Russia gives Edward Snowden permanent residency
reuters.com
reuters.com
But he made sure to be back in Washington in July to vote for the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to retroactively give immunity to AT&T for cooperating with a massive illegal wiretapping operation for the secret services. That was the point where I knew where Obama would stand on mass surveillance.
political jobs were meant to is how sports was a century back.
Being a pro was actively frowned on in many competitions, you were supposed to play part time and still excel.
Political office never paid well, most politicians had farms and other businesses to keep them afloat. Presidents were famously responsible for hosting functions at the White house, some died broke . Also travelling between d.c and your home state was a significant effort for many so extended breaks was needed.
The rules made sense then , they don't now, however given congress makes laws and it's own rules not much can be done to fix it without constitutional amendments.
The fact that incumbents are generally reelected does certainly weaken the mechanism.
I also don't feel the current administration (or future ones that prescribe to Trump Doctrine) would even entertain the idea, being that hardcore military support is a large part of their narrative.
Not even the most devoted partisan can claim this was a straight face. Russia kills journalists that speak against Putin, poison political opposition, and paint with microwave radiation any diplomat misguided enough to attempt a dialogue.
It's a mafia state, pure and simple.
> they routinely gobble up the narrative that the US is less free than Russia and other autocracies
There are certainly periodic discussions suggesting the US is less free than it's own PR would suggest, but that's not at all the same thing.
I fully agree IT in every industry deserves more respect, but Snowden is thoroughly enjoying his new found celebrity post-defection. To deny this is part of his motivation is to be blind.
Right, including me. That just happened to be the result.
In this sense, the move could be seen as an investment in future whistleblowers— "If you see something, say something. Then come here if need be."
I doubt there's anything they 'get' from permanent residency vs not. Beyond PR, I doubt they've been waiting to get whatever they want from him up until today ;)
Whatever discussions with him they wanted to have likely concluded LONG ago.
And now Russia has a chance to turn those tables on the U. S.? I'm kind of disappointed that it took them this long to execute the obvious play.
It's not exactly a huge draw for anyone who does NOT have those unusual security concerns.
Why would anyone go to Russia apart from some moral consideration, given that Russian has nothing else to offer? I think that’s a pretty valid argument in certain circles.
[0]https://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/1974-mikhail-baryshnikov-d...
Plenty of people from the tech world have had unpleasant experience with US security apparatus, leaving them hesitant take a job in the states. The maintainer of curl project comes to mind notably
https://web.archive.org/web/20150704033557/https://twitter.c...
In October 2013, Snowden said that before flying to Moscow, he gave all the classified documents he had obtained to journalists he met in Hong Kong, and kept no copies for himself.[126] In January 2014, he told a German TV interviewer that he gave all of his information to American journalists reporting on American issues.[77] During his first American TV interview, in May 2014, Snowden said he had protected himself from Russian leverage by destroying the material he had been holding before landing in Moscow.[35]
Just part of normal spycraft then.
[0]https://twitter.com/jason_paladino/status/126639991697850777... [1]https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-officers-us...
What country wouldn't want highly skilled and knowledgeable people in STEM to immigrate, thrive, and boost the country's economy? Oh right, the US.
I think the PR angle mentioned elsewhere also makes sense and is a rational argument for Russia's actions, but this adds another meta-level to the whole thing.
Different messages being signalled to different audiences.
The standard requirement for a permanent residency in Russia is 1 year in on a temporary residency. Honestly, I'm surprised he hasn't been given a permanent one before.
In fact, if they granted him citizenship, then they might prevent him from traveling because he would become their responsibility in case he gets arrested abroad.
If they tried to keep him there it would kind of spoil the whole thing and tip the lie of their supposed benevolence.
Much better for the PR to let him go and wish him luck. Probably even have a send off ceremony, give him some kind of medal?
Permanent residency is not citizenship. Granting Permanent Residency will give him some sort of stability knowing he will not have to renew his status every year (or so) and be able to participate more fully in Russian society (ex: Employment, services, travel, Pension, etc).
Edward Snowden will always be a US Citizen in the eyes of the USA unless he takes steps to renounce his citizenship.
It looks as though Russia and possibly China have a documented history of targeting westerners with remote energy weapons. This is tyranny. USA doesn't poison nor assassinate its traitors, certainly not to the degree of our global counterparts -- much less do we not point microwave weapons at foreign diplomats. [1]
Snowden's defecting is a larger statement about US hegemony, one upon which China has freely capitalized. A justified fear is that true tyranny will result from a long term outcome favorable to China. Snowden's treason was a step in the right direction to dismantle US hegemony.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/19/us/politics/diplomat-atta...
His releases were far less dangerous than Manning but I think his problem is no compelling story to distract from his actions and he did step on a lot of toes. Toes that deserved to be stomped.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nsa-spying/u-s-court-...
> Evidence that the NSA was secretly building a vast database of U.S. telephone records - the who, the how, the when, and the where of millions of mobile calls - was the first and arguably the most explosive of the Snowden revelations published by the Guardian newspaper in 2013.
> Up until that moment, top intelligence officials publicly insisted the NSA never knowingly collected information on Americans at all. After the program’s exposure, U.S. officials fell back on the argument that the spying had played a crucial role in fighting domestic extremism, citing in particular the case of four San Diego residents who were accused of providing aid to religious fanatics in Somalia.
> U.S. officials insisted that the four - Basaaly Saeed Moalin, Ahmed Nasir Taalil Mohamud, Mohamed Mohamud, and Issa Doreh - were convicted in 2013 thanks to the NSA’s telephone record spying, but the Ninth Circuit ruled Wednesday that those claims were “inconsistent with the contents of the classified record.”
I'd wager that the people clutching their pearls now talking about people being put at risk due to the leak are pretty much the same people saying it wasn't happening before the leak.
Snowden literally exposed a massive spy campaign and moved it from conspiracy status to truth. Just because you didn't do shit about it doesn't mean it was 0 gain :)
So, future impact affects your assessment of the righteousness of an act of conscience? How does that work?
...but if we could get this police state going and everyone would shut up about it we'd all be 100% safe right?
Why not selectively publish only the parts about surveillance of US citizens?
Why publish details of how the US was dealing with adversaries like China?
From the looks of it, Snowden cared about getting famous more than any specific goal.
Until the US organizational culture and culture in general is orders of magnitude less hostile to whistle blowers, this asymmetric response will likely continue. The reflexivity of this situation likely means US organizations that don't tolerate whistle blowing become more compartmentalized to force whistle blowing into a more deniable narrow scope, which of course means the same organizations increase their inefficiency.
An altogether horrible development all around.
This is the insight and strategy Assange laid out in his 2006 essays "State and Terrorist Conspiracies" and "Conspiracy as Governance"[0] and put into practice with WikiLeaks.
> Authoritarian regimes create forces which oppose them by pushing against a people’s will to truth, love and self-realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce further resistance. Hence such schemes are concealed by successful authoritarian powers until resistance is futile or outweighed by the efficiencies of naked power. This collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population, is enough to define their behavior as conspiratorial.
> We can see conspiracies as a type of device that has inputs (information about the environment), a computational network (the conspirators and their links to each other) and outputs (actions intending to change or maintain the environment)
> In a conspiracy, individuals conspire, while when isolated they do not. We can show most of this difference by adding up all the important communication (weights) between all the conspirators. Call this total conspiratorial power.
> Instead of cutting links between conspirators so as to separate a weighted conspiracy we can achieve a similar effect by throttling the conspiracy — constricting (reducing the weight of) those high weight links which bridge regions of equal total conspiratorial power.
> Literacy and the communications revolution have empowered conspirators with new means to conspire, increasing the speed of accuracy of the their interactions and thereby the maximum size a conspiracy may achieve before it breaks down.
> Later we will see how new technology and insights into the psychological motivations of conspirators can give us practical methods for preventing or reducing important communication between authoritarian conspirators, foment strong resistance to authoritarian planning and create powerful incentives for more humane forms of governance.
In pardoning him would more people feel motivated to become whistleblowers, possibly with different outcomes? How dangerous would that be?
If he's not pardoned, what message does it pass to future generations?
[1] "U.S. court: Mass surveillance program exposed by Snowden was illegal". Reuters. Retrieved September 2, 2020. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nsa-spying/us-court-m...
Shocker, upvoting someone you agree with!
[0] On further reflection, that's probably overstated. While there is no such express condition in the Constitution, and pardons have been issued in such circumstances (including the famous Nixon pardon), none of them have been challenged (such as by a later attempt to prosecute despite the pardon) in a way which caused a court to rule on their effect, and there are cases where the question of the Constitutionality of pre-conviction pardons has been raised, though those cases were resolved on other grounds. So it should probably be acknowledged that the claim that a pardon requires trial and conviction is an active legal theory, though one without positive support in case law, and one which the actual practical use of pardons in the US has not been consistent with to this point.
Not until you go trial
It's actually real unclear what the legality of it would be if a subsequent President had tried to arrest him.
however, is there any case where the admission of guilt has been used to coerce testimony from a pardon recipient?
is there really a practical downside to being pardoned?
No, it is not even technically true.
EDIT: However, as pointed out, the following statement, in my original response, was incorrect: Nor do pardons even have to be “accepted” to have effect, it's a unilateral executive power.
EDIT[2]: additional response on another point previously overlooked:
> however, is there any case where the admission of guilt has been used to coerce testimony from a pardon recipient?
Any imputation of guilt is a side issue on coercing testimony; a pardon (if accepted, and this is the main practical reason why it might not be accepted) makes the recipient immune to prosecution for the offenses it covers, and thus makes the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination irrelevant to the extent related to offenses within the scope of the pardon. The government has plenty of power to compel testimony wherever the Fifth Amendment does not apply already, an admission of guilt is not necessary once that shield is moved out of the way.
are there any examples you are aware of where a person has been harmed by receiving a pardon or commutation?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burdick_v._United_States
> After President Gerald Ford left the White House in 1977, intimates said that the President privately justified his pardon of Richard Nixon by carrying in his wallet a portion of the text of the Burdick decision that suggested that a pardon carries an imputation of guilt and that acceptance carries a confession of guilt. Legal scholars have questioned whether that portion of Burdick is meaningful or merely dicta.
Manning wasn't pardoned, though.
Manning was granted clemency based largely on how the military treated her in detention.
And Presidential authority doesn't extend to say "Whatever he did, this country forgives him" in the absence of a guilty verdict. It's commonly thought to, but the actual result is unknown; a subsequent President's authority to arrest him on his "pardoned" actions and try him for commission of crime under the theory that one cannot be pardoned for crimes not tried has never been tested in the US legal system.
Trump is enough of an outlier that someone might actually be willing to test the hypothesis on any pardons he fires off.
Nobody's ever tried to claim the President lacks authority to pardon for crimes untried. What would happen if it was tried is unclear; there's no precedent. Trump's enough of an outlier that his successor might actually test the hypothesis.
The Constitution makes no mention of trial, or of conviction.
Indeed, the Supreme Court has ruled that pardons can be offered prior to a conviction in Ex parte Garland[0]
However, subsequent rulings call into question the absolute scope of Ex parte Garland (https://digitalcommons.law.wne.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...).
In particular, in case of dispute, the Court has the authority to adjudicate the dispute. It's the authority the Court used to hear Ex parte Garland in the first place.
And to my knowledge, there has never been a case that considers the President's ability to pardon for all possible crimes that could be filed related to some action. So if a subsequent President chooses to tack on a fourth crime to the list of three Snowden is currently charged with, a Trump pardon would likely not attach. At least, it would be up to the Court to decide if it attaches.
Look forward to your return.
There is no illusion of privacy anymore, even if a company jams ads down your throat.
If things need to be private, you need to be taking extreme precautions.
I would consider Russia far more Orwellian than most nations. Comparisons like yours seem to ignore that fact.
Straight up I don't think they want that, actually the opposite.
Russia really seems to prefer to get close up with other Orwellian nations more than others, they're not there to help ANYONE dig out, rather they'd rather just get friends in place in other nations that are Orwellian themselves.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Perhaps you don't owe massive fuckups better, but you owe this community better if you're posting here. We're trying for a different sort of conversation.
I’m not saying the US is white and Russia is black here, but you’re insinuating that there’s some kind of conspiracy to make Russia look bad when they’re in quite a lot of objective measurements really are. I think most people understand that when you’re in Snowden’s situation, you don’t really have the luxury of choice.
Maybe Biden would pardon Snowden but it will be a hollow symbolic victory. Unless he explicitly sets to dismantling Obama's machine, it will churn ever on at the whims of whomever is president.
But in his 2nd term, he was a far better president. He eased off on drone strikes (still too much, imo), pardoned non-violent drug offences like crazy, he commuted Manning's sentence, and there were talks of him considering pardoning Snowden too (when he was a lame duck).
I don't think Biden will venture into territory that Obama considered to be too controversial, but given that Biden's pretty much running as a 1 term President, I don't think it's impossible.
I feel most people don’t realize that he was on transit to Ecuador when the Russians told him passport had apparently been expired. He never planned to stay there.
He visited the Russian consulate in HK (for a birthday party no less) before he left and his main legal advisor was the lawyer from Wikileaks , a Russian intel cutout.
All just coincidence I guess.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/report-snowden-stayed-a...
I don't see a significant difference between the two. He picked his side.
> Every news organization in the world has been trying to confirm that story. They haven't been able to, because it's false.
You do realize especially with his situation, he had to cover all legal aspects. Anyone would visit the consulate before traveling to Russia, and he would, too, even if he didn't plan to leave the international zone.
Staying Russia wasn't his plan, but it was definitely an option as he must've known that he might get trapped in any country he crossed.
Pretty far away from "do people not realize that his passport was taken and he got stuck in the Moscow airport?" Really far.
There are a lot of claims that he gave the Chinese intel, so somehow, after they didn't give him any protection, he just immediately gambled on selling info to Russia?
If it's "standard procedure", then he would have fully expected to stay in (be stuck in) the first country he landed at once leaving HK.
Like I said, it was planned.
You're trying to build a backstory for something using bits and pieces of disparate information when the most plausible explanation is that Snowden was probably well aware that his freedom and likely his life were in danger and sought assistance from wherever he could get it. Building a conspiracy theory on this scaffold is a cop-out. Anyone with enough power to keep Snowden safe is probably an enemy of the US.
As for Wikileaks being a Russian tool, would you have the same discrediting opinion about the outlets publishing info that Russia or China would rather keep secret? Or if the person who leaked some data about the Chinese ethnic cleansing program received assistance from the US?
One program he leaked was found to be illegal. 98% of what he leaked had nothing to do with domestic surveillance, wasn't illegal, and only was released to hurt US intel efforts and standing in the world. Which is why people view this as a Russian op from the start.
I get that you don't care about any of that, but perhaps insist on accuracy when discussing it?
> people view this as a Russian op
"People". Does any of them make a stronger case than you? Or does everyone simply reference "people" to support their conclusions? People also say the onlines are full of trolls and sock-puppet accounts creating narratives.
You should be in the streets demanding that the people responsible for that "only one illegal program" be put in prison but here you are arguing that the person who gave them away should be there instead purely because he may or may not be associated with a US enemy.
That's a weird bit of deflection you've resorted to. [0] And unless you're walking back on every one of your comments and opinions in this thread I think I was spot on with my assessment.
My friend, it's not my "hard to follow" writing style that you're stumbling on, it's that I made a more sensible argument than you did. You are plucking an argument out of thin air, floating on conspiracy and innuendo without any real evidence, or at least something that passes Occam's razor. Like that you can build anything, doesn't make it true.
Look, I'm not even saying you are wrong, because I have no evidence either way. Just that the (far) more plausible explanation is that anyone running from a superpower is running to another superpower. It's the only thing that makes sense. He did what he had to do to survive.
You're trying to build that into "he must have been a Russian puppet all along" because "people" have been saying it so you must be right. But then you complain that "people" also say he got stranded in Russia, so they must be wrong. So I ask you, is what "people" say only correct when you want it to be correct? You selectively go between "people support my views so I must be right" to "people contradict my views so they must be wrong".
I'm sorry, that's no way to have a civilized and productive discussion.
> "he must have been a Russian puppet all along"
No. Actually read what i'm saying. He chose a side. He knew that poking the eye of the US has consequences, and to avoid those consequences he needed to align himself with one of the few states left that doesn't bow to US wishes.
The states that fit that criteria are themselves exclusively authoritarian. So in protesting the illegal surveillance of a liberal state, he made himself a pawn in the propaganda war of an illiberal state.
That basic contraction was never his intention, but it became his reality.
> Just that the (far) more plausible explanation is that anyone running from a superpower is running to another superpower. It's the only thing that makes sense. He did what he had to do to survive.
Yes, we agree. His intentions can't ever be known, so arguing that is pointless. I'm simply pointing out the consequences of his actions and the basic contraction in his story vs the actual outcome.
Putting aside domestic disclosures, it's difficult to see how the scope of stolen materials merits praise or euphemistic titles. Snowden is a fugitive. As it pertains to the majority of what was stolen, he is not a whistleblower, but a thief.
Had Snowden simply revealed unconstitutional domestic mass surveillance programs, perhaps he could be pigeonholed as a whistleblower.
Assuming for the moment that this is true...
Even something that is secretly lawful can be entirely immoral and only doable if kept hidden from the public who would otherwise object. The whistleblower's responsibility is to the public, not just their organizational superiors.
It's unhealthy to believe that the law dictates ethics.
* Which servers in China we are hacking
* Foreign surveillance
* Joint CIA/NSA programs
Damage is ongoing. Relationship with foreign leaders, for instance, has suffered irreparable damage.
Snowden's very existence as a propaganda mouthpiece does align with Putin's long term active measures. His greatest value is in undermining internal confidence in our institutions that protect our freedom.
Multiple former officials did this and society largely didn't believe them and didn't care. Thomas Drake, Bill Binney, and others came forward through the appropriate legal channels and lost their careers, faced prosecution, and absolutely nothing changed.
Legally, you're technically correct. Snowden is a fugitive. That doesn't change the fact that he fundamentally changed the way we think about privacy and the government's role in digital privacy for the better. James Clapper lied to Congress weeks before Snowden's revelations, yet he never faced perjury charges. That's what a broken system looks like.
Everyone connected to big tech, Graham and company, stood to gain immensely from Snowden's treason against his country. Naturally, "hero" is the word. I'd speculate that Snowden singlehandedly added trillions in value to big tech.
What?!?! Big tech was the primary facilitator of NSA surveillance through PRISM, they worked together to spy on billions of people. The idea that the general public benefited from this relationship is laughable.
> I'd speculate that Snowden singlehandedly added trillions in value to big tech.
Care to elaborate on this? How did Snowden add trillions in value to the companies that enabled the NSA to spy on everyone?
Big tech wises up to Big Brother snooping on them, locks down, then continues to accumulate all of that precious data, out of view of the IC. Control over that data is worth trillions.
Just last month:
> Seven years after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the mass surveillance of Americans’ telephone records, an appeals court has found the program was unlawful - and that the U.S. intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth.
> In a ruling handed down on Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the warrantless telephone dragnet that secretly collected millions of Americans’ telephone records violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and may well have been unconstitutional.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nsa-spying/u-s-court-...
The sweet spot is to have mechanisms and institutions in place to adequately "watch the watchers watching the watchers". Instead, we get judges putting on a dog and pony show, while our IC leaders were originally forced to lie or mislead about the secret programs.
Americans are wildly spoiled. We now have, by far, the most libertarian policies regarding E2EE, on a global basis. Take a bow, Ed, this is all your doing.
See you in 2050. Watch Hawaii.
I imagine the data he took were to serve as proof of these governmental over-reaches. Nobody would've taken him seriously without solid proof.
Add that to his shady Russia ties and he's not the hero many make him out to be.
I'm still trying to wrap my mind around how Snowden could fancy himself as a patriot when he leaked the blueprints to our global surveillance operations. This is pure gaslighting, since nobody wants unnecessary mouth breathers. It's the ultimate leveraging of civil liberties to support internal strife and division between our institutions and the civilians served by those institutions.
Russia keeps Edward Snowden around primarily to support Active Measures. There'a a cognitive dissonance going on, one that particularly appeals to tech idealists, an idealism that most of us geeky civilians possess to some degree. What would Russia do if the roles were reversed, in terms of controlled propaganda, and retribution?