Edward Snowden is an American patriot. He followed his conscience and acted in good faith to defend the constitutional rights of the American people.
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»
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