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 c…
Makes you wonder what was the motivation behind creating "Whistleblower protection" program in the first place.
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.
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 o…
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.
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.
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...
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".
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 no…
“Caesar” became a hereditary title when Rome shifted from Republic to dictatorship.
I sometimes wonder if “President” will be the same.
Will Trump pardon Snowden? that will be interesting.
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.
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.
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 c…
#2 means that there is no wistleblower protection in the intelligence community.
What else could Snowden have done do to stop the crimes being committed?
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 c…
Put me in his jury and I’ll happily give the US govt a lesson in the powers of jury nullification.
They learned that a long time ago and screen jurors carefully.
I do 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.
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…
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.