Choosing Hong Kong Is a Brilliant Move by Edward Snowden

You can also sneak out of Hong Kong easily, and it is an hour ferry ride a to Macau or Guangzhou or a bus or taxi ride to Shenzen.

Hong Kong has very loose exit visa policies on western passports. You can jump on a plane to some destinations with your passport only being checked at checkin (which is of the ticket). It is very simple to get to any number of ~50 countries in the space of hours and not having your identity checked until you land.

Private banking in Hong Kong means he can have money sent to him and he can spend money without worrying about who finds out who supports him.

He is also likely to find work, since there is a lot of English speaking expat work in the country especially in the IT industry.

I'm unsure if he has a path to citizenship, a path to residency is easy but I think the only way he could swap his passport is if he works out an entire 4 or 5 year residency or go citizenship via asylum.

Time will tell us more about Snowden but I believe his intentions to be primarily towards exposing the surveillance state for American citizens. Its existence as described by his documents is contrary to our guiding principles. I kind of doubt he was too focused on exposing this to the rest of the world but feels that it's a necessary part of what he's doing for his country.

It was scary back then for sure. MLK and his supporters suffered beatings, faced extrajudicial lynchings, etc. I'm not disputing any of that. Yet, we don't have to speculate whether MLK could count on a fair shake from the justice system, because history tells us. MLK was arrested 30 times[1], yet he spent relatively little time incarcerated. The longest sentence he ever received was 4 months (compare that to Aaron Swartz' 6 months plea offer), but he served less than that. His famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail was written when he was in jail for only 11 days[2]. As screwed up as things were then, the justice system was not so draconian that it prevented him from leading an effective campaign of civil disobedience.

I don't think it's unreasonable to speculate that Edward Snowden, if arrested in the US, would be denied bail. He would be facing decades in prison. It's quite likely he'd be held in solitary confinement and he could even be subjected to "Special Administrative Measures" (a recent invention) that would severely restrict his freedom to communicate with the outside world[3]. There would be no Letter from a Federal Detention Center from Edward Snowden. These draconian sentences and measures make it completely impossible to conduct a meaningful campaign of civil disobedience, as they can be wielded to completely neutralize a movement's leaders and serve as a warning to anyone else who is thinking of doing the same thing.

What's truly ahistoric is comparing Snowden to MLK to suggest he needs to come back to the US and face the consequences. Snowden may not be facing beatings and lynch mobs, but he would be facing a justice system that would treat him far more harshly than it ever treated MLK. We've thankfully lost many of the great evils of the past, but there are new evils. Civil disobedience is even more difficult today, and what's especially insidious is that instead of it being discouraged by lynch mobs and corrupt southern sheriffs, it's discouraged by the justice system itself.

(We should be thinking about the consequences Snowden would face because the essential civil disobedience of the future may very well be about information, but if you'd rather look at "conventional" protesters more akin to MLK, consider Al Sharpton being jailed for 90 days in 2001 for trespassing during a protest against a naval base in San Juan[4], or the case of the anti-nuke protesters that was on HN a few days ago[5]. Not quite as draconian as the situation Snowden could be facing, but the sentences are still unfair, longer than what MLK faced, and make carrying out effective civil disobedience extremely difficult.)

[1] http://www.thekingcenter.org/faqs

[2] http://www.lib.lsu.edu/hum/mlk/srs216.html

[3] They're mostly used for "dangerous" prisoners, like suspected or convicted terrorists, but they're also used for those accused or convicted of espionage charges: http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2009/June/09-ag-564.html

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/24/nyregion/sharpton-and-3-fr...

[5] https://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/15-7

I lived and worked in/around Central when I was in HK a couple years ago. HKCSL 3G data was unusably slow (I don't think cell towers handle extreme density well). I switched to Three and it was slightly better but still horrendous compared to T-mobile in SF or Rogers in Toronto.

I paid 50HKD/month for "50mbps" cable internet (some special deal at the time). What a joke. I got 50mbps torrenting and about 0.5mbps from anywhere outside Hong Kong.

It is significantly more involved (I don't know if I'd say difficult as this is tough to judge) for a PRC citizen to enter HK than it is for, say, a citizen of the USA.