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Are there any people not in favor of pardoning Snowden here? It seems like most of the people I encounter who aren't on his side either don't fully understand t

Are there any people not in favor of pardoning Snowden here? It seems like most of the people I encounter who aren't on his side either don't fully understand the situation or think the story is so ridiculous some conspiracy is going on. Everyone is so gung-ho on getting rid of political insiders, exposing the wrong doings of the government, and yet we blacklist someone who could be a bannerman for that cause.

tamana 10y ago
Yes. There is a contingent that says Snowden overshared information and that is treasonous. Those people no problem in the oversharing Showed exposed,of course. A substantial grouonornproehxt people, on and off HN, are deeply authoritarian and believe that The State is the only legitimate arbiter of right and wrong.
- rayiner 10y ago
  I don't think that's a charitable interpretation of the majority view. 64% of Americans familiar with Snowden have a negative view of him: http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/04/21/edward-snowden-unpopular-at-home-a-hero-abroad-poll-finds http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/04/21/edward-snowde.... The people are entitled to trust the government and condemn those who leak state secrets. You or I might think that's short-sighted, but the whole point of democracy is to give people the power to make these value judgments. America wasn't set up for a class of self-appointed civil libertarian guardians to tell people what their priorities should be.
  - MajesticHobo 10y ago
    A valid point of view, but the US is technically a constitutional republic, not a true democracy. Certain values and principles are written into our DNA via the Constitution, and I contest your assertion that they can simply be voted away by the majority.
    - dalke 10y ago
      Technically the US is a form of democracy. It is a type of representative, or indirect, democracy. It is not direct democracy, which is also called a pure democracy, with the best known example being James Madison in Federalist 10. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_democracy for a list of some of the types of democracy. It does not list a "true democracy". I suspect that you meant to use "pure" instead of "true" in your comment.
      - MajesticHobo 10y ago
        Yes, that is what I meant. That's what I get for being a pedant.
  - jazzyk 10y ago
    But most people who are "familiar" with him don't really know the details - for example, many think he planned the escape to Russia.
  - kiba 10y ago
    Liberalism and democracy are not automatic bedfellow, but somehow people think it is.
  - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
    > The people are entitled to trust the government and condemn those who leak state secrets. You or I might think that's short-sighted, but the whole point of democracy is to give people the power to make these value judgments. Isn't that a self-fulfilling prophecy? If the government is allowed to lie to the people and keep secrets from them without oversight then the people have no way to make an informed decision, and will consequently be more inclined to make a decision favoring the government. It's all too easy to win a public debate when everyone with the information required to refute your position is prohibited by law from disclosing it.
    - rayiner 10y ago
      The decision is not about individual programs. It's a much higher-level one. What do we fear more: the potential for leaks to undermine security, or the possibility of government surveillance abuses that go uncaught and unpunished? That's a decision people can make without knowing the specifics of what kind of surveillance the government is doing.
      - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
        > That's a decision people can make without knowing the specifics of what kind of surveillance the government is doing. I don't think it is. To make that decision you have to know the cost of secret abuses. And how are you supposed to know that if they're secret? To make the reductio ad absurdum, suppose the government's line is that a plague that becomes contagious before it becomes symptomatic is ravaging the population and everyone is being tested and the people infected are immediately taken to quarantine where they uniformly die of the plague, but in reality what's happening is that genocidal fanatics in the government are doing genetic testing and sending people to death camps. There is no amount of undermining security that can overcome that amount of harm. But if people are assuming that the harm is dramatically less than that and are not allowed to be corrected then they can't be expected to make the right decision.
        rayiner 10y ago
        People are entitled to trust the government not to do that, and also to presume that the really gross abuses will be hard to keep secret.
mercurialshark 10y ago
Correct, there are a number of people that look at the actions of a contractor that exposed operational material and think - that's treason. There is a long history of Pentagon leaks regarding policy decisions (ex. shifting budgetary priorities or weapon system programs). However, to expose ongoing operational details - literally in the correct sense of the word - risks lives. Lives, assets and sources which he was willfully indifferent to. Not exactly the work of a patriot, as he likes to self-identify.
- deleted 10y ago
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- jazzyk 10y ago
  Sorry, but this is FUD. He didn't dump information on a random server somewhere. He worked with the journalists from The Guardian, The WaPo and the NYT. They said they reached out to the gov to work with them and were turned down. How much more effort would satisfy you?
  - mercurialshark 10y ago
    Oh wow, why not disseminate classified information to your priest or scout master? A foreign journalist is equally arbitrary. Being a self-identified position of authority or confidence does not endow that person with clearance or special knowledge. "He didn't dump information on a random server somewhere." - That's exactly what he did. Once it left the secure facility, it was no longer secure and vulnerable - tis the point.
    - jazzyk 10y ago
      So what exactly was he supposed to do? The people "cleared" to see the info are the perpetrators who blatantly violated (and keep violating) the constitution.
dcposch 10y ago
> Are there any people not in favor of pardoning Snowden here? Tptacek says that if he were president, he'd "see Snowden prosecuted for overtly and recklessly breaking the law, but would commute his sentence" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5868853#up_5869346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5868853#up_5869346 ), whatever that means. Marc Andreesen called him a traitor in a TV interview right after the leaks. Even on HN and in Silicon Valley, there are people who think mass surveillance is more or less acceptable, even done in secret without the consent of the public, and that Snowden was wrong for revealing it.
- deleted 10y ago
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- pjys 10y ago
  Doesn't tptacek routinely defend pro-authoritarian and far-right views on these forums? His condemning Snowden's actions seems perfectly in line with the things he usually says. I wouldn't consider him a good example of what HN users think. As for Andreesen, he may be more representative of Silicon Valley, but he is also known for having endorsed Republican presidential candidates multiple times (Romney, Fiorina). See Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen#Personal_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen#Personal_life
  - ScottBurson 10y ago
    I think tptacek is generally somewhat to the right of most of HN, but "far-right" is a considerable exaggeration. (Insert standard disclaimer about the limitations of the "left"/"right" categories.)
- ghayes 10y ago
  For what it's worth, I think we should discuss people's views today. A lot has changed since the leaks first surfaced.
slg 10y ago
I will offer the voice of dissent. Snowden is a slightly improved version of Chelsea Manning and deserves a similar fate as her. Both revealed legitimate issues that they deserve praise for highlighting. However, both also revealed information that has little public interest, isn't illegal activity, and can really only be categorized as releasing privileged material (look to The Intercept and this weeks SIDtoday releases for the most recent examples of this). The intentions of both were noble, but you can't simply say the good outweighed the bad. That isn't how the law currently works or in my opinion should work. You have to take all of the good and bad into account. As a nation, we also can't set the precedent that any person with classified information has the right to release information they morally object without any legal repercussions. If you are going to ask for whisteblowing protection, you need to be fairly focused on things that are either illegal or at the very least objectively amoral. Neither Snowden or Manning did that. They instead grabbed everything they could get their hands on in the off chance it was something they were looking for. Isn't that the exact problem we have with mass surveillance in the first place?
- donatj 10y ago
  I'm going to place the contrarian argument that for there to be a nation of the people there needs to be total transparency in the governments actions. Anything less is tyranny. You cannot possibly make an informed vote when the government is a black box you cannot see into. The entire inner workings should be public knowledge. This mountain of secrecy left over from the cold war does not make for a free society and has no place in a just world. My argument boils down to the government keeping secrets first place is inherently amoral.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - slg 10y ago
    >My argument boils down to the government keeping secrets first place is inherently amoral. That is an idealistic viewpoint that simply isn't possible in the real world. Yes, I believe the government should be more transparent about these things, but they can't be transparent about everything. How do you protect a country like the United States without any intelligence or military secrets?
deleted 10y ago
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bunkydoo 10y ago
Well most people aren't even aware of all the other stuff Snowden took and is effectively selling to the highest bidder (now the Russians) over time for asylum. I appreciate his intent, but he went about it in the wrong way. He doesn't care about America, and that is abundantly clear. If he really cared about this country, he would have worked to improve this system and take the element of human nature out of ECHELON and PRISM program by working to develop the system to walk on its own without human operators that have sexuality, ideas, beliefs, religion, illnesses, and ultimately perceptions that influence the mission at large.
- krapp 10y ago
  >Well most people aren't even aware of all the other stuff Snowden took and is effectively selling to the highest bidder (now the Russians) over time for asylum. Neither are you - unless you're working for Russian intelligence and can actually prove anything, it's just conjecture.
darawk 10y ago
While I do think Snowden should be pardoned and I am completely on his side, I am sympathetic to the argument that what he did represents a very dangerous slippery slope - especially when the activities in question were not necessarily illegal. Whistleblowing on say, corruption at the EPA is clearly in the public interest. That is illegal and everyone can agree it is illegal and bad. But what the NSA was doing was, at least nominally, authorized by congress and the executive branch. You and I may think it is wrong for them to be doing it, but it wasn't necessarily against the law. What this means is that he was leaking classified information on the basis of his own personal moral judgments. If we accept that people should be able to whistleblow under such circumstances, how do we argue against people who take such actions who's morality does not comport with our own? To craft a somewhat awkward hypothetical, let's say the Obama administration negotiated better human rights for women in Iran as a side deal in lifting the trade sanctions against them, but this was kept secret until the deal was finalized because it wouldn't make it through if it was known by the more fundamentalist elements of the government. And then let's suppose someone in the administration 'whistleblew' on this and leaked it because they morally objected to women having such rights. How do you differentiate that from what Snowden did? Both individuals believe that what they did was in the public interest, we just happen to agree with Snowden and not the other guy. It seems to me that the only objective criteria for whistleblowing might have to be criminal behavior. If you can't prosecute someone for it, you can't whistleblow on it. Because if you don't make that the standard, then what is?
- ScottBurson 10y ago
  I don't know that there can be an objective criterion. Whistleblowers who succeed in getting public opinion on their side -- as I guess Daniel Ellsberg did, on balance, though there were certainly many who disagreed -- will get away with it. Those who don't, won't. I'm not sure it can be any other way. The government has to protect itself, and for the most part, that's a good thing. The only authority that can set limits on that self-protection, to keep it from going against the public interest, is the public itself. I too support pardoning Snowden. He risked his life and his future to bring us critically important information about the activities of our government, and he did so in as responsible a manner as I think he could have under the circumstances. This Guardian article certainly speaks to that point.
tosser00009 10y ago
I'm not. He released a lot of information that has nothing to do with domestic survaillence. He should be prosecuted for leaking details on legitimate foreign survaillence. That's the NSA's job and I'm sure he made that job more difficult.
twblalock 10y ago
True civil disobedience is predicated on being willing to accept the legal consequences. Otherwise, acts of disobedience are not civil, but constitute rejection of the concept of rule of law. Snowden thinks the law should not apply to him. He denies it, but he has demonstrated it by his actions, particularly by the fact that he ran away into the arms of a dictator.
- MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
  But if the entities you're disobeying regularly take extra-legal actions themselves, and the consequences of your actions are almost certain to result in extra-legal punishments (rendition, torture), what are you to do? He has to expand his "concept of the rule of law" to account for the ways the American security apparatus have expanded theirs. Perhaps the NSA bigwigs view their secret, self-authorized expansions of power as being aligned the "spirit of the law"; I'm sure Snowden felt the same about his actions. Also, he didn't plan to end up in Russia.
  - twblalock 10y ago
    He has been a rather docile propaganda symbol for the Russian state ever since he got there. If he doesn't want to be there, he's got an odd way of showing it.
    - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
      And he's supposed to do what, antagonize the government of a country he can't leave which has no enforceable free speech protections and can deny his asylum and send him to prison? If the US didn't want him to be in Russia we could easily let him come home.
    - MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
      I don't know what exactly you're referring to, but now that he's there and an internationally known figure, I don't think he can realistically try to go elsewhere, nor would it be wise for him to make trouble with his hosts. I highly doubt he has any love for the Russian government, but he's an American and took the actions he did to have an impact on America. You keep implicitly saying "well if he's such an idealist to have blown the whistle in the first place, why doesn't he behave like a naive idealist in all regards - and if he's not behaving thus he must not be as pure of intentions as he claims" which is just ridiculous given the reality of the situation. He knows what the US security apparatus does to true naive idealists like Drake and Crane.
joe_the_user 10y ago
It seems unlikely a pardon is going to happen. But if we're in the realm of the hypothetical, what would be much better than a pardon is to have a serious whistleblower program than Snowden and others could count-on to avoid prosecution in the first place.

tamana 10y ago

Yes. There is a contingent that says Snowden overshared information and that is treasonous. Those people no problem in the oversharing Showed exposed,of course. A substantial grouonornproehxt people, on and off HN, are deeply authoritarian and believe that The State is the only legitimate arbiter of right and wrong.

rayiner 10y ago
I don't think that's a charitable interpretation of the majority view. 64% of Americans familiar with Snowden have a negative view of him: http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/04/21/edward-snowden-unpopular-at-home-a-hero-abroad-poll-finds http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/04/21/edward-snowde.... The people are entitled to trust the government and condemn those who leak state secrets. You or I might think that's short-sighted, but the whole point of democracy is to give people the power to make these value judgments. America wasn't set up for a class of self-appointed civil libertarian guardians to tell people what their priorities should be.
- MajesticHobo 10y ago
  A valid point of view, but the US is technically a constitutional republic, not a true democracy. Certain values and principles are written into our DNA via the Constitution, and I contest your assertion that they can simply be voted away by the majority.
  - dalke 10y ago
    Technically the US is a form of democracy. It is a type of representative, or indirect, democracy. It is not direct democracy, which is also called a pure democracy, with the best known example being James Madison in Federalist 10. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_democracy for a list of some of the types of democracy. It does not list a "true democracy". I suspect that you meant to use "pure" instead of "true" in your comment.
    - MajesticHobo 10y ago
      Yes, that is what I meant. That's what I get for being a pedant.
- jazzyk 10y ago
  But most people who are "familiar" with him don't really know the details - for example, many think he planned the escape to Russia.
- kiba 10y ago
  Liberalism and democracy are not automatic bedfellow, but somehow people think it is.
- AnthonyMouse 10y ago
  > The people are entitled to trust the government and condemn those who leak state secrets. You or I might think that's short-sighted, but the whole point of democracy is to give people the power to make these value judgments. Isn't that a self-fulfilling prophecy? If the government is allowed to lie to the people and keep secrets from them without oversight then the people have no way to make an informed decision, and will consequently be more inclined to make a decision favoring the government. It's all too easy to win a public debate when everyone with the information required to refute your position is prohibited by law from disclosing it.
  - rayiner 10y ago
    The decision is not about individual programs. It's a much higher-level one. What do we fear more: the potential for leaks to undermine security, or the possibility of government surveillance abuses that go uncaught and unpunished? That's a decision people can make without knowing the specifics of what kind of surveillance the government is doing.
    - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
      > That's a decision people can make without knowing the specifics of what kind of surveillance the government is doing. I don't think it is. To make that decision you have to know the cost of secret abuses. And how are you supposed to know that if they're secret? To make the reductio ad absurdum, suppose the government's line is that a plague that becomes contagious before it becomes symptomatic is ravaging the population and everyone is being tested and the people infected are immediately taken to quarantine where they uniformly die of the plague, but in reality what's happening is that genocidal fanatics in the government are doing genetic testing and sending people to death camps. There is no amount of undermining security that can overcome that amount of harm. But if people are assuming that the harm is dramatically less than that and are not allowed to be corrected then they can't be expected to make the right decision.
      - rayiner 10y ago
        People are entitled to trust the government not to do that, and also to presume that the really gross abuses will be hard to keep secret.

mercurialshark 10y ago

Correct, there are a number of people that look at the actions of a contractor that exposed operational material and think - that's treason. There is a long history of Pentagon leaks regarding policy decisions (ex. shifting budgetary priorities or weapon system programs). However, to expose ongoing operational details - literally in the correct sense of the word - risks lives. Lives, assets and sources which he was willfully indifferent to. Not exactly the work of a patriot, as he likes to self-identify.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jazzyk 10y ago
Sorry, but this is FUD. He didn't dump information on a random server somewhere. He worked with the journalists from The Guardian, The WaPo and the NYT. They said they reached out to the gov to work with them and were turned down. How much more effort would satisfy you?
- mercurialshark 10y ago
  Oh wow, why not disseminate classified information to your priest or scout master? A foreign journalist is equally arbitrary. Being a self-identified position of authority or confidence does not endow that person with clearance or special knowledge. "He didn't dump information on a random server somewhere." - That's exactly what he did. Once it left the secure facility, it was no longer secure and vulnerable - tis the point.
  - jazzyk 10y ago
    So what exactly was he supposed to do? The people "cleared" to see the info are the perpetrators who blatantly violated (and keep violating) the constitution.

dcposch 10y ago

> Are there any people not in favor of pardoning Snowden here? Tptacek says that if he were president, he'd "see Snowden prosecuted for overtly and recklessly breaking the law, but would commute his sentence" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5868853#up_5869346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5868853#up_5869346 ), whatever that means. Marc Andreesen called him a traitor in a TV interview right after the leaks. Even on HN and in Silicon Valley, there are people who think mass surveillance is more or less acceptable, even done in secret without the consent of the public, and that Snowden was wrong for revealing it.

deleted 10y ago
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pjys 10y ago
Doesn't tptacek routinely defend pro-authoritarian and far-right views on these forums? His condemning Snowden's actions seems perfectly in line with the things he usually says. I wouldn't consider him a good example of what HN users think. As for Andreesen, he may be more representative of Silicon Valley, but he is also known for having endorsed Republican presidential candidates multiple times (Romney, Fiorina). See Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen#Personal_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen#Personal_life
- ScottBurson 10y ago
  I think tptacek is generally somewhat to the right of most of HN, but "far-right" is a considerable exaggeration. (Insert standard disclaimer about the limitations of the "left"/"right" categories.)
ghayes 10y ago
For what it's worth, I think we should discuss people's views today. A lot has changed since the leaks first surfaced.

slg 10y ago

I will offer the voice of dissent. Snowden is a slightly improved version of Chelsea Manning and deserves a similar fate as her. Both revealed legitimate issues that they deserve praise for highlighting. However, both also revealed information that has little public interest, isn't illegal activity, and can really only be categorized as releasing privileged material (look to The Intercept and this weeks SIDtoday releases for the most recent examples of this). The intentions of both were noble, but you can't simply say the good outweighed the bad. That isn't how the law currently works or in my opinion should work. You have to take all of the good and bad into account. As a nation, we also can't set the precedent that any person with classified information has the right to release information they morally object without any legal repercussions. If you are going to ask for whisteblowing protection, you need to be fairly focused on things that are either illegal or at the very least objectively amoral. Neither Snowden or Manning did that. They instead grabbed everything they could get their hands on in the off chance it was something they were looking for. Isn't that the exact problem we have with mass surveillance in the first place?

donatj 10y ago
I'm going to place the contrarian argument that for there to be a nation of the people there needs to be total transparency in the governments actions. Anything less is tyranny. You cannot possibly make an informed vote when the government is a black box you cannot see into. The entire inner workings should be public knowledge. This mountain of secrecy left over from the cold war does not make for a free society and has no place in a just world. My argument boils down to the government keeping secrets first place is inherently amoral.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- slg 10y ago
  >My argument boils down to the government keeping secrets first place is inherently amoral. That is an idealistic viewpoint that simply isn't possible in the real world. Yes, I believe the government should be more transparent about these things, but they can't be transparent about everything. How do you protect a country like the United States without any intelligence or military secrets?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

bunkydoo 10y ago

Well most people aren't even aware of all the other stuff Snowden took and is effectively selling to the highest bidder (now the Russians) over time for asylum. I appreciate his intent, but he went about it in the wrong way. He doesn't care about America, and that is abundantly clear. If he really cared about this country, he would have worked to improve this system and take the element of human nature out of ECHELON and PRISM program by working to develop the system to walk on its own without human operators that have sexuality, ideas, beliefs, religion, illnesses, and ultimately perceptions that influence the mission at large.

krapp 10y ago
>Well most people aren't even aware of all the other stuff Snowden took and is effectively selling to the highest bidder (now the Russians) over time for asylum. Neither are you - unless you're working for Russian intelligence and can actually prove anything, it's just conjecture.

darawk 10y ago

While I do think Snowden should be pardoned and I am completely on his side, I am sympathetic to the argument that what he did represents a very dangerous slippery slope - especially when the activities in question were not necessarily illegal. Whistleblowing on say, corruption at the EPA is clearly in the public interest. That is illegal and everyone can agree it is illegal and bad. But what the NSA was doing was, at least nominally, authorized by congress and the executive branch. You and I may think it is wrong for them to be doing it, but it wasn't necessarily against the law. What this means is that he was leaking classified information on the basis of his own personal moral judgments. If we accept that people should be able to whistleblow under such circumstances, how do we argue against people who take such actions who's morality does not comport with our own? To craft a somewhat awkward hypothetical, let's say the Obama administration negotiated better human rights for women in Iran as a side deal in lifting the trade sanctions against them, but this was kept secret until the deal was finalized because it wouldn't make it through if it was known by the more fundamentalist elements of the government. And then let's suppose someone in the administration 'whistleblew' on this and leaked it because they morally objected to women having such rights. How do you differentiate that from what Snowden did? Both individuals believe that what they did was in the public interest, we just happen to agree with Snowden and not the other guy. It seems to me that the only objective criteria for whistleblowing might have to be criminal behavior. If you can't prosecute someone for it, you can't whistleblow on it. Because if you don't make that the standard, then what is?

ScottBurson 10y ago
I don't know that there can be an objective criterion. Whistleblowers who succeed in getting public opinion on their side -- as I guess Daniel Ellsberg did, on balance, though there were certainly many who disagreed -- will get away with it. Those who don't, won't. I'm not sure it can be any other way. The government has to protect itself, and for the most part, that's a good thing. The only authority that can set limits on that self-protection, to keep it from going against the public interest, is the public itself. I too support pardoning Snowden. He risked his life and his future to bring us critically important information about the activities of our government, and he did so in as responsible a manner as I think he could have under the circumstances. This Guardian article certainly speaks to that point.

tosser00009 10y ago

I'm not. He released a lot of information that has nothing to do with domestic survaillence. He should be prosecuted for leaking details on legitimate foreign survaillence. That's the NSA's job and I'm sure he made that job more difficult.

twblalock 10y ago

True civil disobedience is predicated on being willing to accept the legal consequences. Otherwise, acts of disobedience are not civil, but constitute rejection of the concept of rule of law. Snowden thinks the law should not apply to him. He denies it, but he has demonstrated it by his actions, particularly by the fact that he ran away into the arms of a dictator.

MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
But if the entities you're disobeying regularly take extra-legal actions themselves, and the consequences of your actions are almost certain to result in extra-legal punishments (rendition, torture), what are you to do? He has to expand his "concept of the rule of law" to account for the ways the American security apparatus have expanded theirs. Perhaps the NSA bigwigs view their secret, self-authorized expansions of power as being aligned the "spirit of the law"; I'm sure Snowden felt the same about his actions. Also, he didn't plan to end up in Russia.
- twblalock 10y ago
  He has been a rather docile propaganda symbol for the Russian state ever since he got there. If he doesn't want to be there, he's got an odd way of showing it.
  - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
    And he's supposed to do what, antagonize the government of a country he can't leave which has no enforceable free speech protections and can deny his asylum and send him to prison? If the US didn't want him to be in Russia we could easily let him come home.
  - MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
    I don't know what exactly you're referring to, but now that he's there and an internationally known figure, I don't think he can realistically try to go elsewhere, nor would it be wise for him to make trouble with his hosts. I highly doubt he has any love for the Russian government, but he's an American and took the actions he did to have an impact on America. You keep implicitly saying "well if he's such an idealist to have blown the whistle in the first place, why doesn't he behave like a naive idealist in all regards - and if he's not behaving thus he must not be as pure of intentions as he claims" which is just ridiculous given the reality of the situation. He knows what the US security apparatus does to true naive idealists like Drake and Crane.

joe_the_user 10y ago

It seems unlikely a pardon is going to happen. But if we're in the realm of the hypothetical, what would be much better than a pardon is to have a serious whistleblower program than Snowden and others could count-on to avoid prosecution in the first place.