.
These notions are famously very narrow. A category that doesn't exist in the government's conception is something like "I think there should be a political debate about, or judicial review judging the legality of, this thing which has previously not been subject to political debate or judicial review because of its secrecy". Or "I think this thing is immoral, but it's not necessarily illegal".
It's easy to support whistleblowing on these grounds (especially if you personally agree with those judgments on the whistleblowers' part!), but it's not easy to integrate such exceptions into the official government secrecy system, not least because of their subjectivity.
There are various ideas for official mechanisms that would build in more official adversarial review or high-level transparency for classified government actions and programs. I remember it briefly seemed like Congress might have been willing to create the official FISA court advocate who would argue before the FISA court against the government's legal interpretations and argue that they should not be allowed to use new surveillance methods under prior legal authorities.
These people have rights too.
And in foreign relations, it's best to remember the words of PM Henry Palmerstone in the British Parliament, 1848:
“We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.
Does your house get searched daily because a child is missing somewhere?
I bet that approach would save more lives than collecting internet data.
And the british aren't the best advisor for foreign relationships
At the end of the day, I'm okay with surveilling others. I don't think it's morally wrong other countries do it to us (barring agreements otherwise).
I have a problem when we do it to ourselves.
Why? US people kill more US people than any other nation. Seems more logical to keep yourselves under constant surveillance. Tight GPS tracking surely will help solving homicides.
Hayao Miyazaki.
We can't know this for sure. We have no idea what the behind-the-scenes factors were that led to Obama granting clemency to Chelsea Manning.
Any day now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Intelligence_Com...
And it’s actually not a lot when you break it down. They each specialize in different areas of intelligence. NSA does SIGINT, NGA does GEOINT, military branches do intelligence for military intelligence in their respective branch, law enforcement intelligence for law enforcement, and so on.
i.e.: Parallel construction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
Because they get the information using illegal methods... that's why.
src: https://meduza.io/en/news/2022/09/26/putin-grants-citizenshi...
The only use of Snowden I can imagine so far is the same they gave to Medvechuk during last week.
There have also been reports of people without military experience being taken [2]
That said, I very much doubt they'd draft Snowden, I don't see what purpose that would serve. Also I'm not sure I'd consider him "outspoken" on the issue, but he has expressed criticism of the Russian government over the years, including their invasion of the Ukraine. In his own words, "It was not my choice to be here, and this is what people forget. ... It was not my choice to live in Russia."
I very much doubt he considers Russia any better than the US with respect to their military & espionage programs, especially because I'd bet there's a firm (and low) upper limit on how much outspokenness the government there would tolerate from him. His value to Russia is his continuous presence on the world stage serving as a reminder about how the U.S. operates with respect to intelligence gathering. Otherwise, he's probably only 2-3 furious anti-Putin diatribes away from being the next underwear nerve-toxin assassination target.
[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/text-vladimir-putin-mobiliza...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2019/09/12/760121373/edward-snowden-tell...
The approval rating didn't bulge when the aforementioned organization sent thousands to die for essentially nothing (if you believe the US military miscalculated the war on terror) or oil (if you believe the war on terror was a subtle ploy to get in there and be in control of oil)
Didn't evne bulge after Abu Graib...so?
I don't know how it works in Russia specifically, but I think in most countries the issuing of passports is subject to executive discretion, and even if Snowden technically has the possibility of challenging such a refusal in court, I don't imagine a court ruling against the Kremlin.
Assuming he did have a passport, though, the question becomes "How could he escape Russia?". Russia probably has a system for recording the passport numbers of people who should be detained if they try to leave the country, but maybe that system isn't 100% effective when it comes to Russia's vast remote borders and enforcement officers who might be willing to take a bribe.
(If you were going to disobey your orders like that, though, you'd probably also want to seek political asylum in whichever country you were supposed to be guarding the border with, since Putin probably won't respond well to the news that his political pawn has slipped out of his grasp).
Then the problem becomes "How does Snowden remain a free man while the US are after him?". I don't know if he's on a secret Interpol wanted list, and they probably don't have his (hypothetical) new Russian passport number, so he might be safe for a while. But suppose he manages to get as far as Finland or Norway. Could he really then catch a flight to Ecuador without his plane being forced to land so he can be arrested on America's behalf?
I think his best bet would be to travel (visa free) to Georgia, in a bus or something. Then fly from Tbilisi to Doha, and from there to Caracas, with a final leg to Quito. Alternatively, if he wanted to live in a G20 nation without a formal extradition treaty with the US, he could travel east to Indonesia.
One final consideration is that Biden might actually want to pardon him (or at least pre-emptively reduce his sentence to some token amount, like one year, if that's even constitutionally possible). In such a scenario, it might be dangerous to announce this pardon while Snowden is still in Russia, since it makes him look like more of a flight risk, so the CIA would presumably have to contact him securely (I see the irony with that) and tell him that if he can get to a neutral third country, Biden will publicly announce the pardon. That would then make Snowden's travel out of Georgia (for example) a lot easier.