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Trump says he is considering pardon for Edward Snowden

reuters.com

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Re: Trump says he is considering pardon for Edward Snowden

#191

Post by refurb »

smt88 wrote: post #61
runawaybottle wrote: post #16

Politically, bringing back Snowden brings back the issue, Obama/Biden era big government spying program Prism. Trump: Remember everyone, Biden used to spy on you. This is similar to when he did a press conference with all of Bill Clinton’s accusers. Just a means to an end for Trump.

Politically, he just says insane things that get headlines, which distract from the real news: Covid killing hundreds of thousands under his care, dismantling of the Post Office, and other highly unpopular consequences of his presidency.

Covid killing hundreds of thousands under his care

But the US is near the middle-bottom of per capita deaths in Western countries and far behind several European countries.[1]

[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...

Re: Trump says he is considering pardon for Edward Snowden

#192

Post by cryptonector »

ithkuil wrote: post #175
cryptonector wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to promise controversial things that require Congressional action and cannot pass Congress. The President -no matter who they are or what Congressional action they promised- can't even push their allies in Congress to do something that can't work because of the filibuster or lack of sufficient majorities. Every candidate, and every President, promises things that they know Congress won't likely deliver -- c…

Presidential pardon does not require approval from Congress, does it?

I was referring to GP's reference to carry reciprocity.

Re: Trump says he is considering pardon for Edward Snowden

#193

Post by refurb »

eagsalazar2 wrote: post #162
tlear wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is almost zero chance that Biden will debate him. If he does pardoning Snowden and making that into an issue is a brilliant move. That will sting hard.

Biden already accepted invitations to the debates, last I read Trump had not.

Huh? Biden agreed to 3 debates and Trump asked for a 4th which Biden declined.[1]

[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-rejects-trumps-push-f...

Re: Trump says he is considering pardon for Edward Snowden

#195

Post by jeffbee »

marcan_42 wrote: post #151
bcrosby95 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of why Google decided to speed up their timeline on encrypting traffic across their internal network is because they learned the NSA tapped into it.

I was there when it happened, and basically the entire engineering org was pissed off at the NSA. It went from ongoing project to "we're flipping the switch within a month" or something like that.

Snowden's powerpoint decks clearly implied that NSA had tapped Google's transatlantic fibers. But it also seems to suggest that they weren't getting access to Google data from Google, because if they were, they wouldn't need to grep for some guy's email address in a packet capture and display it as a hex dump. Some NSA guy thought it was a big enough accomplishment to document in a presentation that they had managed to grep for gmail.com and surface one pretty useless RPC body, which tells me that their access to and understanding of the data was very poor.

FYI the slide in question appears here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/11/04...

Re: Trump says he is considering pardon for Edward Snowden

#196

Post by SparkyMcUnicorn »

C19is20 wrote: post #152
jhardy54 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This single issue is not worth overlooking the rest of Trump and the GOP.

Any single issue, or even combination of several is why I have never, and never will vote.

Are you saying that you need to be in 100% agreement with a candidate in order to vote for them, and that'll never happen?

Re: Trump says he is considering pardon for Edward Snowden

#197

Post by jeffbee »

refurb wrote: post #174
marcan_42 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was there when it happened, and basically the entire engineering org was pissed off at the NSA. It went from ongoing project to "we're flipping the switch within a month" or something like that.

Why were they pissed at the NSA? I thought Google cooperated with the NSA to provide access. Or did I misunderstand the situation?

There is nothing in Snowden's leaks to support this conclusion, much to suggest that it is false, and Google flatly denies cooperating with the NSA in clear, non-weasel-word terms.

https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html

Re: Trump says he is considering pardon for Edward Snowden

#198

Post by dragonwriter »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #176
cryptonector wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the first I've heard of Snowden helping elect Trump.

A lot of people believed Snowden's gross misreading of the documents he leaked, and that misreading paints a picture of deep state intelligence agencies run amok illegally spying on Americans. Of course, any literate person who reads the documents understands they don't support that picture, but there are enough barely literate QAnon believers to support an entire industry.

> A lot of people believed Snowden's gross misreading of the documents he leaked, and that misreading paints a picture of deep state intelligence agencies run amok illegally spying on Americans. Of course, any literate person who reads the documents understands they don't support that picture

On the other hand, the intelligence community IG report mandated by the FISA Amendments Act that leaked and was published just after, and almost certainly because of, the publication of the Snowden leaks did paint such a picture. So, you know, there's that.

Of course, while much less detailed a picture than the IG report, so did the whole trickle of official revelations and leaks leading up to the FISA Amendments Act, which overtly sought to both legalize some of and control other mass surveillance, some of which was publicly acknowledged and more of which had to have been briefed to members to have motivated the act.

Re: Trump says he is considering pardon for Edward Snowden

#199

Post by austhrow743 »

sixothree wrote: post #116
propogandist wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they've intentionally selected the word due to it's negative context. The usage of "leaker" allows them to play to the 'orange man bad' narrative, which they value more than getting Snowden pardoned.

Are there any measurable metrics by which he is doing a good job?

Sure, the most important one. Hasn't invaded any new countries.
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