Now it would be the right time to ask for a presidential pardon for Edward Snowden. Now that candidates are gearing up their campaign platforms, it would be a great vote winner both on the left and on the (libertarian) right. If you live in a "defining primary" state, please go and ask the candidates as soon as they show up.
Why would it be a good time to ask for a pardon? The only thing the current administration loves more than jailing whistleblowers is drone-striking civilians. Why ask when the answer is obviously going to be 'Fuck No?'
Or even when the answer is going to be yes? Snowden shouldn't need a pardon for what he's done. Any federal prosecutor that would even consider laying charges should be removed from office immediately.
But in reality that's not the prosecutors call to make. In the US laws are challenged in the court system, or overturned by lawmakers. I would say that the current government in the US is not going to be open to changing these things so that requires charges to be brought and a trial to be convened and then let the process move from there.
A presidential pardon solves Snowdens issue, but does not change the law.
It is very much the prosecutor's call to make. Prosecutors aren't (at least in theory) supposed to charge the accused with as many crimes as possible. It is the job of the prosecutor to ensure that justice is served, whatever that might mean given the facts before them. Sometimes that might mean throwing the book at the accused, but in other cases it might mean dropping the case even when it is clear that the accused really did break the law. Unfortunately prosecutors are rewarded for successful convictions, so it is not surprising that prosecutors act as though their job is to charge the accused with as many crimes as possible.
I'd put it a little differently: it's the job of the prosecutor to ensure that public order is upheld. Americans tend to get distracted by the ambiguous notion of "justice" and what is or isn't "just" (even when the two are orthogonal).
Justice is for the courts to decide, not the prosecutor. But whether enforcing a law serves to uphold the public order is up to the prosecutor. And enforcing bullshit laws is just as problematic as being inconsistent in what laws you do enforce.
We may be glad with what he did but do we want to encourage this type of thing? I think quietly "being nice" to him is fine but a public pardon, a welcome hope party, adoring media coverage may inspire some idiot to be the next Snowden and we probably do not want that.
> We may be glad with what he did but do we want to encourage this type of thing?
I think this raises an issue we can't easily dismiss, how to handle whistle-blowers. On one hand they are essential to democracy, so we don't want to jail all of them; on the other they can cause great harm, so we don't want to enable all of them. How do we enable good whistle-blowers and stop the bad ones?
Let's hear serious proposals. Would a law that puts the consequences on the leaker's shoulders be sufficient? Prosecuting someone after-the-fact when, due to the leaker's misjudgment, their leak lost a war and killed hundreds of thousands wouldn't be enough. Require them to exhaust internal institutional solutions? Again, that wouldn't protect us from a leaker with bad judgment; the worse their judgment, the more likley the institution would rightly reject all the leaker's claims, leading to a leak. Rely on executive clemency?
The courts need to make it easier to handle these type of things. One of the issues mentioned here was standing which made it hard for the ACLU to bring cases against the Government.
While it has certainly turned out that way, considering the process of dissemination, both Snowden and Manning dumped a pile of documents on a third party. It's that third party that, in the case of Manning's files (WikiLeaks), was hasty and cavalier in its release of information, whereas Greenwald/Poitras/Etc. have been more careful and deliberate in their releases.
To the extent that the individual leakers could have some sort of culpability, it would be for the people with whom they chose to share their information, though I grant that the who is not independent of the how.
I seem to remember that Wikileaks asked some part of the US government for help redacting the Manning leaks to prevent jeopardizing lives and missions, but they refused.
Snowden's document leaks, and by extension the journalists with whom he entrusted them to, were not restricted in scope to only disclosing illegal domestic collection activities.
In fact, the majority of disclosures were foreign in nature, and of those, quite a few ran counter not only to American foreign policy and security interests, but Western interests in general.
The articles exposing intelligence activities in Indonesia were but one example.[1]
Indonesia is such a nice, non-repressive country[2], and it's not like they aren't making significant progress on the human rights front[3]. How dare western intelligence spy on them. /s
Other examples include severe damage to foreign relations with China[4], coverage of offensive capabilities such as network infiltration and hardware implantation[5], the CIA using co-traveler inference to shake tails in the field [6], and more.
Today's news is certainly a positive thing, but I think it's fair to say Snowden's whistleblowing is far from responsible, even if it isn't wantonly reckless (i.e. Manning).
The citizens of a representative democracy have the right to know what the government is doing on their behalf, either domestically or abroad. Saying that the Snowden revelations damaged relations with another country is like an adulteress complaining that her snitching boyfriend damaged her relationship with her husband. The crime occurred long before the revelation...
>The citizens of a representative democracy have the right to know what the government is doing on their behalf, either domestically or abroad.
While I agree in a domestic context, that ideal can't really be applied to a foreign context with any specificity, at least in terms of intelligence activities.
The vast majority of intelligence operations rely on secrecy to be effective, and you can't maintain secrecy when you inform your citizenry about it.
I know that sounds bad, but the result would be that the representative democracies of the world wouldn't have effective intelligence agencies, and the other countries would. Not exactly an ideal outcome.
>Saying that the Snowden revelations damaged relations with another country is like an adulteress complaining that her snitching boyfriend damaged her relationship with her husband.
Sure, and if we extend my example using your analogy, the husband is and has been a cheating asshole the entire time. His hobbies include perpetrating various human rights violations on a massive scale.
If an oppressive regime is created or perpetuated by Cold War-era anti-communist policy, that's certainly a bad thing. Especially so if the regime then commits atrocities (e.g. as in Indonesia).
That said, I fail to see how such history should have any bearing on whether or not Indonesia is a valid signals intelligence target today. If anything, it provides compelling justification to continue such programs.
In my opinion, countries that have terrible human rights records generally lose their right to complain about privacy when spied on by countries with significantly better records.
Relative to most other western democracies, the human rights record of the US is obviously profoundly deficient in certain areas. When compared to Indonesia however, in terms of how citizens are treated, I'd argue it's actually quite good.
As far as I can tell he did it exactly right. Tried to escalate but not the point of causing trouble and getting fired. Took a bunch of documents and released them not straight out, but to journalists who had an opportunity to redact things that might directly endanger lives (like names of agents, etc).
> do we want to encourage this type of thing?
So long as the government tries to do things in secret that are illegal, yes, we do want to encourage this type of thing. The alternative is that eventually you have "turn key tyranny" where the apparatus is also used to suppress dissent and the government REALLY takes over.
"This type of thing" can be analyzed on a case-by-case basis. If, emboldened by a Snowden partdon, future whistleblowers take it too far, the president can decide whether or not they are eligible for pardon when the time comes.
The pendulum has swung too far away for this to be a credible objection. Yes, I do want to encourage what Snowden did.
This president, and the last one, have decided that any whistleblowing deserves vicious prosecution. They even think that some journalists deserve that treatment too.
George Washington (among many others) kinda set the standard by leading a group of men who murdered those rightfully in charge. I never hear any condemn him for what he did, yet far less extreme actions taken today result in condemnation for going too far. Odd, no?
1. I did not criticize what Snowden did. He was very careful and responsible.
2. All I was trying to say is that turning Snowden into a public mainstream hero could inspire some idiot that "wants to be a hero too" to do something dumb.
Blame the New York Times instead of Snowden for that failure if you want, but I wouldn't call sending that information to the New York Times in the first place 'very careful'.
