Mostly the legal system is not encouraged to be politically correct.
Mr. Snowden broke his oath and leaked confidential data. His defense is the greater good. That should prevent prosecution.
Mr. Clapper lied to Congress when he said "Not Wittingly."
Mrs. Clinton failed to safeguard confidential data.
Others have broken the law, and they are not prosecuted.
We should prosecute those who break the law. They should defend themselves accordingly.
The real solution to this mess is for Congress to pass a law that exposing illegal activities is allowed. Wait - they did! The whistleblower protections don't work. More corruption.
Do you mean prevent conviction or are you taking the stance claiming "the greater good" means you shouldn't be tried?
Separately, because what he did is prima facie for the greater good, he should not be tried.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/oh-nothi...
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jul/2/donald-trump...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/17/us/politics/obama-commute...
What can you do, when the institution you should report illegal acts to, is the one perpetrating them?
The government won't let that happen. They'll say that, for national security reasons, the public can't be allowed to know the actual impact of the secrets he disclosed. And if we can't see the impact, it's impossible to weigh judgment.
Democracy can't work in the face of such secrecy.
That’s his whole point. But if you truly care about the law, shouldn’t government officials also be put on trial for breaking the law on a much more massive scale?
> Our Congress has 535 members for precisely this reason, the president answers to Congress and is not a king, and even the Chief Justice does not rule absolutely.
The reason he went public is precisely because the system of checks and balances didn’t work in the first place. In case you’ve forgotten, government officials actively kept members of congress in the dark and even lied under oath.
He touches on this in the podcast. He claims the vast majority of Congress had no clue and only the Gang of Eight had that access. If true, the implication is that the full representation of the People was not present to provide those checks and balances
Does it change anything for you if it wasn't just his opinion, but some sort of majority consensus instead—even if that only arrives in the history books? (Only asking in principle, as a hypothetical—not making the claim that Snowden in fact was right.)
There seems to be a fundamental problem with what you're proposing here—of course the vigilante approach is riddled with obvious issues too, but I just want to point out that what you're describing isn't clearly an effective way of dealing with things either.
You're basically saying the system works and we should trust it to evaluate and handle Snowden correctly: we have Congress, and they'll make the right choices if not the president.
But, the giant government programs exposed by Snowden are already a striking example of how we can't rely on Congress, at least to handle this matter correctly. Why would we assume the same entity which created the problems that were exposed is going to then handle the exposer fairly?
(I don't know the precise link between the exposed programs and Congress—so maybe they are separate/unrelated enough that my suggestion is inaccurate.)
“If I’d made preexisting arrangements to fly to a specific country and seek asylum, for example, I would’ve been called a foreign agent of that country. Meanwhile, if I returned to my own country, the best I could hope for was to be arrested upon landing and charged under the Espionage Act. That would’ve entitled me to a show trial deprived of any meaningful defense, a sham in which all discussion of the most important facts would be forbidden.
“The major impediment to justice was a major flaw in the law, a purposeful flaw created by the government. Someone in my position would not even be allowed to argue in court that the disclosures I made to journalists were civically beneficial. Even now, years after the fact, I would not be allowed to argue that the reporting based on my disclosures had caused Congress to change certain laws regarding surveillance, or convinced the courts to strike down a certain mass surveillance program as illegal, or influenced the attorney general and the president of the United States to admit that the debate over mass surveillance was a crucial one for the public to have, one that would ultimately strengthen the country. All these claims would be deemed not just irrelevant but inadmissible in the kind of proceedings that I would face were I to head home. The only thing my government would have to prove in court is that I disclosed classified information to journalists, a fact that is not in dispute. “This is why anyone who says I have to come back to the States for trial is essentially saying I have to come back to the States for sentencing, and the sentence would, now as then, surely be a cruel one. The penalty for disclosing top secret documents, whether to foreign spies or domestic journalists, is up to ten years per document.”
Excerpt From: Edward Snowden. “Permanent Record.” Apple Books.
We see this with Mr. Clapper "not wittingly" testimony to congress.
We see this with the Lavabit case.
When the game is rigged, your only option is not to play. I am occasionally encouraged by our country's judicial system doing something right. The fact that this is astonishingly rare is the canonical problem, circular to the issue Mr. Snowden raises.
The federal courts embraced this quasi-faux legal perspective that they could capture data and store it and then post-hoc get a warrant for the previously captured data. This is is corrupt and immoral. In general this is the reason I believe Mr. Snowden should not present himself for trial, because we do not have ethical folks in the courts or congress who will give him a fair trial.
> he was also wrong
what do you mean?
At least that's how I parse the language itself, and I've also heard this position from numerous acquaintances.