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What you're saying is that the existing whistleblower protections are inadequate:

> 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?

Whistleblower protection are bit tricky to define.

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.

The problem is that if you inform your citizens, you also inform your enemy (who can read your language, are among the citizens). With the globalization due to electronics and the Internet, this is even more true, compared to medieval times or Cold War times (where this was also true, but there was arguably higher latency on information, and a higher language barrier as well).

> The problem is that if you inform your citizens, you also inform your enemy

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.

> but the enemy usually has the intelligence services to know it anyway

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.

There is a difference between operational secrets and methodological secrets. If you're about to stage an operation against the enemy, do you publish the fact that you're coming? No. But then when the operation is over, there is nothing more to keep secret, and the public can find out what has been done on a timescale that allows them to reasonably cause bad actors to be punished or prevent it from happening over and over.

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.

So you believe in right for secrecy for governments but not for citizens?

Isn’t this the opposite of what it should be? How else can we hold government accountable?

>What you're saying is that the existing whistleblower protections are inadequate:

^^^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 !"

> 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.

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.

I think this is true and that is why fleeing to Russia was the correct choice. Because the whistle blower channels don't work.

Just for additional clarity, Russia wasn’t his first choice. It was somewhere in South America. US decided to ground him in Russia (best optics for them really)

Russia was probably his only choice. Every other country would have extradited him.

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.

Perhaps he didn't go against the government but went in support of the US citizens and believed what the government did was wrong.

I do 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.

Would just like to point out, Putin was on record in an interview talking about Snowden, and was pretty open about how these programs make sense from an intelligence point of view, and pretty much said that Russia is doing the same thing. He wasn't pretending like they're not doing the exact same thing. I believe it's somewhat of a don't hate the player, hate the game from the perspective of the CIA/KGB/what have you.

Why can't we just be open about our smart TVs listening to us?

The "nothing to hide" argument mistakenly suggests that privacy is something only criminals desire. Fences and curtains are ways to ensure a measure of privacy, not indicators of criminal behavior. Privacy is a fundamental part of a dignified life.

That's not an accurate representation of reality.

Let's demand that, and in the mean time wouldn't hurt to be honest.

He has the image of a dictator (rightly so) and doesn't need to hide it. He connects the image western people have of him to their own domestic actors. If he just condemned it, he would be the hypocrite. So he opted to redirect animosity towards him to others.

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.

That's one difference about Russian and American citizens -- the Russians have pretty much accepted this, and reserve all anti government talk to private conversations or avoid it altogether, while Americans are generally in denial or just ignorant about it.

> ...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?

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.

Out of the frying pan into the fire… but I think human nature suggests that he is making himself happy with it. He's dependent on being fine with everything about Russia, because it's that or be killed in one place or the other: last thing he could afford to do is antagonize Putin, he pretty much has to become 'All Russia, all the time' and that's a powerful motivator to persuade himself that now he is in the GOOD place, and it's the USA that was uniquely wicked and bad.

Then why didn't he just make himself happy with the NSA?

Snowden is critical of Russia, this comes up in every interview he gives

You know, Snowden has recently wrote and published something of an autobiography called "Permanent Record". You don't need to think or guess, he explained his motivations, thoughts and feelings fairly well there, and they don't quite align with your comment.

Clarification: He was in Russia when the US cancelled his passport stranding him there, his intended destination was Ecuador. I think stranding him in Russia was a deliberate choice to discredit Snowden and it seems to be working very well.

While Ecuador was a good choice then, it changed since: see the fate of Julian Assange.

The last update on how he is treated:

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252487666/US-decision-to...

What leads you to perceive that being stranded in Russia is discrediting Snowden?

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?

One of the often repeated talking points from the government/intelligence community is that Snowden traded away US secrets to an enemy country. That narrative has way more impact - I think - when he is stranded in Russia instead of Ecuador. (Snowden denies this and says he didn't have access to the leaked materials any more when he left Hong Kong)

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.

You're right that whistleblower channels don't work, at the very least according to Snowden. But you're wrong about him fleeing to Russia, as that's not where he was going to, but where he ended up.

1. Snowden is not a US judge, and hasn't spent the last half decade deciding whether each US spying operation was legal or not. Snowden released the documents that allowed the courts to decide which programs were legal, so he cannot be held responsible for the decision that the courts made, because time machines don't exist.

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?

1. All of the other things he exposed should also be illegal

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

Put me in his jury and I’ll happily give the US govt a lesson in the powers of jury nullification.

They learned that a long time ago and screen jurors carefully.

Makes you wonder what was the motivation behind creating "Whistleblower protection" program in the first place.

Legal Theatre.

Bureaucratic / political butt covering theatre.

#2 means that there is no wistleblower protection in the intelligence community.

What else could Snowden have done do to stop the crimes being committed?

Non-us citizen nor lawyer, but doesn't a pardon require a conviction? Has Snowden been convicted?

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?

> Non-us citizen nor lawyer, but doesn't a pardon require a conviction?

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.

Simple solution:

Donald Trump puts his money where is mouth is, pardons him and repatriates him.

Right after he releases his tax records following the completion of the Mexican wall.