He didn't "flee" to Russia. His passport was renounced/revoked/disabled while he was on his way to the original destination. He got stuck in the Russian airport for a freaking long time in a small room while the govt made sure he can't go anywhere else. Good Lord, fled to Russia it seems.
That's how it looks at least. It's a good excuse if your goal was always to flee to Russia.
As someone who emigrated from Russia and don't want to ever return here (nor I will be able to unless I want to spend my life in jail), I don't understand how anyone could possibly want to voluntarily "flee to Russia". Doesn't compute.
Well it sort of hints that Snowden was a Russian agent from the start.
And maybe that's why the Snowden documents are not being fully released, because they've gone from responsible disclosure to irresponsible disclosure.
I'm 100% convinced the US is evil imperialists, but in this particular case the "Snowden being a Russian agent"-angle isn't finding much resistance.
If he was an agent from the start, I doubt we would have learned this much publicly. The materials would have been much more valuable to Russia as pressure points, compared to the public release (yes, of course they spinned it properly, US is watching you and they are hypocrites etc etc, but this was damage control and closure from their part).
As a Russian, I am not 100% convinced that US are evil imperialists [at least before 2025]. Have some humility, there are many more evil imperialists. You are probably not even in top 5.
I'm actually Swedish lol. But I'm still convinced US are evil imperialists, and the only difference between the US and RU is that US have a stronger cultural influence, which is a huge advantage when they want to anchor their fleet all across the world.
its just too convenient.
If your goal is to discredit Snowden if you cant catch him, revoking his passport is a total win, he can’t flee to any neutral country (if there even is one that wouldn’t bend to the US) and wherever he lands is an enemy of the US. Russia or China make no material difference, but it’s a bit too “smart” of Snowden for his passport to be revoked while he was laying over en-route to Ecuador... It’s 3D chess when he doesn’t have the ability to move pieces.
I mean: We know his flight details, we know when his passport was revoked, and we know he can’t revoke his own passport, so that leaves very few plausible avenues.
He could have returned to the US. His citizenship wasn’t revoked.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49782476
“Hand yourself in” is not the compelling argument you seem to think it is.
He put egg on the face of the US government, proving that neither democrats or republicans have done anything to preserve peoples right to privacy, even US citizens.
So, what does anyone gain from his capture? Except for people claiming him to be a Russian asset, which they would still do because there is literally no bar that can be cleared for people to believe he did something he believed to be right for the public benefit.
You just want him punished for daring to speak out, because it marginally weakened the US hegemony on digital goods and services.
He leaked WAY more than necessary and didn’t seek out official whistleblower channels. Stuff that didn’t even have to do with US privacy. Say what you want about spying on foreign adversaries but every government does it to another one and that didn’t need to be leaked.
Can you point to anything that he leaked that wasn't necessary to leak?
He didn't release it to the public, he chose journalists specifically who had a lot of integrity and would go through the data with lawyers and release only what pertained to the public interest, with the rest being destroyed or kept encrypted. It was also recorded and those recordings are the basis for the "citizenfour" documentary, so you can see for yourself.
You can contrast this cleanly with Wikileaks which usually dumped only barely redacted information - this was a deliberate systemic filtering conducted by neutral journalists; Snowden published literally nothing himself and the vast majority of documents never made it to the public. In fact when he travelled out of Hong Kong he had literally no documents anymore.
I'm not sure what you'd expect him to do honestly.
The abuse of these systems was so systemic and widespread that the nature of them needed to be understood so that the scale of abuse could be comprehended.
If you didn't know what xkeyscore was, then "civil servants spy on people they find attractive, routinely" doesn't have the same sting..
.... if Google engineers didn't know that there was an internal wiretap on the unencrypted part of there network ("data unencrypted and renecrypted here, LOL!" - actual quoted slide) then the push from big tech companies to encrypt internal traffic never happens, then mass surveillance of literally everyones email continues... heck, it probably still did... I'd bet money that they've planted staff who planted backdoors...
So, what didn't he need to leak, point me to.. say, two things.
NSA spying in China? Maybe, but USA spying on Angela Merkel was necessary, because spying on allied politicians is against several agreements. GCHQ leaks were important because it detailed the mechanism in which Five Eyes governments were circumventing their own laws that protect civilian rights to privacy. In fact, it was seeing James Clapper, then Director of National Intelligence, lie in front of the Senate that triggered Snowden to leak things, because it was clear that the laws were not being applied- and everything released reinforces that point.
Did anything change in terms of policies or people responsible seeing criminal charges as a result of these findings?
I hate to be so cynical, but among people who are concerned about privacy and american influence, these findings are sort of like "no surpise the military surveillance state that built the internet for military and surveillance purposes would continue using it for military and surveillance purposes." I mean after all, many of us grew up getting threatening letters from the powers that be saying "hey, we surveilled your network traffic on behalf of the private moneyed interests who own all the IP in this country and found illegal activity." Witch hunts like McCarthy going after communists are public record and known parts of our history. MKultra. COINTELPRO. FBI writing a letter to MLK asking him to kill himself. CIA selling crack. Lying about Vietnam. Lying about Iraq WMDs. This has always been a bit of a banana republic.
Wikileaks leaked more than necessary. The diplomatic cable dumps included content that put the lives of diplomats at risk (eg honest, undiplomatic assessments of leadership/individuals, etc). Spying on foreigners wasn't the scandal, but that they were knowingly spying on Americans.
As for Snowden? I dunno. The NSA was pretty much breaking the law and everybody knew it. I really want to like and believe in the romantic notion of his actions. But something just doesn't add up with him...
At the cost of immediate and longterm imprisonment.
Decisions made at gunpoint are not usually preplanned choices.
It was his choice to leak as himself. He could have used whistleblower routes (which was investigated and he only sent 1 email but never reported it)
Really have to question his motives
> He could have used whistleblower routes
Against... the NSA. Do you genuinely believe that anyone could leak that amount of NSA data anonymously?
It’s wasn’t anonymous back then iirc and I wasn’t advocating for leaking anything
> I wasn’t advocating for leaking anything
What is whistleblowing, then?
There are secure ways to whistleblow inside the org he was in and not to the press and not to Congress itself. He didn’t use those avenues.
He also leaked information that didn’t need to be leaked which had nothing to do with the privacy issues people keep being up (which btw were not ruled to be in violation of the 4th amendment only that they went beyond the FISA approved collection standards)
> There are secure ways to whistleblow
... when your adversary is the NSA? We're circling back to my original message.
You report it to the Inspector General (IG). How are you not familiar with it ? Snowden even talked to them before not about this but something else. He is a traitor. The other stuff he leaked had nothing to do with Americans “privacy concerns”. It was fairly minor
Ah yes, he "even talked to them". You don't think that perhaps therefore Edward Snowden might've had a better conception of the viability of "the proper channels" than you do?
And, before you answer that too hastily - have you ever heard of William Binney? How about Thomas Drake? Do you know what happened when they used "the proper channels"? If so, your failure to mention them when discussing Snowden's motivation is in bad faith. If not, you're simply not informed enough to be coming into threads speaking authoritatively about this.
“Snowden talked to the IG” only applies to his conversation with the CIA IG about management and IT. There was no NSA IG complaint about surveillance which contrasts with the others (Binney and Drake that you mentioned). So no he did not even try. Was the Binney and Drake incidents ugly? Yes. But neither are in jail and both still live in the US.
Snowden did it completely the wrong way.
Who do you leak to when you believe even your organization is compromised/complicit? Who watches the watchmen? He chose 'the people' and I can't fault him for it.
You report it to the Inspector General (IG). How are you not familiar with it ? Snowden even talked to them before not about this but something else. He is a traitor. The other stuff he leaked had nothing to do with Americans “privacy concerns”. It was fairly minor
Funny, I consider him a national hero. Agree to disagree I guess.
Or it was a crime of opportunity on Russia's part. "Hey, we didn't plan this but since his passport just got revoked, what if Good Ol' Uncle Putin extended a hand? Maybe we could flip him."
Whether the play worked or not doesn't really matter. I don't think his citizenship status is contingent on him leaking to Russia explicitly, and I don't think he started as a Russian spy. I think it was a crime of opportunity; a play.
He could have returned to the US. He chose to exile in Russia. He was already fleeing. I posted a bunch about it below
Snowden has repeatedly talked about why he wouldn't return to US cos the trial won't be fair. He wanted to be able to talk. But due to his role, the trial would be a muppet one where he can't even talk. Or am I wrong?
At the time, look at the situation of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and the many whistle blowers before Snowden? How can u blame him?
Edit: Am unable to reply to comments. HN don't let you comment 2-3 levels in or is it moderation? - Fixed.
The OP was right - avoiding a unfair trial is still fleeing.
The word "flee" is not a pejorative in any way. For example flee North Korea all the time.
No. It is pejorative in the way it is used. Context is important.
The problem is he can’t excuse the offense under the Espionage Act because it doesn’t have a public interest defense. One could argue that it should have that defense. But that doesn’t mean the resulting trial would have been a “muppet trial”
He could have had counsel, challenged the government, and had a jury decide guilt. It would have been fair. It actually looks worse to flee like he did
"doesn't have a public interest defence".
Can't be serious.
There isn’t one under the law so no.
Why wasn’t the whistleblower process followed? Why didn’t he try to contact his congressman/ senator ? He could have said I don’t want a clearance anymore and disclosed his concerns. He could have reported anonymously even.
He wanted public debate and discourse on something that the process didn’t allow
What he exposed was found illegal by US courts. And the govt had to stop it. What more evidence do you want?
A single program he leaked was illegal. The vast majority was not, including the hacking of Chinese targets that he leaked directly to SCMP.
Only one program went beyond what was originally authorized and shutdown. The rest had no basis to be leaked. It caused grave damage to the national security of the US. Those programs had nothing to do with the privacy of American citizens that everyone keeps latching on here. They are ignoring the rest of the stuff
I don’t understand. He’s absolutely guilty of violating the US government and probably a handful of laws. I will respect him forever for doing that. But I completely agree that any trial he’d participate in is A) not going to be fair, because why would you trust the government on an issue like this, and B) not really necessary, because he didn’t do anything wrong, even if it was illegal.
The only reason to NOT flee is if the government didn’t care about whistleblowers and has amazing protections for them, even in the context of national security. Does it?
Maybe you think what he did was morally wrong. Who fucking cares, what the government was and is hiding is even more morally wrong.
For some people what Snowden did was the right thing. But settling in that particular country, makes it seem like he didn't do it from pureness of his heart. Maybe it was accidental but optics is optics.
He took the easy way out that is best for him individually, which is understandable but undermined future debate on the question
Where else would he go? Not many countries don't extradite you to the US for that. US enemies are your only options, and that fact is solely the fault of the US.
Nepal UAE Belarus Mongolia Vietnam Laos Montenegro Indonesia
the same indonesia in which the us government helped organise mass killings of hundreds of thousands of alleged left-wing political activists and voters? [0]
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/th... 'What the United States Did in Indonesia', The Atlantic
Where else can we move the goalposts?
>But settling in that particular country, makes it seem like he didn't do it from pureness of his heart.
It was not the original intent from what i understand.
But also, what country could protect him from the US other than Russia or China and wouldn't hand him over?
> But also, what country could protect him from the US other than Russia or China and wouldn't hand him over?
As i wrote he probably took the easiest way out for himself. We are in agreement.
I just say what's better for himself is not necessarily better for the debate/cause. I don't know how that is controversial.
> But settling in that particular country, makes it seem like he didn't do it from pureness of his heart. Maybe it was accidental but optics is optics.
Who the fuck cares if it's not from "pureness of his heart"? Why are we holding him to an infinitely higher standard than the bastards in the US gov't who were doing all the spying that Snowden uncovered?
Because if we hold them to the same standard, in the eyes of the public neither is better than the other, then there is much less interest in the whole debate on this question.
guy leaks secret info about how US agencies surveil Americans and the world. in public's eye what they do is bad or illegal and what he did is at least illegal. it's a draw at best because many Americans consider national security important.
If he faces prosecution after leaking = guy fights authorities for good cause, has high ground, and it is a pretty controversial bipartisan case.
but he runs to a country that literally benefits from his report and then supports him by offering asylum (which it rarely does) and permanent residency and citizenship (even more rare) = support for him is less popular and more partisan
> he runs to a country that literally benefits from his report
He didn't, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49782465
Manning and Assange are both free today. Isn't that proof that whether it was reasonable to believe Snowden was correct at the time, history has proved him wrong?
Not sure. You are talking about a Snowden in 2013 who looks around and see Chelsea and Assange NOT free. He made the decision based on that and what has happened before. I also think what Snowden exposed is far far far bigger.
Assange is only free because he was not extradited to the USA, and effectively served ~10 years imprisonment anyway. Manning got a presidential pardon. I wouldn't hold either of these up as a shining example of how the USA treats whistleblowers and journalists.
No one was holding them up "as a shining example of how the USA treats whistleblowers and journalists." I was holding them up as history. History will judge Snowden differently because he chose exile and didn't give himself the opportunity for pardons or plea deals like Manning and Assange.
My point was that "both of these people are currently free" isn't the flex it appears to be.
And again, why are we so focused on judging Snowden and not focused on judging the crimes he exposed? I would think that history will judge him very favourably considering that he was completely correct to expose those crimes.
Once again, there was no flex. We aren't judging the morality or ethics of the situation in any direction. We are simply looking back on historical events with hindsight.
We also don't have to flatten these historical events into one good side and one bad side. Reality tends to be more complicated than that. It's ok to recognize that Snowden maybe made some mistakes. That is neither an endorsement of the US government's spying or an accusation of ill intent against Snowden.
we also don't have to flatten these historical events (snowden maybe making some mistakes vs the US government's spying) so we can pretend that they're of equal valence, scale and severity. they are actually extremely dissimilar and one is very transparently worse and more serious than the other
>we also don't have to flatten these historical events (snowden maybe making some mistakes vs the US government's spying) so we can pretend that they're of equal valence, scale and severity
In what way do you think this was done? Nothing I said here was condoning the government's behavior.
Crimes? What a strong word.
Right now, American sailors and officers are doing war crimes every week in the Caribbean, shooting at boaters. They are boasting about it and showing it on social media.
Zero reaction. But you are more concerned because you might have some of your private data put into a huge database by the CIA. Heh. Seems that really sets you off is not the scale of the "crime", but that you may have been affected. "How dare they!"
If a person does an illegal thing, that cancels out the illegal things other people did.
Reality Winner got five years for showing Russian interference in elections, which seems like doing the right thing
Is Snowden... free, in Russia? Is he, really? Between his constant KGB handlers and the Ukrainian bombings?
In the case of Assange, Australian politicians did a lot of work to get him released in the end[1], including:
* Sending a delegation representing all major political parties to the US to argue for the release of Assange. Imagine picking the Republican and Democrat politician LEAST likely to want to cooperate on anything, and those two would have been Australia's equivalent representatives in this delegation. Reports afterwards of the meeting at DOJ HQ indicated it wasn't the type of meeting where the Australians would have brought Tim Tams to share around the room.[2]
* The Australian parliament voted publicly 2:1 on a motion for Assange's release.
* Repeated petitioning through ambassadors in the UK and US, official visits of Australian politicians, etc. Not in private either, as is typically the case for diplomatic affairs.
* Australian politicians attending UK extradition hearings.
* After getting agreement to a plea deal, flying Australian ambassadors for the UK and US to the court of a one-pub-town in the middle of the Pacific Ocean no one has heard of (Northern Mariana Islands) in support of Assange, then all of them flying back to the Australian prime minister's aircraft terminal for a welcome home bevvy.
This was all at a time too where "Free Assange" posters and graffiti was _widely_ distributed across Australian cities.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange#Plea_bargain_an...
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-27/inside-the-us-austral...
No.
Assange didn't commit a crime, and was still forced by the Brits to confess in order to be released. Snowdens situation is completely different.
His only hope was a much wider view of the legality of the acts he'd taken to be considered, taking into account the legality and constitutionality of what he released information about, and there was and is no chance of that.
>Assange didn't commit a crime
Assange literally pleaded guilty to violating the Espionage Act.
And if we're going to pretend that plea deals are coercion than we better rethink how the whole criminal justice system works.
Yes, that he was forced to do so by the Brits in order to be release is what I referred to, so of course it is coercion.
He is of not American and has no duty to be loyal to the US or to refrain from committing espionage against it.
Your objection isn't to just Assange's case. It's with over 90% of criminal cases in the US. I was talking about a particular situation, so I'm not going to have the debate you seemingly want to have.
My objection is absolutely with Assange's case. I don't particularly approve of the idea of these sorts of plea deals, but they are not the core problem.
The core problem is that Britain pressured Assange to enter into a US plea deal over something which it was entirely legal for him to do, seeing as he was in Iceland when the acts were committed.
Seeing as part of the information obtained related to black sites at which there is reason to believe that people were killed (we know that that a person released from the Polish black site were almost killed, so we can be fairly sure that a bunch of people died there), and Iceland has a law making it legally mandatory to help people who are in danger; and I think there's good reason to believe that he had reason to believe that the information would reveal such things, so that it wasn't just him doing good, but him doing his legal duty, once he had reason to believe that people were in danger.
So my concern has very little to do with plea agreements. They have to do with Britain.
>we know that that a person released from the Polish black site were almost killed, so we can be fairly sure that a bunch of people died there
This is the kind of statement that just completely undermines any possible conversation we could have about the law. Can you seriously not take a step back and realize the jump in logic you made here from one person was almost killed and that being evidence of "a bunch of people" being killed? Because this discussion is not worth having with someone who genuinely believes this jump in logic is reasonable.
No, it does not.
There's a guy from Lebanon who ended up moving to Germany called Khaled El-Masri who got seized in Macedonia by the US and who got sent around a bunch of US black sites.
Eventually people figured out he wasn't Khalid Al-Masri and started treating him better, but he still almost died. Consequently, the people who weren't treated better almost certainly did.
This can't really be disputed. The US certainly killed people at these black sites. The obvious danger El-Masri was in makes that clear.
There is a screw-up in my previous comment since I say Poland rather than Macedonia or Afghanistan, but there's reason to think that the Polish black site is iffier than the others because of how the investigation of the location was performed.
Once again, a person who wasn't killed is your evidence that "a bunch of people" were killed. You genuinely don't recognize how silly that is? John Hinckley almost killed Reagan, "so we can be fairly sure" he killed a "bunch" of other presidents.
So imagine a censored random variable.
Let's say that D is a random variable representing whether a certain person in one of these black sites is dead due to mistreatment. It's not so simple that D=0 if the guy lives, D=1 otherwise, D is a continuous variable, a damage level.
You can't sample from D ~ P(D) because people aren't releasing such information; and we know this, because when El-Masri sued the US he was prevented from doing so by means of the State Secrets doctrine and it was argued that whether he had been tortured and by whom was a state secret. Consequently what we actually have samples of is P(D|released) and I think P(D|released)=P(D|innocent,recognized as innocent,slightly lucky). So if we have D ~ P(D|released) where it turns out that we have observed a realization of that with D = 0.17, do you think there are only a few outcomes where D=0, when taking into account that E[D|innocent,recognized as innocent] should be much larger than E[D], and when taking into account that P(released) is really small, something like 10^-4 or 10^-3?
>So imagine a censored random variable... D is a continuous variable, a damage level.
This is not a real thing, it's just something you made up. You can see this obviously if you transfer this to another domain. For example, if I get a paper cut at work do you think that means I'm partially dead? Do you think that singular example of a paper cut means "we can be fairly sure" that "a bunch" of my coworkers have died from paper cuts?
Censored variables are a very real thing and this model is perfectly legtimate. This is how you do maths with conditional probabilities.
It's ad hoc, but so is all maths, and all reasoning.
A man with a paper cut is at D=0.9999 or more. You probably have more noise from variations in sleep or eating or colds. But people don't end up at D=0.17 just randomly. El-Masri was in danger of dying. The fellow was actually tortured.
There's also no censorship in the example of the paper cut. It also isn't possible to infer much from a something like that E[D|some positive condition]=0.9999, so even if there were censorship your example with a small scratch doesn't allow the sort of argument I gave in my previous comment. My previous comment specifically relies that you have a censored sample D~P(D|something that you'd expect would make D large) and then finding that this D is small.
It turns out though, that this doesn't matter. There's actually a list of people who are known to have been tortured to death in these places on Wikipedia.
Still, I think there's a point to this statistical reasoning: Assange could have made it at the time, and been correct, and thus we have a strong argument for his duty to act under Icelandic law.
> And if we're going to pretend that plea deals are coercion
Many absolutely are coercion, not sure why you'd think otherwise.
I guess "we better rethink how the whole criminal justice system works." The guy living in exile seems like a silly place to start that conversation rather than the millions of Americans currently in prison for agreeing to plea deals.
We should because the time between being acused and when a case is actually tried is undeniably a factor in why plea deals are taken. When the alternative to taking a plea deal is potentially spending months in jail until one's case goes to trail is accepting a plea deal which comes with a definite and possibly shorter sentence than the waiting period for a trial itself it isn't surprising that people would simply accept the plea deal
> pretend that plea deals are coercion
That's exactly what they are.
We don’t know whether Assange committed a crime because he refused to go to Sweden to face the rape charges
He did of course commit several crimes under UK law by absconding to the Ecuadorian Embassy
You mean the rape charges that were dropped? Incredible that people still tout this obvious psyop.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50473792
> Assange didn't commit a crime
Smearing your own faeces on the wall isnt a crime - but breach of bail is
He'd served his time for that.
didn't commit a crime - or - committed a crime and served his time
one is true and one is false
With the right/same lawyer, could've potentially worked out similarly to Kiriakou, who only had a few years behind bars and later became a celebrity due to his interviews.
"Only had a few years behind bars"
He's now spent years and is looking at spending the rest of his life in Russia.
Is Snowden able to talk freely in Russia?
About Russia? Nope.
*Bradley Manning
If we're going to judge Snowden by the standard that he could've rectified his situation through a radical act of self sacrifice, then every US president has had the opportunity to pardon him and has failed to do so. It's an equally sensible proposition. It's plain to see that no US president would entertain the notion. Similarly, it's not reasonable to expect someone to return from exile without being offered some kind of clemency.
No radical act of self sacrifice would have been necessary had he only leaked illegal or possibly illegal programs. Instead, he went to Hong Kong and leaked a list of compromised Chinese networks and systems in hopes of getting asylum from China.
That's a very optimistic view of the US justice system's treatment of whistleblowers (surely they would contend that all of their programs were legal), but now his being granted asylum by Russia isn't evidence but a new incongruous fact we need to explain since the hypothesis is now apparently that he is a Chinese turncoat. So I don't see how this helps the case.
> now his being granted asylum by Russia isn't evidence but a new incongruous fact we need to explain since the hypothesis is now apparently that he is a Chinese turncoat.
Putin wanted him in Russia, and Snowden happened to be passing through. Simple as that. I already explained the clear evidence (from Snowden's own mouth) that Snowden initially wanted to gain asylum in Hong Kong by leaking hacks of Chinese infrastructure in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49784968.
Snowden didn't grow up wanting to be Chinese. He simply misread the PRISM documents and imagined a USA that completely ignored the 4th Amendment. Somebody in such a state could easily imagine a USA that would ignore the 8th Amendment, and so he had to flee in order to get the news out about the former, which he talked about nonstop the moment he got journalists' ears. It turned out that he was wrong about PRISM, and he was wrong about the government ignoring the 4th Amendment because the only extant program that might have been in violation was shut down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49785016
The lesson in all this? Stay in school.
>and imagined a USA that completely ignored the 4th Amendment.
Haha. Tell us another one. I don't have enough comedy in my life.
He said so himself. I take him at his word. Meanwhile, the actual USA stopped doing the one extant program in his leaks that was ruled a violation of the 4th Amendment.
>the actual USA stopped doing the one extant program in his leaks that was ruled a violation of the 4th Amendment.
To move it to another program, classified and unreported, under which it could hide again. Don't be naive.
> To move it to another program, classified and unreported, under which it could hide again. Don't be naive.
Why? They first made a more limited program to comply with the law and then shut that down because the data wasn't useful. If they made another program exactly like the original, the SSCI would shut it down, or a whistleblower would point out a program that they know to be clearly illegal, whereas the original program was arguably legal, with the government's justification in the leaks. After the ruling, the government would not be able to provide justification for obtaining that data from the telcos with their old legal argument because it is invalidated by precedent.
Just like with John Kiriakou, the only man ever convicted in connection with the torture program? He went to prison for two years despite only ever leaking information about illegal programs, lost his wife, lost all his money; is that the mercy you expected Snowden to submit to?
Kiriakou gave an interview to ABC describing waterboarding on December 10, 2007, in order to defend the practice. The government did not charge him with any crimes at the time. Three years prior, Newsweek had reported on a secret memo from Yoo justifying the use of waterboarding on Abu Zubaydah. None of the people who leaked that memo were charged with crimes. Three months prior to Kiriakou's interview, "current and former high-ranking U.S. intelligence officials" said that three prisoners had been waterboarded, including Zubaydah. None of them were charged with crimes.
Four years after Kiriakou's interview, he was charged with giving the names of CIA agents to two journalists, a crime under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment, not for describing waterboarding, which if he had leaked would have been covered by the Whistleblower Protection Act.
That's a conspiracy theory I haven't heard before which I'm pretty sure I'll never hear a shred of evidence for.
It's well documented. Snowden himself has admitted as much, and it requires no conspiracy — only the stupidity of a single high school dropout.
https://amp.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3178655...
https://amp.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1260306/edward-s...
https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/article/1266821/us-hacks-chi...
Snowden wasn't stupid. He was the world's best Sharepoint administrator.
It was probably unwise of him to insult the T group director publicly, which led to the entire subsequent chain of events.
If one country wants to kill you why wouldn't you flee to a different one and give them everything you have against the first country?
Sorry, but is Russia or the USA the one most likely to kill Snowden? Oh, yeah, it isn't Russia, because Snowden avoids saying things that could trigger his KGB handlers to disappear him... Like denouncing a genocidal war of aggression against a neighbor, or the assassination of journalists and political opponents, or the repression of any opposition in the streets...
By leaking American info, Snowden painted a target on his back that can be reached by the USA and all allies with extradition agreements. That leaves him with very few superpowers who won't hand him over to the FBI/CIA and execution or imprisonment.
If I were in his shoes, I too would relocate to a superpower not allied with the USA and avoid getting involved in anything political over there.
Execution? A few years of imprisonment at worst. Trump has pardoned worse people (the guy from SilkRoad for instance).
Russia may execute him anytime though. And his family. Easy to pretend he was killed by an Ukrainian bombing.
Well when Trump pardons him, he'll come back. Trump won't pardon him, because Trump supports deep state mass surveillance.
Your president literally does illegal things all the time and your Supreme Court just declares it’s legal because it’s the president.
You have zero moral ground or credibility to stand on.
He isn’t deserving of a pardon or exile by the damage he did. But he could have stayed and faced the consequences if the cause was sincere
What exactly was the damage he did?
He exposed massive unconstitutional dragnets that made the unaccountable agencies look bad.
If the damage is "makes the US look bad from their illegal surveillance of citizens", then the NSA did that to themselves.
Needs of the state outweigh needs of the people? That's crazy talk.