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.
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.
I can't comment on the parent, but here are some disclosures of international capability that Snowden could have kept to himself:
- RAMPART-A
- Anything collected and shared by Five Eyes would have originated overseas. There's quite a bit of GCHQ material, such as Karma Police
- NSA ability to cross airgaps in China
- NSA Core (undercover human agents tapping China, South Korea and Germany) and TAREX (target exploitation running that out of embassies)
- NSA MonsterMind
All of these are only deployed overseas and there are many more such documents. Some have unredacted names of regular people who run these programs, and pieces of info that're miscellany to you and me, but gold to state intelligence services. Both Wikipedia and Lawfare distinguish between Snowden's disclosures of perhaps-unconstitutional domestic surveillance and probably-consitutional international surveillance:
First, Snowden did not have much of a chance to selectively leak documents. He gave basically everything he had to journalists and they've sorted it out.
Second, while many of those actions may be constitutional, citizens should know what their government is capable of and deploying against people. And arguing whether a certain program was constitutional seems pointless when they never get punished.
He never gave any information to any foreign government, what he has let go was directly released to American and European magazines/newspapers. Anything else is conspiracy theory garbage.
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.
>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
