Petition to Pardon Edward Snowden
petitions.whitehouse.gov
petitions.whitehouse.gov
This is a government agency that is commiting widespread breach of privacy. A petition will not be respected. It's an OK start, but it will be essentially meaningless.
If you want results, riot in the streets. Civil disobeience. Historical actions and movements that achieve some measure of peace.
The ease of an action corresponds to what it can achieve. Do you want change? Show the government how badly you want it. Fight for your rights. Don't just click a link.
They've demonstrated they don't care for the voice of the people. So change the domain to something they do care about.
I'd happily agree what the NSA did was just as wrong as, say, making it to easy to get mortgages. But the law and morality don't always agree.
That's not much of a warrant that respects the 4th amendment.
So far, no evidence has been produced to support your assertion. In fact, all evidence in the leaked documents, official statements, etc. suggest the exact opposite: warrants are served that allow investigators to make specific searches, with oversight processes to try to reduce the number of US citizens' data included in the search.
In other words: prove your claim. Cite something other than a Reddit or HN comment from a tinfoil hat-fitting specialist.
In his own words: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/06/07/transcript-what-oba...
Is it, though? The widespread Verizon metadata gathering is what I'm most concerned with right now. It, too, was whistleblown by Snowden.
> the US Supreme Court has already ruled on the legality
I understand this program to be ruled unconstitutional by the Foreign International Surveillance Court, albeit with the findings suppressed by the justice department for "national security" reasons.
I thought this was the stuff Senators Wyden and Udall were briefed on and aghast about, but unable to explain to the American people.
Do you understand this differently?
On a side note it's fascinating how the government has taken the 'digital piracy' logic of "I didn't steal it, the guy I copied it from still has their copy!" and re-arranged that to apply to digital data on a person. I'm not sure whether to cringe or be impressed...
Even if they were going to copy your work that would be a "search" as some government agent would have to copy that paperwork.
Things are different now, so that's one of the things we as a society need to figure out is how much the 4th Amendment is different to match.
Which leads me to an important aside: how much of the outrage being vented here comes from people who don't even know that these are two different programs? Take everything you read here with a huge block of salt.
Edward Snowden's rationale for leaking this info is that people never realized that collection of metadata of phone records and PRISM and other programs had gone so far. Maybe SCOTUS ruled on some of this, but the public never realized the implications, largely because it's all protected by top secret classification.
I used the Verizon story in my comment because those implicated in PRISM said in their carefully crafted PR messages that their warrants were for specific subjects and unlike Verizon's vast dragnet. Anyhow, as other have pointed out, it's not hard to draft a specific warrant for the narrow group of 'every US user 13 years or older' which is what I'd presume PRISM involved. Also, the slides leaked for the PRISM stories showed that PRISM was the improvement on older collection techniques of essentially splicing Internet backbone cables.
Agreed on taking replies here with a grain of salt.
Can you really get a warrant that broad? I assumed PRISM still entailed warrants issued on a user-by-user basis.
Again, though...that program is legal. It's not even a controversial point (unlike with PRISM). From what I know of it, the rationale for the supreme court decision that says mass collection of metadata is legal is fairly well established, has a long judicial precedent, etc.
Yes, Snowden's rationale seems to be forthright. He's bothered by the implications of surveillance on this kind of scale. And I get it -- hell, I even agree. But most of the commentary I've been seeing on HN is just embarrassingly uninformed (or misinformed).
"it's not hard to draft a specific warrant for the narrow group of 'every US user 13 years or older' which is what I'd presume PRISM involved."
All of the public information about PRISM has explicitly said that information can only be obtained when one party to the conversation is a foreign national. I've read nothing to suggest that broad warrants of the sort you describe are any more legal than before.
Granted, IANAL, but I have worked as an engineer in In-Q-Tel funded companies, text analysis, and search. Nothing I'm saying is any reflection or representation of anyone I've worked for and is only my ill-informed, zany, personal opinion.
You need a lawyer to translate anything our leaders (biz, gov or other) say. It's all form with very little substance. If you thought you heard something definitive you almost certainly misunderstood.
Nobody (here) knows. This conversation is more heat than light in part because people are spouting all sorts of uninformed nonsense just to perpetuate their theatrical sense of outrage.
What I've read so far suggests that there's some sort of FISA-related oversight of the "reports" generated by PRISM. It sounds like analysts can do queries based on certain rules that are designed to include only conversations with foreign participants, but to get detailed information they need to go through a FISA court.
Honestly, though...you can't tell much of anything from the documents that have been leaked. Most of the details you see people discussing here are speculation, or worse.
The government position is that it isn't a search until they subject the data to analysis. Nor is it a seizure when you still have your data. Thus they draw a line between collecting data (making sure they have it) and actually searching it. Therefore broad data collection does not violate the 4th so long as they always get specific warrants before actually searching that data.
Why have no accountability and no transparency if they were not going to violate our privacy? I'm flipping the "If you have nothing to hide" bit on them.
But even if there were oversight, the main issue is the potential for abuse. Having all that data in the hands of an entity that can imprison you is a pretty frightening idea. Sure, maybe they're following the rules now, but in desperate times, people can behave immorally and radically. Do not trust other human beings, even if they are under the umbrella of "government". Look at what evil humans have done in the last century alone and you'll agree that we should limit the potential for abuse as much as possible.
The rest of your argument is about reality as civil libertarians see it, and not how the government sees it. (Because, after all, they think that the briefing that Congress gets and the oversight of the FISA court is sufficient protection.)
First, "unreasonable" is a key word. Is the copying of data without any noticeable inconvenience to the citizen considered unreasonable? Another key word would be "seized", is copying considered seizing? Seizing is legally defined as the removal of property, one might argue that no seizure was ever made during this wiretapping.
Second, the Bill of Rights was written over 200 years ago. During that time PHYSICAL searches and property seizures were the primary concern. Nobody could even fathom the concept of the Internet or the role it would play in today's society.
This reminds me of the copyright talks but obviously when it's citizens doing it, copying is stealing but when it's NSA, copying is not an issue because it does not remove anything ...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/government-says-secret...
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/government-says-secret...
I don't understand exactly what happens when a law is found unconstitutional. I can't imagine an analyst at the NSA would be retroactively charged with a crime, would they?
Personally, I think that anyone against this should show a civil disobedience by refusing to pay taxes.
Well put.
How do you define "to riot", and "civil disobedience". They sound mutually exclusive to me.
Besides it's summer time…
Do you have any backups for that? I mean, any historical proof that rioting will make change?
You know, Tunisia went on a relatively peaceful revolution and now we have less freedom and more problems/unemployment. It's even worse for countries where the revolution is violent.
Having lived that experience, I'll be against rioting/civil disobedience any time and for any cause.
Want to make change? Educate people. nothing else.
Not necessarily the DESIRED change, but it certainly changed things!
Let's not forget that it brought us something even more beautiful : The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of_Ma...
The world was certainly changed. Not always for the better.
1. The fatalities and economic losses
2. The high possibility that the power goes to the wrong hand.
3. The good possibility that the power doesn't change hands and we are stuck with even less freedom.
4. Revolutions make the country very vulnerable which is an opportunity for enemies.
Small and secure changes are better in my opinion. Revolutions have a high risk of going wrong.
If you asked me 3 years later, you'll get a different response. Having lived through this so-called Arab spring, I have now a very conservative view for revolution.
There's genuine problems with US Democracy. The lack of a good voting system (preferential, or better still - acceptance voting) means a stable two-party system.
Statistically, protest actions can be beneficial, as long as they don't go too far. No politician wants angry people on the streets. Media tends to cover it. It's a good way for a minority of people to have a huge impact (for better, or worse, depending on whether you support what the protesters want).
The problem is, a lot of protests are pretty much zero sum movements. They are things which half the people want, and half the people don't want (environmental protection, gun rights, gay marriage). A protest for something which would be popular, but most people don't really think about could be more useful.
Take lessons from the past, and APPLY them to your context.
I'm not saying that rioting and killing Obama is the solution. I'm saying that using the government's tools (petitioning) against them is ridiculous. You have to show people you're angry, you have to show your entire country you're angry and you want things to change, laws to change, the system to change. You have to take a real stand.
EDIT : As I mentioned in some other comment. The revolution brought us Democracy, which later spread across all Europe, and brought us the beautiful Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen which is used everywhere in the world as standards (not always respected though). I believe the revolution was the most beautiful part of France history. Napoleon was our anger which was still resonating years after the Monarchy. We're calm people now.
You can take a stand without destruction.
Hell, ask Snowden if he would rather have organized online action to protest, or people in the street beating other people...
In the same way, the Russian Revolution eventually generated Stalinism and brought suffering to the Soviet block, but it was a tremendous inspiration (and often brought material help) to workers' rights movements in many other countries, de facto creating the "social Europe" we currently enjoy (or used to).
EDIT: it's also funny to see these comments on American websites. Hello, your country was built by an armed revolution that was as nationalistic in practice as it was universalistic in inspiration. As certain modern philosophers from the Five Boroughs used to say, "you gotta fight for your right to party" :)
The Russian revolution started relatively peacefully, moved on to a brutal civil war, and then to draconian dictatorship (under Lenin) in just a few short years, then in 21 the resulting wars and disastrous economic policy caused a famine that killed 6 million people before NEP was introduced. And that was well before Stalin began to terrorise the country. Again, I think you're romanticising events which were nasty, brutish, and mostly harmful in their effects.
I'd argue European socialism (the social Europe we currently enjoy) evolved more from the evolution of liberal democracy and liberal capitalism in a peaceful society than from Marxism - many of the things Marx & Engels criticised have been peacefully removed (child labour, alienation of workers from means of production, lack of unions etc). Granted the UK and other European nations have other problems, but let's not forget how far we came peacefully, and how much of a set back to civilisation war and revolution really are.
You might want to also check out The Anatomy of Revolution - it details the broad life cycles revolutions succeed through. It concludes that revolutions are overall detrimental to lasting change in a society. The American Revolution is discussed in order to explain why it turned out atypically.
I know my history well enough, I'm not denying that revolts often (but not always) result in weak political structures which are prone to collapse in the short term; you only need to look at the current wave of Middle-Eastern "springs" for confirmation - from Tunisia to Egypt, in practical terms they're now worse-off than under their dictators. Still, they play a often necessary role in putting the fear of consequences in the heart of established elites who would otherwise refuse to change; places like Saudi Arabia are now grudgingly considering improving conditions of their women, for example.
With respect I completely disagree with this - the reforms to working conditions and the state of our societies in Europe which have happened since Engels wrote 'The conditions of the working classes in England' or Marx 'Capital' have improved because of gradual progress in western democracies introduced because of peaceful protest and people working within the democratic process, on things like mandatory schooling, no child labour, minimum wages, right to assembly, health services, benefits etc. That's a far longer time-frame and was not influenced by the USSR, either in funding western political groups or acting as a sort of bogieman for western governments.
I disagree that revolutions and the attendant violence and destruction are necessary or useful in deposing tyranny, quite often they produce the opposite effect, as the two examples you initially brought up show.
The only country where you can try and talk of a continuous peaceful development is post-Cromwell Britain, which is why this country is still, in many ways, the less socialist of the lot (and getting less so by the day, I could add). Still, the influence of Soviet ideals was so strong even in this land, that there was stuff like the Cambridge Five, something that today is completely unconceivable.
Violent revolutions are not always necessary, but they can (and did) provide inspiration for wider movements.
Also, it was one of the most interesting periods for arts and litterature ever to occur. Great example indeed
Do you have any backups for that? I mean, any historical proof that rioting will make change?
Then you say this:
Want to make change? Educate people. nothing else.
Your teachers must have omitted teaching you about the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War protests. And those are only two examples where protesting and rioting actually made a huge difference.
With some significant exceptions, like the Weather Underground (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground).
Oddly like many — if not most — of the "terror plots" that have been "stopped" over the past however many years, that...
After the American Revolution we setup a government under the "Articles of Confederation". To put it bluntly, this new government sucked and was useless.
A convention was held to suggest improvements for the Articles; they decided instead to do it over again and propose a government that could actually stand the test of time.
The framers of this new Constitution then had to convince the rest of the country to adopt this different form of government. In the process of this debate and feedback it was decided to further specify Amendments that became known as the Bill of Rights to satisfy some reluctant states.
All of this happened peacefully.
The United States of America peacefully transitioned to its second form of government on March 4, 1789.
It hasn't been all peaceful, all the time, after ratification, but it should be in my opinion. We've managed to achieve so much as a nation with non-violent resistance and protest, there's no reason not to do that here to push for transparency.
The third U.S. republic was created after the Civil War, with the passage of Constitutional amendments that made the Federal government unambiguously superior in power to the governments of the states.
The fourth U.S. republic was created during the Progressive Era, with the creation of the "regulatory state" in which significant authority over economic matters was delegated from Congress and the courts to regulatory agencies in the Executive Branch. This system evolved gradually over the years (with the biggest changes coming through Roosevelt's New Deal and Johnson's Great Society) into the system we live in today.
The changes wrought by the Civil War were unfortunately quite violent, but all the other changes have been peaceful, as you note. Our ability to reinvent our democracy in this fashion is a big part of why the Constitution has survived so long -- we can change how we govern ourselves in big ways without having to tear it up and start anew.
Talk is cheap. What sort of riot do you plan on participating in? The sort where you surround a government building, or the kind where you just trash whatever comes to hand?
But signing this petition takes 30 seconds and is useful. I urge you to consider it.
But yes, transparency should go up as well as down.
Upvoting your comment here too, though. Thank you.
If there is no threat of repercussion, why would any entity bother negotiating with you?
In some cases, just following the rules to the letter can be annoying enough to make the powers that be change things.
But yes, having some real threat as a backup has tremendous benefits. 'Nice government you have here; it would be a pity of something happened to it' works better of you have that.
For example shutting down a city's infrastructure indefinitely via mass-scale physical sit ins is likely to be much more effective than signing an internet petition. Labor strikes en masse are likely to be much more effective than signing an internet petition. _INSERT_REAL-WORLD_ACTION_HERE_ is likely to be much more effective than signing an internet petition.
If the state knows that it can violate its subjects with the worst backlash being an internet petition, guess what -- the state will continue violating its subjects indefinitely.
The was Malcolm X though. The threat of militant and violent backlash was there and served like a booster for the non-violent factions. Otherwise look at Occupy movement. How many bankers are in jail? None. There _has_ to be a background and credible threat to the system so it would consider the peaceful alternative as a pretty good deal.
There were things here and there that many seemed to agree on - but it was not nearly focused enough to matter. I think if it were accompanied by any kind of violent protests, the people in general would have completely turned on it - and without legitimate goals, I think rightly so.
Its not comparable to Civil Rights, imho. That was a moral imperative with clear, legitimate, practically implementable goals. There was moral high-ground, general sympathy among the people, and a roadmap (e.g. extend the rights to us that are extended to everyone else). I'd love to see something similar for the modern age of privacy violation or holding gov't officials accountable - but I haven't seen it yet.
Im playing a bit of devil's advocate here, but I think followers of Civil rights movements, with relative ease, would be able to answer similar questions. I sympathize with the energy behind the Occupy movement, but like most people I'm not sure what to do about it - who or what to support, and how to act. And that, imho, is why the Occupy movement fizzled.
Occupy needed to remain peaceful, no doubt about it. But without a large alternative group that wasn't afraid to use violence, Occupy was always going to be marginalized away. They had coherent messages. You and most people don't know them because they were bottled up, discredited and shut down. Exactly what will happen to any peaceful movement.
Personally, I think there's still time for a peaceful alternative though: we all need to start getting directly involved in politics.
What ridiculous nonsense. King would have gone nowhere had it not been for the Black Panthers blowing shit up (he even mentioned "the blast heard round the world" in one of his speeches, so he knew this). Likewise Gandhi would have just been ignored or killed had it not been for courageous revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh.
The truth is, a proper revolution requires violence (or the threat of it) and a peaceful side. The violent part is requires to force actual change and the peaceful side is needed so the targeted party have someone to give the power over too. The British empire would never have handed the reigns to someone like Bhagat Singh. But once Singh and co had made holding onto India simply not worth it, they gladly stepped back and claimed it was because of Gandhi. This way, the next time they're doing some awful the people will hopefully think they can be like Gandhi and they would be free to just ignore/kill them.
Governments don't want people to understand just how effective violence actually is (if violence isn't effective why do governments use it so much and try to maintain a monopoly on it?) because they don't like to lose.
1. poison databases; feed bogus information to surveillance systems at all levels, do this as a matter of course, make it pop culture.
2. build darknets: for instance wifi nodes disconnected from the internet that multiple communities use as a dropbox and rendezvous point ( a linux box, a solar cell, some git magic (or UUCP/Usenet for the old school feel ), and you have something that exists beyond the knowledge of the network ) for extra kicks confine it to only a few locations and times. Or build entire networks air-gapped from the internet; wire your neighborhood and make your own media.
3. If everybody's an informant, make a game of it. Rat out your enemies to the authorities, better yet rat out the informants as rabble rousers...
4. Get serious; break into secret databases, copy them and spread them around.
5. Identify effective advocates of the national security state and neutralize them. But only the effective ones. If you're doing the job right the 10 people within the NSA who are politically adept and technically competent should be in jail for child pornography by this time next year. Any mid-level member of the intelligence community who isn't regularly getting hit with bogus charges and stupid anonymous pranks is probably grossly incompetent.
6. If you know anyone who works in the intelligence community, shame them socially; ask them why they are making the USA into East Germany.
7. Occupy
8. Free your mind, and your ass will follow.
i.e., bomb. pentagon. drop-point. fertilizer. sarah jessica parker.
(Not that this whole age discussion is relevant at all, I must add.)
It looks like it takes extremely high effort to achieve anything worthwhile: look at what the labor and civil rights movements had to endure, for instance.
But, there are plenty of examples of other change that was achieved at lower cost. The environmental movement, for instance, generally did not face levels of institutional rejection and physical violence that labor and civil rights did. Why? Because they had a message that a broad swath of Americans could believe in. Regardless of party, ideology, or race, no one wants their kids to get sick from pollution.
So, the first steps in activism should be the easiest steps. They might work! And if they don't, having tried them creates the moral authority for more aggressive tactics.
Movements that jump straight to civic unrest are typically rejected by the broader American culture. Most people highly value law and order, and are only willing to tolerate departures when they think it's absolutely necessary.
Despite the semantics, this is a good idea to let the administration know that a lot of citizens do not consider what Snowden did to be a crime and support his actions.
This petition suggests a similar maneuver with Obama and Snowden.
See eg. https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/grant-full-pardon-..., a past pardon petition.
1) If you do nothing, nothing will change. Protesting might not be the best choice, but it's better than no action at all. This petition will change absolutely nothing, especially if it only reaches the minimum required signatures. There are 311,000,000 people in the United States which means a menial 100,000 signatures accounts for 0.0003215434% of the total population. Not even 0.01%.
2) Martin Luther King Jr changed the course of a nation with civil disobedience. To say it can't be done again is ignorant and foolish.
on a separate note, I really do worry about the well being of this guy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5840000
and commenting on cases I have personally observed and participated in of turning a country from dictatorship with a secret police including political assassins into a representative democracy with a free press, fair elections, and independent judiciary, and constitutionally protected civil liberties.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5844864
That said, I am also on record somewhere on HN expressing the general opinion that it is pointless for us to submit White House petitions here as new stories. That's not really on-topic for HN, and it's not clear to me (in light of my knowledge of what kind of protest movements have worked in the past to overcome dictatorships) that posting a White House petition here does any good in the real world. Your opinion may differ, but I offer the thought that we have better means
http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html
of tackling your concern about government data-gathering programs than posting White House petitions. If you like the petitions, share them in your social networks in which you see your friends, but discuss the real, powerful democracy hacker tools here.
Sign here to admit you are treasonous terrorist-loving scum who should be under constant surveillance by the NSA for the protection of all fine, upstanding, compliant 'merican citizens.
When we say "put your John Hancock" on it, there's a reason...
How many others dare to let the administration know your opinion about transparency?
Upvoting and discussion on HN is important, but if 50% of the people who read this take 30 seconds to sign the petition, it could truly help.
Imagine the US Government having to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this disclosure caused "exceptionally grave damage to US national security."
This would have a chilling effect on leaking, to say the least. Miscalculating the public's capacity to care should not increase your sentence.
"If he has leaked something of value to America and the world then he should not be punished. But if he has leaked nothing of value then there was no need for it to be secret, and he should not be punished!"
I dunno. At the very least it would be nice to have the evidence out in full before jumping to conclusions.
It's a good start. If enough people sign, it will force the administration to answer the petition. Even if it doesn't push the administration to give a positive answer, it can help fuel more protests and actions.
(This is where the relevant part comes into play)
Before the communications director was unceremoniously fired by the President, the President told the communications director:
"When you walk out of here, there'll be people out there, perhaps a great many, who'll think of you as a hero. I just don't for a moment want you thinking I'll be one of them."
(disclaimer/spoiler: The communications director was pardoned by the President after much deliberation on the President's part. This was mainly due to his very close friendship, and the fact that the communications director had a family on the way)
A blanket free-ride for any and all crimes just won't ever happen. What if he murdered several people along the way, let's say they weren't government employees or involved in PRISM at all, does that mean he should be pardoned for that? The language on this petition needs serious work to get real support, or to have a reasonable chance of being addressed.
If Edward Snowden murdered people that were not government employees or involved in PRISM, then that plainly would not be crimes related to blowing the whistle on secret NSA surveillance programs. If it was at all ambiguous, it could be argued in court.
(referred to this thread -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5846391)
(i'll keep posting this, enjoy)
"Where's the petition to NOT pardon him!!"
I will do it. I will ragequit. This site is turning into a libertarian silicon valley version of freerepublic.
When you've found civilisation, America, in 1000 years or so you'll realise that autoritarianism works and that's why you've got it.
If we had a fascist government, everyone would be in prison except me. I'm sick of the police failing to do their job because they don't know that it IS: to provide a level playing field, that I can see, so I have no need or temptation to cheat in the first place. As an average HN reader, you know this is correct. Ever been pulled over for speeding on a road where everyone else gets away with worse? Until the state STOPS the bad guys having all the fun, you, the state, down to every beat cop, haven't done this. More government now. Much much much much more. Make 50% of the population into prison officers and cops if necessary. There'll be zero unemployment.
Well whaddya know. The great recession has caused Europeans to return to fascism. Way to go Dick Fuld(!)
@pg : either ban all politics from the site or deal with the fires of hell that start in 5 4 3 2 1
Hi there NSA readers, keep it up.
You are not entitled to outrage over data you freely gave away.
And the NSA has had domestic phone metadata since the 1970's, the only thing different is the speed and scale.
The real focus should be on the guy who gave up state secrets and then defected to China. Did he make some kind of deal? There were a dozen better ways to handle the abuse he perceived at the NSA - he chose what was most convenient for him.
He does not get my respect, and he is certainly not a hero.
GOOD!