5 ms·

You've addressed the President's possible motivations. But, do you think Snowden should be pardoned? Just curious. (It's a tough call. I've not decided my o

You've addressed the President's possible motivations. But, do you think Snowden should be pardoned? Just curious. (It's a tough call. I've not decided my own position on the matter.)

HenryKissinger 6y ago
Snowden is charged with theft, unauthorized communication of national defense information, and willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person, under the 1917 Espionage Act. His unauthorized disclosures of classified information caused grave damage to the national security of the United States and allowed enemies of the United States to better conceal their communications and activities. I do not think Snowden deserves a pardon. Edward Snowden should be extradited to the United States to receive a trial and an appropriate sentence.
- liability 6y ago
  If you were the real Henry Kissinger, I think your disapproval would be a great reason to pardon Snowden.
- throwaway1777 6y ago
  Almost everyone thought mass surveillance was a conspiracy theory before Snowden. On the balance maybe he still deserves prison, but denying the positives of what Snowden did is disingenuous.
  - HenryKissinger 6y ago
    Leaking classified data without authorization was reckless and unlawful. There are already stringent safeguards in place to prevent abuse of the intelligence community's surveillance powers. Oversight of US surveillance programs is exercised by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The purpose of these congressional committees is to oversee and make continuing studies of the intelligence activities and programs of the United States Government, to submit to Congress appropriate proposals for legislation and report to Congress concerning such intelligence activities and programs, to provide vigilant legislative oversight over the intelligence activities of the United States to assure that such activities are in conformity with the Constitution and laws of the United States. In fact, there is no country in the world where surveillance activities are subject to more regulations and checks than the United States.
    - monocasa 6y ago
      And yet all those safeguards still led to a program that the courts declared unconstitutional, and only with Snowden's leaked documents. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/secret-court-rules-fbis-backdoor-searches-americans-violated-fourth-amendment https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/secret-court-rules-fbi...
    - bubersson 6y ago
      If you read deep into the reports and leaked details, there are couple folks in NSA that happily share private/accidental webcam nudes with each others as soon as they happen to find some. In that circle that's considered a win - a masturbating woman is for extra points. The "safeguards" you mention tolerate and shush that.
  - longtimegoogler 6y ago
    I don't think so. Wasn't it common knowledge that the Government had access to emails via ISPs and shredder well before Snowden's revelations? What was revealing, I guess was some of the technical details of how it was being done.
    - tomc1985 6y ago
      Not really. There were murmurs, talk of a secret room with fiberoptic splitters at an AT&T datacenter in San Francisco, lots of rumors but most of it was never confirmed
      - toomuchtodo 6y ago
        The existence of this facility (as well as others) was confirmed. https://www.wired.com/2013/06/nsa-whistleblower-klein/ https://www.wired.com/2013/06/nsa-whistleblower-klein/ (NSA Leak Vindicates AT&T Whistleblower) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A (Room 641A) > Room 641A is a telecommunication interception facility operated by AT&T for the U.S. National Security Agency, as part of its warrantless surveillance program as authorized by the Patriot Act. The facility commenced operations in 2003 and its purpose was publicly revealed in 2006.
        burfog 6y ago
        That's what they want you to think. :-) There's also point #4, "Some beautiful misdirection", in https://blog.thinkst.com/p/if-nsa-has-been-hacking-everything-how.html https://blog.thinkst.com/p/if-nsa-has-been-hacking-everythin... discussed 3 days ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24139828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24139828 Maybe they'd really prefer to take the public relations hit of everybody thinking that they spy on Americans.
    - bcrosby95 6y ago
      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.
  - enjeyw 6y ago
    I'm uncertain here, but my gut tells me that potential positive and negative effects of whistleblowing are so hard to predict and fully attribute (they tend to be at a global geopolitical scale where lots of other cofounding factors are involved), that we should judge whistleblowers on their underlying motivations instead. Was the whistleblower/leaker motivated purely by a desire to improve the welfare of their nation's citizens? If so, the person should be praised as a selfless patriot. If there were other motivations, like personal gain, they're potentially a traitor. Why I'm not certain about this: - What kind of other actions does this philosophy of "the motivation justifies the ends" lead to? Assassinating political leaders suddenly seems on the table... - What if the whistleblower is motivated by the welfare of the citizens of the world, rather than just of their own nation? I guess you can be a traitor to your country and a hero to humanity (see Nazi Germany etc etc)
    - cryptonector 6y ago
      Hard cases make bad law and all that. There's no easy way to construct a good general rule here.
      - enjeyw 6y ago
        Yeah very fair point, though (and?) ideally you'd want to be able to provide some heuristic for citizens to use to predict how their actions will be judged, to help them decide whether leaking is the right move or not.
    - stjohnswarts 6y ago
      Does it really matter? He revealed unconstitutional information to the press, all very forgiveable by the 1st amendment rights of every citizen. However, since the patriot act we live in only a semblence of a democracy, closer to that than an authoritarian government but unlimited surveillance is certainly on the list of things that is very very very good for when the government has started to get some momentum towards a dictatorship. the same despotic government our current administration seems to be trying to drag us kicking and screaming towards
    - staunch 6y ago
  - Lammy 6y ago
    To expand on this, it means conversations about surveillance get to actually happen instead of being instantly derailed with "well we don't know it's happening".
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    Almost everyone thought mass surveillance was a conspiracy theory before Snowden. The TSP was revealed in 2005, broader surveillance was broadly acknowledged publicly by the government in 2007, and a big, overt part of the FISA Amendments Act of 2009 was retroactive legalization of much of it. All of this well before Snowden.
  - dboreham 6y ago
    Seriously? I've never met anyone inside the business (tech/internet) who didn't believe governments were engaging in mass surveillance. This is going back to the 80s fwiw.
  - Taek 6y ago
    Easy to forget this. Before Snowden, any claims I made to my family and non tech friends of government surveillance were met with incredulousness and had me branded as a conspiracy theorist. Snowden vastly changed the conversation for everyday people. He's a hero.
- Causality1 6y ago
  The national security of the United States was placed in jeopardy by the people who violated the Constitution. The Snowden Revelations should have resulted in half a dozen people being put to death for treason.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  If this were youtube I could at least be certain that an account named "HenryKissinger" spouting authoritarian drivel was a novelty account. Here? I legitimately don't know.
  - gpm 6y ago
    In his profile > about: Not related to the real Henry Kissinger.
    - jjoonathan 6y ago
      It's pretty standard for novelty accounts to put disclaimers in their details, so I don't think that provides much information one way or another.
      - gpm 6y ago
        Oh, I interpreted the "not a novelty account" option to be "actually Henry Kissinger", which that disclaimer means it probably isn't.
        jjoonathan 6y ago
        Yeah, my post was underconstrained. I meant to consider possibilities 1 and 2: 1. Parody role-play of Henry Kissinger ("novelty") 2. Unironic tribute to Kissinger in the username 3. Actually Henry Kissinger
- atlgator 6y ago
  Name checks out.
runawaybottle 6y ago
Depends, how bad was Prism exactly?
- lern_too_spel 6y ago
  Not very. https://www.cnet.com/news/no-evidence-of-nsas-direct-access-to-tech-companies/ https://www.cnet.com/news/no-evidence-of-nsas-direct-access-...
  - monocasa 6y ago
    Uhh, six years after that article, the justice system found PRISM had been commonly used unconstitutionally. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/secret-court-rules-fbis-backdoor-searches-americans-violated-fourth-amendment https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/secret-court-rules-fbi... I'd say that's pretty bad.
    - lern_too_spel 6y ago
      My article says that PRISM isn't what Snowden claimed it to be. Your article also does not dispute it. The issue that your article discusses is searches about Americans conducted on data collected from non-Americans outside the US (via Section 702). This is not mass surveillance on Americans. Edit: We're having this conversation in two places. Consolidated in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24175476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24175476
      - monocasa 6y ago
        It is giving recorded information on most Americans to the FBI who then used it unconstitutionally against Americans. It was never the NSA who was going to arrest you; this is what mass surveillance on Americans looks like.
dx87 6y ago
I think it's debatable whether he should be pardoned for leaking the domestic spying information (I don't think so, he didn't try to bring it up through proper channels first), but he leaked information that had nothing to do with that. For example, he gave the Chinese government information about which computers the NSA had access to. My personal theory is that he just gathered as much information as he could get his hands on to give to China, then went back and looked through the data to try and retroactively justify what he did.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  >For example, he gave the Chinese government information about which computers the NSA had access to. When did he give them what information exactly? >don't think so, he didn't try to bring it up through proper channels first The two sides disagree whether he attempted this. Snowden say he spent tremendous effort trying to report things through the proper channels.
  - Cyph0n 6y ago
    Besides, the fact that the NSA was operating surveillance programs at that scale implies that the brass had some awareness of what was going on, so I am not sure what the "proper channels" would even look like for Snowden.
  - dx87 6y ago
    > When did he give them what information exactly? He gave them the information when he got to China. > The two sides disagree whether he attempted this. Snowden say he spent tremendous effort trying to report things through the proper channels. I think if he had, he'd have a single shred of evidence that he had actually tried. I find it hard to believe that he gathered a ton of information that had nothing to do with his supposed reason for leaking the information, but didn't save a single email he could have sent to the people he tried to report it to.
    - boomboomsubban 6y ago
      >He gave them the information when he got to China Do you have any evidence to support this claim? >I find it hard to believe that he gathered a ton of information that had nothing to do with his supposed reason for leaking the information, but didn't save a single email he could have sent to the people he tried to report it to. Any such email would be classified information, and he destroyed his copies of all that information before leaving Hong Kong
aoowii 6y ago
What the NSA is doing is wrong and edward should be pardoned, but he has said himself he is fine with a fair trial in court (fair is the key word here). So even if you are undecided on the pardoning you have to agree he should be given trial in the US unless for some weird reason you love the NSA that much.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  He can never get a fair trial in the current state of our government, he better just stay where he's at and hopefully Trump or a future government will pardon him and welcome him back like the hero he is.
vmception 6y ago
Yes, he should be pardoned. Just because toddlers can't distinguish the nuance between the following the law and discretionary breaking of it, it doesn't mean the rest of us with developed prefrontal cortex have to put up with spending taxpayer dollars on a trial just to show consistency. People are more concerned about other people showing us shady things intelligence community does, than what Edward Snowden did. When intelligence community shouldn't be doing things Congress doesn't know about, which it does.
- cryptonector 6y ago
  Thank you and the others for giving forthright answers!

You've addressed the President's possible motivations. But, do you think Snowden should be pardoned? Just curious. (It's a tough call. I've not decided my own position on the matter.)

HenryKissinger 6y ago

Snowden is charged with theft, unauthorized communication of national defense information, and willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person, under the 1917 Espionage Act. His unauthorized disclosures of classified information caused grave damage to the national security of the United States and allowed enemies of the United States to better conceal their communications and activities. I do not think Snowden deserves a pardon. Edward Snowden should be extradited to the United States to receive a trial and an appropriate sentence.

liability 6y ago
If you were the real Henry Kissinger, I think your disapproval would be a great reason to pardon Snowden.
throwaway1777 6y ago
Almost everyone thought mass surveillance was a conspiracy theory before Snowden. On the balance maybe he still deserves prison, but denying the positives of what Snowden did is disingenuous.
- HenryKissinger 6y ago
  Leaking classified data without authorization was reckless and unlawful. There are already stringent safeguards in place to prevent abuse of the intelligence community's surveillance powers. Oversight of US surveillance programs is exercised by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The purpose of these congressional committees is to oversee and make continuing studies of the intelligence activities and programs of the United States Government, to submit to Congress appropriate proposals for legislation and report to Congress concerning such intelligence activities and programs, to provide vigilant legislative oversight over the intelligence activities of the United States to assure that such activities are in conformity with the Constitution and laws of the United States. In fact, there is no country in the world where surveillance activities are subject to more regulations and checks than the United States.
  - monocasa 6y ago
    And yet all those safeguards still led to a program that the courts declared unconstitutional, and only with Snowden's leaked documents. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/secret-court-rules-fbis-backdoor-searches-americans-violated-fourth-amendment https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/secret-court-rules-fbi...
  - bubersson 6y ago
    If you read deep into the reports and leaked details, there are couple folks in NSA that happily share private/accidental webcam nudes with each others as soon as they happen to find some. In that circle that's considered a win - a masturbating woman is for extra points. The "safeguards" you mention tolerate and shush that.
- longtimegoogler 6y ago
  I don't think so. Wasn't it common knowledge that the Government had access to emails via ISPs and shredder well before Snowden's revelations? What was revealing, I guess was some of the technical details of how it was being done.
  - tomc1985 6y ago
    Not really. There were murmurs, talk of a secret room with fiberoptic splitters at an AT&T datacenter in San Francisco, lots of rumors but most of it was never confirmed
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      The existence of this facility (as well as others) was confirmed. https://www.wired.com/2013/06/nsa-whistleblower-klein/ https://www.wired.com/2013/06/nsa-whistleblower-klein/ (NSA Leak Vindicates AT&T Whistleblower) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A (Room 641A) > Room 641A is a telecommunication interception facility operated by AT&T for the U.S. National Security Agency, as part of its warrantless surveillance program as authorized by the Patriot Act. The facility commenced operations in 2003 and its purpose was publicly revealed in 2006.
      - burfog 6y ago
        That's what they want you to think. :-) There's also point #4, "Some beautiful misdirection", in https://blog.thinkst.com/p/if-nsa-has-been-hacking-everything-how.html https://blog.thinkst.com/p/if-nsa-has-been-hacking-everythin... discussed 3 days ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24139828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24139828 Maybe they'd really prefer to take the public relations hit of everybody thinking that they spy on Americans.
  - bcrosby95 6y ago
    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.
- enjeyw 6y ago
  I'm uncertain here, but my gut tells me that potential positive and negative effects of whistleblowing are so hard to predict and fully attribute (they tend to be at a global geopolitical scale where lots of other cofounding factors are involved), that we should judge whistleblowers on their underlying motivations instead. Was the whistleblower/leaker motivated purely by a desire to improve the welfare of their nation's citizens? If so, the person should be praised as a selfless patriot. If there were other motivations, like personal gain, they're potentially a traitor. Why I'm not certain about this: - What kind of other actions does this philosophy of "the motivation justifies the ends" lead to? Assassinating political leaders suddenly seems on the table... - What if the whistleblower is motivated by the welfare of the citizens of the world, rather than just of their own nation? I guess you can be a traitor to your country and a hero to humanity (see Nazi Germany etc etc)
  - cryptonector 6y ago
    Hard cases make bad law and all that. There's no easy way to construct a good general rule here.
    - enjeyw 6y ago
      Yeah very fair point, though (and?) ideally you'd want to be able to provide some heuristic for citizens to use to predict how their actions will be judged, to help them decide whether leaking is the right move or not.
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    Does it really matter? He revealed unconstitutional information to the press, all very forgiveable by the 1st amendment rights of every citizen. However, since the patriot act we live in only a semblence of a democracy, closer to that than an authoritarian government but unlimited surveillance is certainly on the list of things that is very very very good for when the government has started to get some momentum towards a dictatorship. the same despotic government our current administration seems to be trying to drag us kicking and screaming towards
  - staunch 6y ago
- Lammy 6y ago
  To expand on this, it means conversations about surveillance get to actually happen instead of being instantly derailed with "well we don't know it's happening".
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  Almost everyone thought mass surveillance was a conspiracy theory before Snowden. The TSP was revealed in 2005, broader surveillance was broadly acknowledged publicly by the government in 2007, and a big, overt part of the FISA Amendments Act of 2009 was retroactive legalization of much of it. All of this well before Snowden.
- dboreham 6y ago
  Seriously? I've never met anyone inside the business (tech/internet) who didn't believe governments were engaging in mass surveillance. This is going back to the 80s fwiw.
- Taek 6y ago
  Easy to forget this. Before Snowden, any claims I made to my family and non tech friends of government surveillance were met with incredulousness and had me branded as a conspiracy theorist. Snowden vastly changed the conversation for everyday people. He's a hero.
Causality1 6y ago
The national security of the United States was placed in jeopardy by the people who violated the Constitution. The Snowden Revelations should have resulted in half a dozen people being put to death for treason.
jjoonathan 6y ago
If this were youtube I could at least be certain that an account named "HenryKissinger" spouting authoritarian drivel was a novelty account. Here? I legitimately don't know.
- gpm 6y ago
  In his profile > about: Not related to the real Henry Kissinger.
  - jjoonathan 6y ago
    It's pretty standard for novelty accounts to put disclaimers in their details, so I don't think that provides much information one way or another.
    - gpm 6y ago
      Oh, I interpreted the "not a novelty account" option to be "actually Henry Kissinger", which that disclaimer means it probably isn't.
      - jjoonathan 6y ago
        Yeah, my post was underconstrained. I meant to consider possibilities 1 and 2: 1. Parody role-play of Henry Kissinger ("novelty") 2. Unironic tribute to Kissinger in the username 3. Actually Henry Kissinger
atlgator 6y ago
Name checks out.

runawaybottle 6y ago

Depends, how bad was Prism exactly?

lern_too_spel 6y ago
Not very. https://www.cnet.com/news/no-evidence-of-nsas-direct-access-to-tech-companies/ https://www.cnet.com/news/no-evidence-of-nsas-direct-access-...
- monocasa 6y ago
  Uhh, six years after that article, the justice system found PRISM had been commonly used unconstitutionally. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/secret-court-rules-fbis-backdoor-searches-americans-violated-fourth-amendment https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/secret-court-rules-fbi... I'd say that's pretty bad.
  - lern_too_spel 6y ago
    My article says that PRISM isn't what Snowden claimed it to be. Your article also does not dispute it. The issue that your article discusses is searches about Americans conducted on data collected from non-Americans outside the US (via Section 702). This is not mass surveillance on Americans. Edit: We're having this conversation in two places. Consolidated in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24175476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24175476
    - monocasa 6y ago
      It is giving recorded information on most Americans to the FBI who then used it unconstitutionally against Americans. It was never the NSA who was going to arrest you; this is what mass surveillance on Americans looks like.

dx87 6y ago

I think it's debatable whether he should be pardoned for leaking the domestic spying information (I don't think so, he didn't try to bring it up through proper channels first), but he leaked information that had nothing to do with that. For example, he gave the Chinese government information about which computers the NSA had access to. My personal theory is that he just gathered as much information as he could get his hands on to give to China, then went back and looked through the data to try and retroactively justify what he did.

boomboomsubban 6y ago
>For example, he gave the Chinese government information about which computers the NSA had access to. When did he give them what information exactly? >don't think so, he didn't try to bring it up through proper channels first The two sides disagree whether he attempted this. Snowden say he spent tremendous effort trying to report things through the proper channels.
- Cyph0n 6y ago
  Besides, the fact that the NSA was operating surveillance programs at that scale implies that the brass had some awareness of what was going on, so I am not sure what the "proper channels" would even look like for Snowden.
- dx87 6y ago
  > When did he give them what information exactly? He gave them the information when he got to China. > The two sides disagree whether he attempted this. Snowden say he spent tremendous effort trying to report things through the proper channels. I think if he had, he'd have a single shred of evidence that he had actually tried. I find it hard to believe that he gathered a ton of information that had nothing to do with his supposed reason for leaking the information, but didn't save a single email he could have sent to the people he tried to report it to.
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    >He gave them the information when he got to China Do you have any evidence to support this claim? >I find it hard to believe that he gathered a ton of information that had nothing to do with his supposed reason for leaking the information, but didn't save a single email he could have sent to the people he tried to report it to. Any such email would be classified information, and he destroyed his copies of all that information before leaving Hong Kong

aoowii 6y ago

What the NSA is doing is wrong and edward should be pardoned, but he has said himself he is fine with a fair trial in court (fair is the key word here). So even if you are undecided on the pardoning you have to agree he should be given trial in the US unless for some weird reason you love the NSA that much.

stjohnswarts 6y ago
He can never get a fair trial in the current state of our government, he better just stay where he's at and hopefully Trump or a future government will pardon him and welcome him back like the hero he is.

vmception 6y ago

Yes, he should be pardoned. Just because toddlers can't distinguish the nuance between the following the law and discretionary breaking of it, it doesn't mean the rest of us with developed prefrontal cortex have to put up with spending taxpayer dollars on a trial just to show consistency. People are more concerned about other people showing us shady things intelligence community does, than what Edward Snowden did. When intelligence community shouldn't be doing things Congress doesn't know about, which it does.

cryptonector 6y ago
Thank you and the others for giving forthright answers!