First off, the fact that Mr Snowdon is
alive and presently safe informs us that he made a successful extraction from
his decision to provide the American people with full disclosure of the ongoing
activities of the NSA and the serious weaknesses in general oversight and the
open door to extreme abuse of personal liberties let alone privacy. It is hard to discern a course of action that
provided him this outcome at all.
Secondly, Mr Snowdon performed an act of
extreme patriotism by remembering his loyalty to his fellow citizens and yes
the constitution. This is particularly
true as he has made little visible effort to capitalize. Of course in the long term there are book
contracts at least. Yet giving up $200k
per year is no joke. Eventually the
money runs out and his enemies will run around screaming that he is broke and
by association broken.
So we really must take this at face value
and who today is willing to day that he was wrong? Nuremberg taught us that blind loyalty and
following orders is no excuse at all. Extricating yourself from an enterprise that
if not criminal but trending toward criminality is naturally difficult and by
an order of magnitude from a government organization that can and will destroy
people’s lives.
The truth is that they have to settle with
Mr. Snowdon. He stole everything and
likely does not know everything that he has.
They need to close the rest of this down and make peace. They are now getting the needed oversight and
he simply won for which we are grateful.
Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower
Published:
January 1, 2014
Seven
months ago, the world began to learn the vast scope of the National Security
Agency’s reach into the lives of hundreds of millions of people in
the United States and around the globe, as it collects information about their
phone calls, their email messages, their friends and contacts, how they spend
their days and where they spend their nights. The public learned in great
detail how the agency has exceeded its mandate and abused its authority, prompting
outrage at kitchen tables and at the desks of Congress, which may finally begin
to limit these practices.
The revelations have already prompted two
federal judges to accuse the N.S.A. of violating the Constitution (although a
third, unfortunately, found
the dragnet surveillance to be legal). A panel appointed by
President Obama issued
a powerful indictment of the agency’s invasions of privacy and
called for a major overhaul of its operations.
All of this is entirely because of information
provided to journalists by Edward Snowden, the former N.S.A.
contractor who stole a trove of highly classified documents after he became
disillusioned with the agency’s voraciousness. Mr. Snowden is now living in
Russia, on the run from American charges of espionage and theft, and he faces
the prospect of spending the rest of his life looking over his shoulder.
Considering the enormous value of the
information he has revealed, and the abuses he has exposed, Mr. Snowden
deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and flight. He may have
committed a crime to do so, but he has
done his country a great service. It is time for the United States to offer
Mr. Snowden a plea bargain or some form of clemency that would allow him to
return home, face at least substantially reduced punishment in light of his
role as a whistle-blower, and have the hope of a life advocating for greater
privacy and far stronger oversight of the runaway intelligence community.
[ I hope that his final
service is to make it clear that the country will ultimately protect a man who
must make his decision. Recall just how
highly placed he was and howcell he understood the issues. This was no cipher clerk. Arclein
]
Mr. Snowden is currently charged in
a criminal complaint with two violations of
the Espionage Act involving unauthorized communication of classified
information, and a charge of theft of government property. Those three
charges carry
prison sentences of 10 years each, and when the case is
presented to a grand jury for indictment, the government is virtually certain
to add more charges, probably adding up to a life sentence that Mr. Snowden is
understandably trying to avoid.
The
president said in August that Mr. Snowden should come home to face
those charges in court and suggested that if Mr. Snowden had wanted to avoid
criminal charges he could have simply told his superiors about the abuses,
acting, in other words, as a whistle-blower.
“If the concern was that somehow this was the
only way to get this information out to the public, I signed an executive order
well before Mr. Snowden leaked this information that provided whistle-blower
protection to the intelligence community for the first time,” Mr. Obama said at
a news conference. “So there were other avenues available for somebody whose
conscience was stirred and thought that they needed to question government
actions.”
In fact, that executive order did
not apply to contractors, only to intelligence employees, rendering its
protections useless to Mr. Snowden. More important, Mr.
Snowden told The Washington Post earlier this month that
he did report his misgivings to two superiors at the agency, showing them the
volume of data collected by the N.S.A., and that they took no action. (The
N.S.A. says there is no evidence of this.) That’s almost certainly because the
agency and its leaders don’t consider these collection programs to be an abuse
and would never have acted on Mr. Snowden’s concerns.
In retrospect, Mr. Snowden was clearly justified
in believing that the only way to blow the whistle on this kind of
intelligence-gathering was to expose it to the public and let the resulting
furor do the work his superiors would not. Beyond the mass collection of phone
and Internet data, consider just a few of the violations he revealed or the
legal actions he provoked:
■ The N.S.A. broke federal privacy laws, or
exceeded its authority, thousands
of times per year, according to the agency’s own internal
auditor.
■ The agency broke
into the communications links of major data centers around the world,
allowing it to spy on hundreds of millions of user accounts and infuriating
the Internet companies that own the centers. Many of those companies are
now scrambling to install systems that the N.S.A. cannot yet penetrate.
■ The N.S.A. systematically undermined
the basic encryption systems of the Internet, making it impossible
to know if sensitive banking or medical data is truly private, damaging
businesses that depended on this trust.
■ His leaks revealed that James Clapper Jr.,
the director of national intelligence, lied
to Congress when testifying in March that the N.S.A. was not
collecting data on millions of Americans. (There has been no discussion of
punishment for that lie.)
■ The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court rebuked
the N.S.A. for repeatedly providing misleading
information about its surveillance practices, according to a ruling made public
because of the Snowden documents. One of
the practices violated the Constitution, according to the chief judge of
the court.
■ A federal district judge ruled
earlier this month that the phone-records-collection program
probably violates the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. He called
the program “almost Orwellian” and said there was no evidence that it stopped any imminent act of terror.
[ it was done boys and
girls just because we could – arclein ]
The shrill brigade of his critics say Mr.
Snowden has done profound damage to intelligence operations of the United
States, but none has presented the slightest proof that his disclosures really
hurt the nation’s security. Many of the mass-collection programs Mr. Snowden
exposed would work just as well if they were reduced in scope and brought under
strict outside oversight, as the presidential panel recommended.
When someone reveals
that government officials have routinely and deliberately broken the law, that
person should not face life in prison at the hands of the same government.
That’s why Rick Ledgett, who leads the N.S.A.’s task force on the Snowden
leaks, recently
told CBS News that he would consider amnesty if Mr.
Snowden would stop any additional leaks. And it’s why President Obama should
tell his aides to begin finding a way to end Mr. Snowden’s vilification and
give him an incentive to return home.
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