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Snowden is charged with theft, unauthorized communication of national defense information, and willful communication of classified communications intelligence i

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.

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.