Putin grants Russian citizenship to Edward Snowden | Hacker News Reader

Putin grants Russian citizenship to Edward Snowden

npr.org

61 pointsgeorgecmu63 comments

Can't he fly to Ecuador now? He's got a brand new Russian passport.

This is actually an interesting question. Just being granted citizenship doesn't mean you are automatically issued a passport. That requires a separate application process, where the government can probably refuse your request for any reason, or for none at all.

I don't know how it works in Russia specifically, but I think in most countries the issuing of passports is subject to executive discretion, and even if Snowden technically has the possibility of challenging such a refusal in court, I don't imagine a court ruling against the Kremlin.

Assuming he did have a passport, though, the question becomes "How could he escape Russia?". Russia probably has a system for recording the passport numbers of people who should be detained if they try to leave the country, but maybe that system isn't 100% effective when it comes to Russia's vast remote borders and enforcement officers who might be willing to take a bribe.

(If you were going to disobey your orders like that, though, you'd probably also want to seek political asylum in whichever country you were supposed to be guarding the border with, since Putin probably won't respond well to the news that his political pawn has slipped out of his grasp).

Then the problem becomes "How does Snowden remain a free man while the US are after him?". I don't know if he's on a secret Interpol wanted list, and they probably don't have his (hypothetical) new Russian passport number, so he might be safe for a while. But suppose he manages to get as far as Finland or Norway. Could he really then catch a flight to Ecuador without his plane being forced to land so he can be arrested on America's behalf?

I think his best bet would be to travel (visa free) to Georgia, in a bus or something. Then fly from Tbilisi to Doha, and from there to Caracas, with a final leg to Quito. Alternatively, if he wanted to live in a G20 nation without a formal extradition treaty with the US, he could travel east to Indonesia.

One final consideration is that Biden might actually want to pardon him (or at least pre-emptively reduce his sentence to some token amount, like one year, if that's even constitutionally possible). In such a scenario, it might be dangerous to announce this pardon while Snowden is still in Russia, since it makes him look like more of a flight risk, so the CIA would presumably have to contact him securely (I see the irony with that) and tell him that if he can get to a neutral third country, Biden will publicly announce the pardon. That would then make Snowden's travel out of Georgia (for example) a lot easier.

Inb4 he's drafted and sent to Ukraine

The Russians are getting desperate. Next they'll hand him a rifle and it's off to Ukraine.

> Snowden’s lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, told Interfax that “since Edward didn’t serve in the Russian army and has no military service experience, he’s not liable for conscription.”

src: https://meduza.io/en/news/2022/09/26/putin-grants-citizenshi...

That might apply to Peskov's son, I don't see how it's valid for Snowden.

The only use of Snowden I can imagine so far is the same they gave to Medvechuk during last week.

The mobilization order may say one thing on paper, but in practice they're just grabbing anyone they can. If you show up to protest against the mobilization and you're a man, they'll grab you and put you on a bus to the front.

Snowden's lawyer is either not aware of the specifics of the conscription order or is choosing to represent things in accordance with Putin's statements even though his statements don't align with the actual order, which is much broader. Here's a link to the full text, [1] which does not exclude individuals without military service.

There have also been reports of people without military experience being taken [2]

That said, I very much doubt they'd draft Snowden, I don't see what purpose that would serve. Also I'm not sure I'd consider him "outspoken" on the issue, but he has expressed criticism of the Russian government over the years, including their invasion of the Ukraine. In his own words, "It was not my choice to be here, and this is what people forget. ... It was not my choice to live in Russia."

I very much doubt he considers Russia any better than the US with respect to their military & espionage programs, especially because I'd bet there's a firm (and low) upper limit on how much outspokenness the government there would tolerate from him. His value to Russia is his continuous presence on the world stage serving as a reminder about how the U.S. operates with respect to intelligence gathering. Otherwise, he's probably only 2-3 furious anti-Putin diatribes away from being the next underwear nerve-toxin assassination target.

[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/text-vladimir-putin-mobiliza...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2019/09/12/760121373/edward-snowden-tell...

Damn, he'll be drafted next, Putin is meticulously petty, if nothing else.

dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32985097

We are due for a new leak... wonder what they have been doing for the last ~10 years.

They? Are you confusing Edward Snowden with Wikileaks?

"They" as in the countless spy agencies... I bet you don't even know how many of them are in the USA alone (They all share data anyways, so what's the point?).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Intelligence_Com...

That's a lot of "spy agencies", the word "countless" still applies as it's a figure of speech. Only on HN. This is why an engineer should never be president as much as many of you wish it to be so. You can't have a normal conversation without your ocd ticking off.

I’m not an engineer.

And it’s actually not a lot when you break it down. They each specialize in different areas of intelligence. NSA does SIGINT, NGA does GEOINT, military branches do intelligence for military intelligence in their respective branch, law enforcement intelligence for law enforcement, and so on.

So why do they teach law enforcement agencies to lie about where information comes from?

i.e.: Parallel construction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

Because they get the information using illegal methods... that's why.

Okay. I don’t know what prompted that question, though.

To my defense, I wasn't only talking only about the USA in the first part of my sentence. But 17 is a shitload either way for the USA (there is probably some secret ones too... aka the black budget).

You really should read up more on how the US intelligence community functions. It can be very enlightening. But why is that a shitload?

I know too much already... they need to spy less on their people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com