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Did the US just facilitate Snowden's asylum? They seem to be locked in eternal overreach.

• phyalow 13y ago
  Yeah tell that to Kim Dotcom. The US seemingly have no respect for sovereignty or foreign process.
  • vidarh 13y ago
    In both cases they seem to be overplaying their hand. Dotcom has a very real chance of getting off largely because the way it was handled have included such blatant disregard for the law. E.g. without the revelations of illegal spying, and the massive overkill of the way his arrest was handled, it might have been a lot easier to gentle "suggest" things to a judge and make the whole thing go away. Instead they've ensured that it's really hard for the judges involved to not treat this seriously. Same with Snowden - creating a diplomatic incident that now has pretty much every Latin American leader screaming bloody murder and have officials describing it as virtually a kidnapping, and complaining about colonialism, means European countries and others will quickly start seeing that there's a very high potential price to pay for bending to US demands in this, in a case where they likely have little sympathy to the US position in the first place given that pretty much all of them have faced revelations of US spying targeting them. If the US keeps pushing like that, they might just find that someone will snap and decide to tell them to go to hell. It'll be interesting to see if they manage the balancing act of pushing just hard enough to keep everyone in line without pushing anyone too far.
• omegant 13y ago
  They don't seem to be handling this very intelligently, more like a bully than anything else. It would be much easier to let Snowden get to a country in southamerica and then after some weeks press under the table to get him arrested. Now doing all this pressing all they get is Snowden in China or Russia's arms.
  • mattvot 13y ago
    If you assume the goal of all this is to deter future leaks, I'd say they are doing a pretty good job. Snowden has so much uncertainty and risk in the next few weeks that I bet borderline whistle-blowers are rethinking their plan. Arresting him quietly without the media gets them Snowden, but not the deterrent.
    • vidarh 13y ago
      On the other hand, if he gets out of their grasp, potential future whistleblowers will have a recipe for how to handle the situation and the knowledge that they can get away... It's a big gamble.
    • grey-area 13y ago
      Snowden saw how Manning, Binney, Drake and others were treated, and it didn't stop him.
      • GVIrish 13y ago
        If anything, seeing how those guys got treated is why Snowden fled the country. I can imagine that future whistleblowers are going to seek asylum first, then blow the whistle.
    • osivertsson 13y ago
      I think the opposite is true. Whistle-blowers may be releasing information because of strong ethical objections, not rational thoughts about their own well-being. I think watching this unfold with obvious lies from governments has actually strengthened the ethics in releasing this information, and may reinforce others with similar information that leaking really is the morally right thing to do.
      • omegant 13y ago
        Also the next guy maybe will leak anonimously, if that's possible with all that Prism systems. Maybe creating some downtime in the system while the leak is produced??