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.
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!
Manning wasn't pardoned, though.
Manning was granted clemency based largely on how the military treated her in detention.
[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.
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.
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?