Time to Pardon Edward Snowden?
infosecurity-magazine.com
infosecurity-magazine.com
https://mobile.twitter.com/_nalexander/status/13124054429251...
He did not flee to Russia. He got stuck there on transit to Ecuador because his passport was allegedly cancelled. He came from Hong Kong. Read his book.
Is that why he was at the Russian consulate in HK a few days before, and in constant contact with the lawyer from Wikileaks (a Russian Intel cutout)?
Come on.
This is contradicting to the idea of government existing for people and serving people.
If government uses fear to reduce accountability, it needs to be changed.
(I am merely pointing out the paradox of inaction. Enacting change is a lot of work, so one must first decide to contribute actual work, then figure out what actual work needs to be done, then do the work and measure the result. Work = force * displacement and if nothing is displaced, no work has been achieved. Rosa Parks wanted change so she did the work. Snowden wanted change so he did the work.)
Colordrops is correct: comments matter because they help shape public opinion.
Dustingertz is also correct: governments & political parties have published processes for changing & enforcing policy. Citizens who read the docs & use those processes can achieve a lot.
What if the CIA were wiretapping the president, or the supreme court? Well, that would be illegal wouldn't it? Wouldn't you want a whistleblower to feel like they could safely expose it?
By and large, it's the government that decides what's legal and what's not. Even the Constitution can be amended with enough support. So exposing illegal government activities means you're exposing that a part of the government was doing something that it wasn't empowered to do, by the government. There are multiple branches of government for a reason. When the government is doing something illegal, it means an office of the government has either made a serious legal error, or gone rogue and disregarded its legal responsibilities.
That's a serious problem right?
Yeah you're basically describing Watergate here. And I don't think anyone objected to that being made public. Well except for Nixon :D
IMO Whistleblowing has a place in society as a safeguard against the abuse of power.
Russia gave him asylum, for reasons which are not related to him helping them, purely because it antagonises the US.
He still openly criticised the Russian government, and has expressed strong desire to come back to the US.
I don't personally think either of these people are or have ever knowingly been Russian assets.
But that's not the point. Particularly after the Special Counsel investigation, Assange/Wikileaks has been portrayed quite publicly through a credible federal investigation as being used as a puppet for distributing Russian-acquired documents.
Snowden clearly ended up in Russia for lack of options when fleeing HK. There's never been any credible allegations of a Russian affiliation outside of that AFAIK.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Counsel_investigation_...
Assange had a TV show on Russian State television in 2012.
He exposed what basically any G20 nation does and lives pretty damn well by virtue of doing the bidding of a foreign government that seeks to undermine democracy in the world.
Somehow that makes him a patriot.
Yes all he had to gain was international celebrity.
- Herman Goering [with additions]
Nothing much changes.
I think where he messed up was he got help from Assange when he was at his neediest, took it, and ended up in Moscow.
"A National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program has been ruled unlawful, seven years after it was exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden."
Off the top of my head I recollect they were intercepting hardware like switches and compromising it, inserting spying equipment in Google data centers forceing them to now to end to end encryption and many other shady things.
Not to mention the collection of zero days that almost certainly will get discovered by other nation states and bad actors and risk our security. They used parallel construction with other law enforcement orgs as they leaked run of the mill criminal behavior (not national security related) so as to not disclose the real way they got the info.
There are many more examples of overreaches he brought to light but I don't recall all of it. The core concern I have is all this apparatus are tools of fascism and control of any dissenting voices including the opposing political party. Where we are politically today I think would be hard to fathom back when Snowden leaked all this.
My point was they were essentially MITM'ing all traffic in google data centers. I fail to see how that "makes the US more secure".
"The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials.
By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-i...
Hacking private companies and spying on Americans seems outside their charter IMO.
Aside from phone metadata collection, they weren't spying on Americans. They could tap communications of non-Americans outside the US, and they could find those communications in Google WAN traffic crossing the US border. It's Google's fault for not encrypting it because any number of other countries with fewer laws against spying on their citizens could have done the same thing. It is good that Google and other Internet companies now use https everywhere and encrypt their WAN traffic, but the threat vector should have been well known at that point given what China had already been doing publicly for years.
On the other hand, there were multiple stories about the guy from Saudi Arabia who was at twitter and I think he got away back to S.A.
It was ruled illegal in 2015 by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
> inserting spying equipment in Google data centers
There is no evidence of this in the Snowden leaks or anywhere. Google would know if it had unaccounted for hardware in its datacenters. They put network analyzers on international links that carried Google traffic.
> they were intercepting hardware like switches and compromising it
For hardware shipped to targeted foreigners. We should expect our spy agencies to do this if they are even moderately competent.
> They used parallel construction with other law enforcement orgs as they leaked run of the mill criminal behavior (not national security related) so as to not disclose the real way they got the info.
Where is the evidence for this claim?
> The core concern I have is all this apparatus are tools of fascism and control of any dissenting voices including the opposing political party.
That would be a valid concern for unchecked domestic surveillance but not for what Snowden leaked.
I may very well have some details wrong.
Re: parallel construction reference here though clearly this is more recent: https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/28/hemisphere-phone-records/
At the bottom of this article it references the NSA and Snowden but says no explicit links was proven. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
My point was that those things do nothing to add to the lore that he is an American patriot that defended American constitutional rights. The question of should he receive a pardon by a US President should should put significantly more weight in the service he did to Americans compared to the service he did to other people.
I don’t mean to come off as xenophobic or nationalist. However, the title American Patriot is earned for services given to Americans and the United States itself.
Patriot definition: a person who vigorously supports their country and is prepared to defend it against enemies or detractors.
If you mean other nations don't recognize the same rights, then I grant you that, but the constitution doesn't limit this recognition to US citizens.
Of course, the conclusion to draw from this is that a new constitution is needed, one that does actually, at the time of writing, explicitly intend to disallow slavery and other offenses against human rights. Why should a document that has been shown to be compatible with slavery (and anti-gay sentiment, and segregation, and extra-judicial killings, and internment camps for the japanese and so on) be considered to carry any weight?
If the courts are free to interpret the letter of the law without thinking about the intention of the framers, and the meaning that was given before, what is the difference between courts and lawmakers?
Note: I'm talking entirely philosophically here. In practice, I'm extremely happy that the Supreme Court doesn't allow slavery and that they consider gay marriage to be a human right, that elective abortion is also a human right etc. But, as happy as I am that these are accepted as fundamental human rights, as I think they should be, I don't understand what the point of the constitution really is in this place.
Untrue, though this is a popular myth. There are a few Constitutional rights explicitly restricted to citizens (voting is the big one), but pretty much all the rest are rights of people generally that the government (either federal or state, depending on which Constitutional provision is involved) is restricted from intruding on. Both the plain text and the case law of the Constitution is inconsistent with this “only American citizens have rights protected by the US constitution” view.
There is some case law that certain actions by the US government affecting noncitizens outside of the US are not limited by certain provisions of the Constituion that would affect actions that were either within the US or directed at citizens (or, at least, that such actions are not subject to legal process in the federal courts, which amounts to the same thing), but the particular exception is quite narrow.
>U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said that the U.S. surveillance of phone records was indeed illegal.
The U.S. surveillance
That's because of statutory restrictions (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) on surveillance of citizens adopted in the wake of the foreign intelligence apparatus being broadly used against domestic opposition, not Constitutional limits on rights to citizens.
From the ruling at issue: «We conclude that the government may have violated the Fourth Amendment and did violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”) when it collected the telephony metadata of millions of Americans»
We need to examine the situation not from whether enough time has elapsed to make the wounds heal over, but from whether our government is ready to admit its past mistakes and learn from them.
Still, when you consider that Snowden is living in Russia, essentially free, and Assange is in a 3.5x2m cell, I don't think Snowden has anything to worry about, except that the royalties from his book will be taken away....but he has his freedom.
https://www.npr.org/2020/10/01/919261319/court-rules-edward-...
Again, as I understand it (which I believe is based on other comments from previous threads on HN).
Not true. Assange hasn't committed a crime but Snowden has committed a crime of theft from the NSA; unlawfully retaining a National Security Agency (NSA) documents containing information classified at the TOP SECRET/SENSITIVE COMPARTMENTED INFORMATION (TS/SCI) level.
Let me clarify. What he did in exposing PRISM was fantastic, the people had a right to know, absolutely, but, the act in itself was still stealing. It's no different to any other theft. When you work for a company and you steal, you can be prosecuted.
We can argue from two points; moral and legal. Morally he did the right thing. Legally he did not.
The difference between Assange and Snowden is vast. Assange is a published of information, no different to The Guardian. He did not steal the data he published. Snowden did, as did Chelsea Manning when he stole the known as Cable Gate.
The point in the article is that the OP thinks Snowden should receive a pardon. My point, is that Assange hasn't even been pardoned for his supposed crime of publishing. If Assange hasn't been pardoned for a lesser crime, then what hope does Snowden have of being pardoned for an actual crime of data theft from the NSA?
Another lady stole data from the NSA. SHe is now facing prosecution and 10 years.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/west-virginia-woman-admits-wi...
I’d lay odds if he ever steps foot in an unprotected setting, a slip on a banana peel and a fatal head injury wouldn’t shock me.
He’s a traitor. I’m as liberal as it gets and even I think he went too far.
So Snowden even revealed everything or nothing. He couldn't only spill half the beans!
The issue here is that none of these programs care about national boundaries (or citizenship etc). So exposing domestic surveillance exposed it internationally as well. There was no way to avoid that. So criticism of it seems unfair to me...
Also, 99% of the programs he exposed were Illegal. Some have been legalised after the fact, others semi legalised.
SCOTUS has refused to rule on any of it, so the ultimate compatibility with the constitution remains unclear...
The only US program he leaked that was illegal was the phone metadata collection. The vast majority of programs he leaked involved surveillance on foreign targets outside the US.
> SCOTUS has refused to rule on any of it
None of it has made it to SCOTUS due to the vast majority being completely legal, so SCOTUS hasn't even had a chance to refuse to rule on any of it. The only program that could have gone to SCOTUS was phone metadata collection, but the government already shut that down, so they aren't going to waste time challenging its legality.
Edit -- And yes, this harmed America by undermining the trust that those countries had in it. But to be clear, it wasn't Snowden's disclosure that broke that trust, it was the spying. It's hubris to think that if not for Snowden it would never have been discovered, and the longer it went on, the more harm that would have been done between America and its allies when it eventually got found out. So by revealing it early, Snowden really minimized the damage, rather than causing it.
I'm not saying it's right - we were in the wrong on Iraq and that was obvious before it started. But just like the US has had a HARD turn towards fascism, there's nothing stopping that from occurring to our allies as well. I'd argue it's dereliction of duty if you aren't spying on your allies, they're spying on us.
What you DO with the information gathered, in my opinion, is what determines whether you're violating your ally's trust.
Edit: And it's one thing (not necessarily a great thing) if you and your allies are knowingly and willingly exchanging intelligence about suspicious activities you pick up in each other's countries to tip off law enforcement. Exfiltrating corporate industrial and technological secrets is a different matter and there's no way an allied government would be OK with that happening, even as an under-the-table arrangement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_to_the_Iraq_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governmental_positions_on_the_...
I expect the US to be spying on ALL nations, not just enemy-of-the-week or communist ones.
That's not what game theory says. Defecting against everyone you meet is a losing strategy in an iterated multi-actor prisoner's dilemma. Tit-for-tat does much better. Establishing and maintaining mutual trust, to cooperate with those who are willing to cooperate with you, is in a nation's interests.
You are changing the topic, subtly and importantly.
Maintaining an operative network to support an information network and flexible operations (either to help or hinder a nation-state) is THE winning strategy.
> Tit-for-tat does much better.
That is incorrect, in context.
That seems unlikely. At the international level, it's well understood that alliances aren't permanent as de Gaulle's famous quote "[Nations have] no friends, only interests." illustrates. For example, Russia, Japan, and the US were allies during the First World War but were on opposing sides in the Second.
As the old joke goes "Don't anthropomorphize countries; they hate it when you do that." There is no guarantee of continuity in leadership or national policy because of periodic leadership turnover (elections, etc.) so exactly what would a country be extending trust to?
Really, like what?
Snowden didn't expose it but the newspaper he coordinated with (the guardian) ended up not correctly redacting that portion.
I don't have an opinion on whether this is a bad thing or a good thing.
This notion of 'harm' is bandied about all the time. If anything, he improved their capabilities, since now they are bolstered against insider threats going forward.
Apparently you're not because I couldn't disagree more.