U.S. court: Mass surveillance program exposed by Snowden was illegal
reuters.com
reuters.com
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/22/how-pentagon....
"None of the lawful whistleblowers who tried to expose the government’s warrantless surveillance – and Drake was far from the only one who tried – had any success,” Devine told me. “They came forward and made their charges, but the government just said, ‘They’re lying, they’re paranoid, we’re not doing those things.’ And the whistleblowers couldn’t prove their case because the government had classified all the evidence. Whereas Snowden took the evidence with him, so when the government issued its usual denials, he could produce document after document showing that they were lying. That is civil disobedience whistleblowing.”
he had to go live in exile and nothing changed
1. The court only found that a single program exposed by Snowden was illegal. Snowden released a bunch of other information that was a violation of the NDA he signed when he was given a security clearance.
2. Even if all the information he disclosed revealed illegal activity, Snowden's actions make him ineligible for whistleblower protection. Whistleblower protection for the intelligence community[1] is only provided if a person follows the proper procedure to securely notify their Inspector General and/or Congress. Since he's not automatically protected, it would take Congress or the President to decide to offer him protection. Snowden (allegedly) did not even attempt to notify the proper authorities before going public with the information, so not only is he ineligible, it's not likely that anyone will take pity on him.
3. There's a chance that this ruling won't stick as the legal system chugs along and a few more judges look at it, and even if they were willing to help Snowden, nobody in Congress is going to take action until there is some permanence with the ruling. IANAL, but I think this would be decided if the Supreme Court either decides to decline or hear the case. If it's declined, then it's pretty much final. If they decide to hear the case, then it could be another year or so before they make a decision.
[1] IC whistleblower protection is a little different than standard whistleblower protection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_Community_Whistle...
2. He tried they denied him. I think the entire process of "exposing" illegal acts that has to be done through the very system that is committing the illegal acts is asinine, and anyone that is defending that process is complacent in the abuse of human rights
3. Highlighting the pure and total corruption that is the 3 branches of government, no longer is there a check and balance they have combined into a single corrupt abusive state
I doubt he is happy with having to live in Russia - the main benefactor of his leaks. It's impossible to imagine that he is able to reconcile his hatred of US spying with the malicious actions of the government he now relies on for protection.
...and that's the ultimate crux of this whole thing. When you go up against the US government, you have to ask yourself - is there any major world power out there that's better?
I don't think he asked himself that question.
edit: Saying Russia is the main benefactor of the leaks sounds like evidence of long lost cold war thinking to be honest.
Perhaps it would also be to the benefit of the targets of surveillance? Because if you wouldn't want to hand Russia a win, not subjecting the population to surveillance would have been quite the strategy in this case.
Why can't we just be open about our smart TVs listening to us?
Let's demand that, and in the mean time wouldn't hurt to be honest.
Pointing out mass surveillance isn't an attack on the integrity of the US, it is an attack on the practice you would expect from Putin.
Even if this ruling gets overturned it is irrefutable evidence that, after considering the issues, a person who understood the legal issues might conclude that the people behind the mass surveillance program were engaged in a literal criminal conspiracy.
Snowden wasn't going up against the US government, he was going up against a rogue branch of the military. I hope there is some consensus here that illegal programs aren't legitimate.
The last update on how he is treated:
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252487666/US-decision-to...
I don't doubt that (almost) any other American taking shelter in Russia would make a dent on their reputation in US, but I'm curious about Snowden specifically. IMO, Those who know what he did and how he did (in general) seem to support him. A minority hates him. But the rest of public opinion?
I think the intelligence community and establishment democrats & republicans are generally still out to get Snowden, while his support comes from the fringes left and (libertarian-)right, who have basically no actual power.
Public opinion seems to be mixed and a lot of regular people don't have strongly held opinions about Snowden (or mass surveillance in general). The Patriot Act is still in effect for god’s sake even after all these revelations.
Lately the whole russia-gate thing has made it really easy to get people to froth at the mouth at any Russian connection, and the fact that Trump said he wanted to look at Snowden (Even a broken clock is right twice a day) automatically will turn anti-Trump people against it. So I don't see public opinion turning more positive on Snowden in the short term.
EDIT: I realized that my writing looks very GTP-3 like, but I swear i'm not a bot, I'm just having trouble connecting these thoughts in a nice way.
> 1. The court only found that a single program exposed by Snowden was illegal. Snowden released a bunch of other information that was a violation of the NDA he signed when he was given a security clearance.
Requirement of perfection and a superhuman level of ability to sift through more information than any individual could before sharing it with anyone who could help with doing so.
> Whistleblower protection for the intelligence community[1] is only provided if a person follows the proper procedure to securely notify their Inspector General and/or Congress.
Requirement to do something that can get you put on a list, and thereby either lose access to the information or get put under surveillance so that you can no longer release the information if the official channels are fruitless.
Moreover, "official channels" even when they work don't disclose the existence of the program to the public, which is a necessary public good, because otherwise even if that gets it shut down, the structures and incentives that led to its creation aren't addressed and it just happens again until they get it running with a group of people not willing to risk their own careers to report it up the chain.
> There's a chance that this ruling won't stick as the legal system chugs along and a few more judges look at it
So a whistleblower has to spend how many years in exile before they get their vindication?
When is something whistleblowing, when is it a leak, when is it malicious, and when is it espionage? It's easy to allow leaks about illegal acts, but if you start allowing leaks about secret but legal acts too, then things get blurry.
I personally don't think a government, ultimately a servant of the people, should be allowed to keep secrets from the people, but that's currently legal for e.g. military reasons, and thus needs to be considered.
Imagine for a second a parallel universe where the government wasn't evil, and while some of the released documents was showing illegal activity, others did not and in fact contained secret information about national security matters where releasing the information undermines the work (e.g. Russia/China/... monitoring, intercept measures, etc.).
> So a whistleblower has to spend how many years in exile before they get their vindication?
The legal system would be fundamentally broken if you could evade judgement by going into hiding, regardless of reason.
Snowden should have been pardoned a long time ago, but his time in hiding is and should be inconsequential from a legal standpoint until laws are changed and pardons are made. It's up to the citizens of the U.S. to fix their country and welcome him home.
Indeed, but the enemy usually has the intelligence services to know it anyway, leaving your citizens uninformed as the only real side-effect.
I don't think secrecy is important in national security anymore. On the other hand, the secrecy is used for evil, such as keeping citizens in the dark around government plans to control popular opinion in their favor, falsely positioning themselves as the people's superiors.
Depends per subject and intelligence service and enemy (there is more than one).
> I don't think secrecy is important in national security anymore.
Why?
Think of it this way. I'm Dutch. Our secret services hacked into the GRU's camera system. This allowed attribution. Our secret services also did the physical last mile infiltration of Stuxnet.
Did I, as random Dutch citizen have to know this? No. As the enemy does not know it, and will know it when the Dutch population knows. These are two examples where a need to know basis makes sense, and is very limited.
By contrast, with something like a secret mass surveillance program, there is no "end" where you keep something a secret for 18 months but then everybody finds out about it through official channels, so things like that don't get to be a secret. One way or another the public needs to timely find out what's being done in their name.
Isn’t this the opposite of what it should be? How else can we hold government accountable?
^^^Exactly THIS ! Missing the "Forrest for the tree's ! One day our kids will asked us:
Kids:"Why did you guys let it happen ?"
Parents: "Oh we wanted to stop them, but the people that could, they were not completing the correct forms !... So you know, better let the gov just kept on spying on us all... Can't have improper forms now !"
What you refer to as 'perfection' I would call 'reasonable due diligence and discretion'. If you don't know what's in the files you're releasing, you don't even know if you're providing sufficient information to prove your point. If a whistleblower can release any amount of unrelated information, whistleblowing becomes indistinguishable from espionage.
> Requirement to do something that can get you put on a list, and thereby either lose access to the information or get put under surveillance so that you can no longer release the information if the official channels are fruitless.
The requirement to notify congress would appear to give potential high-level whistleblowers a way to field complaints to sympathetic ears. Among the 538 representatives and senators, there are plenty of folks who would champion this cause while working to secure the anonymity of the whistleblower.
Bureaucratic / political butt covering theatre.
What else could Snowden have done do to stop the crimes being committed?
Holding him responsible would be the same as a person calling the police to report a crime, the cops showing up and arresting a person, then months down the line the courts rule not guilty on the arrestee, so the police now go charge the original caller with false reporting. It's ludicrous to think he could've known which programs would be borderline illegal and which would step over that line. And if it took the US justice system 6 years and millions of dollars worth of man hours to actually make that decision, how could he possibly have correctly come to the same conclusion, beforehand, with no governmental support?
Donald Trump puts his money where is mouth is, pardons him and repatriates him.
Does _anything_ obligates the President to pardon anyone?
And why would those points you listed invalidate a pardon? If Snowden was considered (by courts, government) to be a whistle blower by legal definition, he wouldn't need a pardon, right?
No, Nixon wasn't convicted either. He received a pardon nonetheless. Accepting a pardon implies though an admission of guilt.
> Does _anything_ obligates the President to pardon anyone?
AFAIK, not in the strict sense of the word. In the looser sense, public opinion.
> And why would those points you listed invalidate a pardon?
It would at most, because it influences public opinion. But technically, all those are reasons, why there is a pardon. The law may say he is guilty, but there might be overruling concerns at hand.
Clapper lied, on camera, under oath, admitted it and has had zero consequences. Kept his job. Has not had to defend a prosecution. Now he's using is former position and influence to get rich. It's lawbreaking from the top. Nothing to discuss about it.
Sadly the rule of law and equality before it is a thing that needs to be re-established.
I doubt it will ever be safe for him in the US again, despite his legal status.
The view of people familiar with the matter is that anything placed into the unskilled hands of people like Greenwald or Gellman (although the latter did get professional assistance and take a lot of steps to protect it) got accessed/copied by any of a half-dozen other state-level intelligence services, so presumably the US IC was concerned about these particular not-published-in-the-media secrets being available to the public. (This is not to say they weren’t concerned about them being known to other intel agencies, just that based on the unprofessional hands in which it was placed, that ship had probably already sailed once it was given to those incompetent in safeguarding it.)
Personally, I wish the original unredacted PRISM deck had been published in full to the public. The state derives its authority from the consent of the governed; it is impossible to consent to something of which you are unaware and uninformed.
I heartily recommend reading Gellman’s book about Snowden, Dark Mirror. One of the things he mentioned that surprised me was that Snowden told him that they (the IC) would not hesitate to assassinate him (Gellman, a US citizen on US soil) instantly if they thought it would prevent the leak from going further.
I think most Americans don’t know or care who Ed Snowden is. The Last Week Tonight segment with him was rather instructive.
Watching_the_watchmen_recursive has detected a stackoverflow and was aborted.
A core dump has been created and can be viewed at constituion.hex.
Not arguing one way or the other here, as I simply don't know enough about the situation.
Of course it is bullshit .. but since when did that stop them? Exceptionalism has been the key word, used almost every time the government violated a laws or moral boundary (both domestically and abroad).
Why would anyone expect sense, from a government that will never receive actual jail time from any national court, in a country were potential punishment appears to be the main motivator for powerful people to not do everything illegal?
Why on earth would anyone still expect any sense, after the USA went as far as creating laws to justify military invasion of a foreign country, if an international tribunal would ever charge them with violating international law?
Why are so many American citizens still so naive about the real nature of their own government. Always thinking it's the other party that's the bad guys .. never wanting to accept that the party really doesn't matter (just ask any foreign country that received an unhealthy dose of "freedom and democracy").
To drive that point even a little further, the mafia (the actual one, in Italy) also had done many good things, helping many local people out, often when it was the government that totally failed those people. But none of that made it any less of a ruthless criminal organization.
Should any of the US government's good deeds (if any, because I have never seen the USA do anything abroad that wasn't first and foremost good for them, only in second place for the local population) ever excuse any of their criminal activities?
I don't see what is complicated here. To me, the answer is just as clear as with the Italian mafia (during its heydays): no! Crimes are crimes, no matter who commits them.
(1) There is no question that he broke the law, he is not denying it.
(2) There is very strong evidence and argument to be made that legal routes were blocked and/or broken and the only way forward was to go public outside the US.
Snowden paid attention to what happened to three earlier attempts to report illeagal activity using leagal means in the NSA global surveillance program–Roark, Binney, Wiebe, Drake and Loomis–for example.
They complained to their superiors, to the NSA general counsel, to the Defense Department Inspector General Office, and to both the Senate and the House intelligence committees. The DoD Inspector General Office violated confidentiality agreement and gave their names to the FBI and falsely accused them of leaking. FBI raided their houses and started to investigate them instead.
Pardon exists just for cases like this. Breaking the law for common good can be morally justified, even heroic.
Just writing that, though, it feels dirtily and precisely "Trump".
edit: grammar
It's seriously weird to have a President and a large faction of Americans actively working to fight America as it currently stands. I'm sympathetic to ideas of reform, but they're not talking about reform, they're talking in terms like rounding up all those people and putting 'em in camps as unredeemable criminals/enemies. Nobody going on about 'Deep State' or 'Pizzagate' etc. are talking about reforms, they are behaving like it's an occupying army of absolute monsters that could never possibly be reformed or improved.
I sometimes wonder if “President” will be the same.
However, if Snowden were pardoned, and Cannabis were legalized, I do think Trump would win centrist and libertarians.
It may seem nitpicky, but I genuinely don’t think people understand how utterly anarchic geopolitics is, even at the height of unipolar stability in decades past.