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Snowden did the right thing. He should be pardoned for that.

tptacek 11y ago
Why are you so sure of this? Aren't you essentially saying "no matter what else comes of the Snowden leaks, enough good has been done that Snowden can't possibly be culpable"?
- anonbanker 11y ago
  Aren't you essentially saying "no amount of good done by an action can outweigh a wrong caused?"
  - tptacek 11y ago
    No, that's not an equivalent statement. Mine hinges on the fact that we don't know everything that's been disclosed yet. Mine incorporates the current unlimited downside of the leaks.
    - hobs 11y ago
      If you want to be so precise, then lets go ahead and admit that the information to be disclosed cannot have an unlimited downside (what does that even mean, if we blow up the entire world have we reached unlimited downside?)
    - ellyagg 11y ago
      Considering that Snowden massively raised awareness of how much closer to 1984 we are than many people thought, and considering that 1984 is considered to exemplify a horrific dystopia, it's hard to imagine a realistic downside to a Snowden disclosure that would evict him from my head as a hero. Wanna scoff at a 1984 reference? Fine, Snowden demonstrated that the government's power and reach is much greater--much much greater--than most people imagined. Of course, if the downside risk is unlimited, if it's actually infinite, then literally no good Snowden has done could overcome it. Seems like a bit of a gotcha to me.
      - icanhackit 11y ago
        Also consider that the bad guys (insert: terrorism, Russia etc) probably had some functional understanding of what the spying capabilities were, and those doing the spying probably knew they knew. So what's left is the public being the only party who didn't know, was least prepared and least deserved it. It leaves you wondering. Now here we are, and I think that while it's nice that we're trying to fight these invasive practices in courts and through policy, security by design is what's needed most. The invasive practices were either completely unlawful or stretched the definition of what is lawful anyway, so the policy side of things should focus on protecting the legality of encryption, not making it illegal to spy. Everyone needs to understand that everyone is spying on everyone, and every time a system is implemented to protect someone from spying, the spy will test the topology of that system and find a new way in. So begins a Cold War in the protection of privacy - unending, but honest at least.
    - deciplex 11y ago
      Unless the US government is hiding an unfriendly boxed AI and the Snowden disclosures have introduced a risk that this AI may unbox itself - no the downside can not be anywhere near unlimited. How about we look at what we already know of the disclosures along with reasonable guesses of what remains, along with the probability that the remaining disclosures will ever become public knowledge, and judge him based on that.
    - mindcrime 11y ago
      Meh... every action has "unlimited potential downside" if you engage in enough hypotheticals. We can speculate a scenario where the leaking of the Pentagon Papers results in a worldwide pandemic of a superbug 200000x more contagious and deadly than Ebola. I mean, nobody can prove that that couldn't be a possible outcome. But by the same token, there's little or no reason to believe that such a thing is likely, just like there's little or no reason to expect any sort of dramatic consequence from Snowden's leaks. I mean, really, why would we expect the papers who have the leaked data to suddenly throw caution to the wind and publish anything any more damaging than what they already have? As far as that goes, if they had anything more revealing and were going to publish it, why wouldn't they have done it earlier?
      - logfromblammo 11y ago
        As a sidebar on epidemiology, a superbug 200000x more contagious and deadly than Ebola would result in a circle around the initial infection wherein everyone inside is dead, and everyone outside avoids entering it. It would be much worse to have a less deadly and more contagious pathogen. Airborne transmission, plus long linger times for surface transmission, plus long incubation periods, plus low survivability, times zero treatment options, times international airports, equals annihilated species. This might connect with government secrets somehow if there were a secret project to develop a weaponized virus, and a vaccine for it, then to sneak the vaccine into a multivalent vaccine commonly given to the domestic population, but not to foreigners. The revelation might startle another bio-capable nation into pre-emptively releasing their supervirus, relying on quarantines to save a portion of their population from the American weapon. There are practical limits on the downside. The worst we could probably do at our current tech level is kill everything on the Earth's surface except for the extremophiles like D. radiodurans, and even that would assume that a lot of people have been telling a lot of lies about existing stockpiles of cobalt-salted nuclear weapons or other types of salted nukes.
        mindcrime 11y ago
        That's actually pretty interesting. I just threw something hyperbolistic out there to make a point, but I remember reading some stuff about Ebola a while back, where they were making some of these same points. Interestingly enough, the main "thing" that ever got me intrigued by the idea of a "deadly superbug" was reading The Stand by Stephen King.
    - fineman 11y ago
      That's pretty lopsided. The leaks have the potential to save the country. Also, we're talking about blame for actions committed. I feel no remorse for the criminal, anticipating that every new leak will be the one that tightens the noose. That's their fault for the crimes they committed, not the person who turned them in. If we were talking about a poor kid who robbed a liquor store people would be saying "Can't do the time, don't do the crime."
- supercanuck 11y ago
  Your question is trying to bottle me into defining Snowden's behavior by the outcomes. I'm saying he should be defined by the morality of his decision when he made it. Even if it resulted in something detrimental or even catastrophic, I still think that Snowden made the moral choice because those programs don't belong in a free society.
  - mpyne 11y ago
    > Your question is trying to bottle me into defining Snowden's behavior by the outcomes. Why else is behavior even a concern, except for its outcomes? When people oppose surveillance, it's because they fear the possible outcome(s) of surveillance. Likewise, then, for Snowden. It shouldn't have taken John Oliver to have to point out to Snowden (while interviewing Snowden literally opposite from the Russian intelligence headquarters) that he has to accept responsibility for his actions, good and bad, but apparently that's the world we live in now.
    - lawnchair_larry 11y ago
      A straw man and a red herring, well played. You're seriously going to play the Russian spy card? Surely you can do better that that one.
      - mpyne 11y ago
        Everything save the FSB HQ-sponsored interview was dead serious... and the snark on said FSB shout-out was why it was parenthetical. You can't simply argue that 1 good thing outweighs an arbitrary number of bad things from your decision. Otherwise the NSA would be able to use that logic to argue for an actual policy of no limit to surveillance: "Hey, we disrupted that one plot from our decision to engage in illegal spying, so that makes it OK to scale up surveillance as much as we want, right?" Has anyone even figured out what Snowden did with all the stuff he leaked from NSA while at Booz-Allen (i.e. the rest of stuff with the IP addresses of Chinese servers NSA was attacking, that he leaked to Chinese media)? The stuff he leaked to Greenwald was from when he worked at Dell, not Booz-Allen. Greenwald and the other journalists claim they never got the documentation that Snowden obtained while he was at Booz-Allen, Snowden claims he took nothing with him to Russia... so where is it? Where did it go? Did he destroy it all in Hong Kong? If so why did he claim he needed to jump over to Booz-Allen to get to the "Tier 3" information in the first place, if he was never going to leak that data to anyone? Where was he in the 11+ days between when he left Hawai'i and when he apppeared in Hong Kong? He may not be a Russian spy but even now he has left as many questions as he's answered...
- Aloha 11y ago
  Snowden is a hero, but a hero that committed a crime, he should pay a punishment. The question to me is not if there should be a penalty, its what form should the penalty take (I feel much the same about Chelsea Manning) I think some misdemeanor (misuse of government documents or somesuch) and a nominal fine would be a suitable punishment, I am merely one citizen of millions however. The issue that I have right now, is our existing laws for the kind of crime to me are blatantly unjust, and used so selectively as to create the impression of selective persecution of unwanted and unpopular views.
  - pdkl95 11y ago
    This is the Just-World Fallacy, as you presume there is some sort of reliable map between things being a crime and things being morally wrong. This is clearly not true, as laws change all the time. Furthermore, there is the concept of extenuating circumstances. Killing people is usually a crime, but we generally accept self defense as a legitimate justification that requires no punishment. Regarding Snowden, in a country where oaths are taken to defend the Constitution - and not the country itself - informing the people that important parts of the Constitution are under attack or being ignored is an incredibly strong and obvious example of extenuating circumstances. Anybody that has a problem with that really needs to focus their attention on the people that made such an extreme defense of the Constitution necessary. Yes, we need to update a lot of laws. Hopefully, we can accomplish those changes soon, before someone else is forced to make the choice between following the law and protecting the Constitution like Snowden.
    - Aloha 11y ago
      I'm of a mixed mind about it. I believe some of what was released, was potentially very harmful (more so in the case of Ms. Manning) to our interests abroad, and was collected via legal means (aka, not domestic spying), but I also believe that the whistle blowing aspect largely ameliorates whatever damage was done. Thats why I think there should be some criminal prosecution, is warranted, but not for what is being currently pressed or called for. I try not to pass judgement on weather spying on our allies is morally wrong, I can't say what I'd do if I were president, however I'd always assumed that everyone spies pretty evenly on everyone else, same with the telephone meta data tracking, while I was appalled at the depth and retention time of program, I wasn't really surprised it was going on, as the government has long had easy access to call detail records, this is only an extension of that. That said, I don't think its right to spy on American Citizens, at home or abroad, spying on there, meh, YMMV, I don't think the government should be doing things in private it wouldn't want to come out later.
- click170 11y ago
  I'm not arguing with the idea that we don't yet know all of the downsides from the leaks, I have to concede that point. However, I would argue that the probability of his leaks causing more substantial damage to the US than the very organization perpetrating the act is vanishingly small. There are different ways of measuring damage, but I'm not talking about destroyed vehicles or dead bodies.
  - DonHopkins 11y ago
    Damage is not necessarily a bad thing. A doctor damages your tumor when they remove it.
- fineman 11y ago
  No, we're saying that leaking a major conspiracy is never the leaker's fault. He wasn't the one who broke the laws, he was the one compelled by law to report it. All problems coming from the inconvenient revealing of the NSA's programs are firmly the NSA's fault. (The way accidental deaths during a crime are felony murder...) Do you blame rape victims too? And I ask in all seriousness. Because he's being called a traitor and being forced to flee to Russia because he told us our employees are lying to us.

Why are you so sure of this? Aren't you essentially saying "no matter what else comes of the Snowden leaks, enough good has been done that Snowden can't possibly be culpable"?

anonbanker 11y ago
Aren't you essentially saying "no amount of good done by an action can outweigh a wrong caused?"
- tptacek 11y ago
  No, that's not an equivalent statement. Mine hinges on the fact that we don't know everything that's been disclosed yet. Mine incorporates the current unlimited downside of the leaks.
  - hobs 11y ago
    If you want to be so precise, then lets go ahead and admit that the information to be disclosed cannot have an unlimited downside (what does that even mean, if we blow up the entire world have we reached unlimited downside?)
  - ellyagg 11y ago
    Considering that Snowden massively raised awareness of how much closer to 1984 we are than many people thought, and considering that 1984 is considered to exemplify a horrific dystopia, it's hard to imagine a realistic downside to a Snowden disclosure that would evict him from my head as a hero. Wanna scoff at a 1984 reference? Fine, Snowden demonstrated that the government's power and reach is much greater--much much greater--than most people imagined. Of course, if the downside risk is unlimited, if it's actually infinite, then literally no good Snowden has done could overcome it. Seems like a bit of a gotcha to me.
    - icanhackit 11y ago
      Also consider that the bad guys (insert: terrorism, Russia etc) probably had some functional understanding of what the spying capabilities were, and those doing the spying probably knew they knew. So what's left is the public being the only party who didn't know, was least prepared and least deserved it. It leaves you wondering. Now here we are, and I think that while it's nice that we're trying to fight these invasive practices in courts and through policy, security by design is what's needed most. The invasive practices were either completely unlawful or stretched the definition of what is lawful anyway, so the policy side of things should focus on protecting the legality of encryption, not making it illegal to spy. Everyone needs to understand that everyone is spying on everyone, and every time a system is implemented to protect someone from spying, the spy will test the topology of that system and find a new way in. So begins a Cold War in the protection of privacy - unending, but honest at least.
  - deciplex 11y ago
    Unless the US government is hiding an unfriendly boxed AI and the Snowden disclosures have introduced a risk that this AI may unbox itself - no the downside can not be anywhere near unlimited. How about we look at what we already know of the disclosures along with reasonable guesses of what remains, along with the probability that the remaining disclosures will ever become public knowledge, and judge him based on that.
  - mindcrime 11y ago
    Meh... every action has "unlimited potential downside" if you engage in enough hypotheticals. We can speculate a scenario where the leaking of the Pentagon Papers results in a worldwide pandemic of a superbug 200000x more contagious and deadly than Ebola. I mean, nobody can prove that that couldn't be a possible outcome. But by the same token, there's little or no reason to believe that such a thing is likely, just like there's little or no reason to expect any sort of dramatic consequence from Snowden's leaks. I mean, really, why would we expect the papers who have the leaked data to suddenly throw caution to the wind and publish anything any more damaging than what they already have? As far as that goes, if they had anything more revealing and were going to publish it, why wouldn't they have done it earlier?
    - logfromblammo 11y ago
      As a sidebar on epidemiology, a superbug 200000x more contagious and deadly than Ebola would result in a circle around the initial infection wherein everyone inside is dead, and everyone outside avoids entering it. It would be much worse to have a less deadly and more contagious pathogen. Airborne transmission, plus long linger times for surface transmission, plus long incubation periods, plus low survivability, times zero treatment options, times international airports, equals annihilated species. This might connect with government secrets somehow if there were a secret project to develop a weaponized virus, and a vaccine for it, then to sneak the vaccine into a multivalent vaccine commonly given to the domestic population, but not to foreigners. The revelation might startle another bio-capable nation into pre-emptively releasing their supervirus, relying on quarantines to save a portion of their population from the American weapon. There are practical limits on the downside. The worst we could probably do at our current tech level is kill everything on the Earth's surface except for the extremophiles like D. radiodurans, and even that would assume that a lot of people have been telling a lot of lies about existing stockpiles of cobalt-salted nuclear weapons or other types of salted nukes.
      - mindcrime 11y ago
        That's actually pretty interesting. I just threw something hyperbolistic out there to make a point, but I remember reading some stuff about Ebola a while back, where they were making some of these same points. Interestingly enough, the main "thing" that ever got me intrigued by the idea of a "deadly superbug" was reading The Stand by Stephen King.
  - fineman 11y ago
    That's pretty lopsided. The leaks have the potential to save the country. Also, we're talking about blame for actions committed. I feel no remorse for the criminal, anticipating that every new leak will be the one that tightens the noose. That's their fault for the crimes they committed, not the person who turned them in. If we were talking about a poor kid who robbed a liquor store people would be saying "Can't do the time, don't do the crime."
supercanuck 11y ago
Your question is trying to bottle me into defining Snowden's behavior by the outcomes. I'm saying he should be defined by the morality of his decision when he made it. Even if it resulted in something detrimental or even catastrophic, I still think that Snowden made the moral choice because those programs don't belong in a free society.
- mpyne 11y ago
  > Your question is trying to bottle me into defining Snowden's behavior by the outcomes. Why else is behavior even a concern, except for its outcomes? When people oppose surveillance, it's because they fear the possible outcome(s) of surveillance. Likewise, then, for Snowden. It shouldn't have taken John Oliver to have to point out to Snowden (while interviewing Snowden literally opposite from the Russian intelligence headquarters) that he has to accept responsibility for his actions, good and bad, but apparently that's the world we live in now.
  - lawnchair_larry 11y ago
    A straw man and a red herring, well played. You're seriously going to play the Russian spy card? Surely you can do better that that one.
    - mpyne 11y ago
      Everything save the FSB HQ-sponsored interview was dead serious... and the snark on said FSB shout-out was why it was parenthetical. You can't simply argue that 1 good thing outweighs an arbitrary number of bad things from your decision. Otherwise the NSA would be able to use that logic to argue for an actual policy of no limit to surveillance: "Hey, we disrupted that one plot from our decision to engage in illegal spying, so that makes it OK to scale up surveillance as much as we want, right?" Has anyone even figured out what Snowden did with all the stuff he leaked from NSA while at Booz-Allen (i.e. the rest of stuff with the IP addresses of Chinese servers NSA was attacking, that he leaked to Chinese media)? The stuff he leaked to Greenwald was from when he worked at Dell, not Booz-Allen. Greenwald and the other journalists claim they never got the documentation that Snowden obtained while he was at Booz-Allen, Snowden claims he took nothing with him to Russia... so where is it? Where did it go? Did he destroy it all in Hong Kong? If so why did he claim he needed to jump over to Booz-Allen to get to the "Tier 3" information in the first place, if he was never going to leak that data to anyone? Where was he in the 11+ days between when he left Hawai'i and when he apppeared in Hong Kong? He may not be a Russian spy but even now he has left as many questions as he's answered...
Aloha 11y ago
Snowden is a hero, but a hero that committed a crime, he should pay a punishment. The question to me is not if there should be a penalty, its what form should the penalty take (I feel much the same about Chelsea Manning) I think some misdemeanor (misuse of government documents or somesuch) and a nominal fine would be a suitable punishment, I am merely one citizen of millions however. The issue that I have right now, is our existing laws for the kind of crime to me are blatantly unjust, and used so selectively as to create the impression of selective persecution of unwanted and unpopular views.
- pdkl95 11y ago
  This is the Just-World Fallacy, as you presume there is some sort of reliable map between things being a crime and things being morally wrong. This is clearly not true, as laws change all the time. Furthermore, there is the concept of extenuating circumstances. Killing people is usually a crime, but we generally accept self defense as a legitimate justification that requires no punishment. Regarding Snowden, in a country where oaths are taken to defend the Constitution - and not the country itself - informing the people that important parts of the Constitution are under attack or being ignored is an incredibly strong and obvious example of extenuating circumstances. Anybody that has a problem with that really needs to focus their attention on the people that made such an extreme defense of the Constitution necessary. Yes, we need to update a lot of laws. Hopefully, we can accomplish those changes soon, before someone else is forced to make the choice between following the law and protecting the Constitution like Snowden.
  - Aloha 11y ago
    I'm of a mixed mind about it. I believe some of what was released, was potentially very harmful (more so in the case of Ms. Manning) to our interests abroad, and was collected via legal means (aka, not domestic spying), but I also believe that the whistle blowing aspect largely ameliorates whatever damage was done. Thats why I think there should be some criminal prosecution, is warranted, but not for what is being currently pressed or called for. I try not to pass judgement on weather spying on our allies is morally wrong, I can't say what I'd do if I were president, however I'd always assumed that everyone spies pretty evenly on everyone else, same with the telephone meta data tracking, while I was appalled at the depth and retention time of program, I wasn't really surprised it was going on, as the government has long had easy access to call detail records, this is only an extension of that. That said, I don't think its right to spy on American Citizens, at home or abroad, spying on there, meh, YMMV, I don't think the government should be doing things in private it wouldn't want to come out later.
click170 11y ago
I'm not arguing with the idea that we don't yet know all of the downsides from the leaks, I have to concede that point. However, I would argue that the probability of his leaks causing more substantial damage to the US than the very organization perpetrating the act is vanishingly small. There are different ways of measuring damage, but I'm not talking about destroyed vehicles or dead bodies.
- DonHopkins 11y ago
  Damage is not necessarily a bad thing. A doctor damages your tumor when they remove it.
fineman 11y ago
No, we're saying that leaking a major conspiracy is never the leaker's fault. He wasn't the one who broke the laws, he was the one compelled by law to report it. All problems coming from the inconvenient revealing of the NSA's programs are firmly the NSA's fault. (The way accidental deaths during a crime are felony murder...) Do you blame rape victims too? And I ask in all seriousness. Because he's being called a traitor and being forced to flee to Russia because he told us our employees are lying to us.