Choosing Hong Kong Is a Brilliant Move by Edward Snowden
correntewire.com
correntewire.com
It's striking how one obscure blog post can be more valuable than all the media speculation on this question (that I've seen) put together. That doesn't make its interpretation true, of course. But the alternate explanation that was going through my head seems a bit movie-esque by comparison.
The infographic is taken from the South China Morning Post, a mainstream media outlet. It's followed by some verbiage about the speed of the Hong Kong judiciary and then a mention of a murder trial (actually, two trials) that's gone on for nearly 10 years - but that's a murder trial, not an extradition proceeding.
This is just as speculative as anything else but from what little we've learned about Snowden, he just doesn't strike me as some fiendishly clever schemer. If I had to guess, I'd say he went to Hong Kong because he has an interest in Chinese language and culture and went to the most comfortable place in China that's China-but-not-quite.
As Confucius said, in one of his most famous take-downs, "始吾於人也、聽其言而信其行、今吾於人也、聽其言而觀其行。At first in dealing with people, I would hear their words and trust their deeds, but now my way of dealing with people is to hear their words and observe their deeds." We'll see what appears about his planning and his view toward China and a lot of other things about him as he continues interaction with news media and the governmental authorities of various governments.
Sorry, if it sounds personal but I have to ask: How do you know he's not proficient and what does your proficiency have to do with it?
I have a basis of knowledge about how language proficiency is defined (the federal government in the United States has a standard rating scale of foreign language proficiency, as do most other countries with an active diplomatic corps and military alliances with other countries) and I know how much time it takes in specialized training programs and in-country to become proficient in Chinese, none of which Snowden has. I would find it more believable that he has some knowledge of Japanese, because Snowden lived in Japan for a while, but he apparently has little knowledge of that language either.
wow. Err... aren't there other ways how to learn a language than government sanctioned programs? How about attending lectures in the evenings and a Chinese speaking friend (not that unbelievable in Hawaii).
If you care about things like your credibility and being taken seriously you probably don't do things like fib about your salary or suggest the CIA is going to hire triads to have you whacked.
If you hope to avoid the reach of the US criminal justice system or intelligence services you probably don't meet, in person, with high-profile US journalists in a Hong Kong hotel carrying a Rubik's cube. You probably don't go to Hong Kong in the first place where your ability to predict your future fate is very limited.
And finally, if you hope to represent your prosecution as political and your acts as acts of conscience in defense of civil liberties, you probably don't start divulging operational details of overseas US intelligence operations to foreign governments - they're not related to your stated cause and just land you in much deeper doodoo.
Now, it's possible all of this is some diabolically clever ploy/gambit but, personally, I find that a little hard to swallow.
- the US did not have significant influence
- could not be strong-armed into giving him up
- would cause significant problems if he were taken without consent (or killed outright - not implausible, given the things we've seen in Pakistan)
China is a fairly logical choice - it's as far as you can run from the US in geopolitical terms. Hong Kong is just being in China without "being in China".
I don't think, though, that in the unlikely event he gets Vanunu'd out Hong Kong it would cause significant problems for anyone but him. He also doesn't really face any risk of being killed - whatever one may think of the ethics, legality or quality of targeting of the drone strikes, they do target people involved in a violent, armed conflict with the US - 'enemy combatants' as the USG likes to call them. Snowden is not any sort of enemy combatant.
Whether they'd do it or not is not the issue - Snowden is a whistle blower who's had a peak inside the system, and is paranoid (perhaps justifiably given what he was leaking) about his safety. We're only trying to explain his choice, not whether it was a good one.
edit: also, the US has already killed its citizens without trial using drones in the war on terror. I think it's a pretty thin line between "enemy combatant" and "treasonous spy", slippery slope and all..
As to the quality of his choices, I think that's the actual interesting thing - not whether we can come up with some semi-plausible theory for them. Are his choices a part of some grand strategy (like the article we're discussing seems to suggest) or are they haphazard? To me, the evidence so far seems to strongly point to 'haphazard', which is very bad news both for him personally and for the cause of civil liberties which he claims as his motivation.
I'd love to be wrong about this but not quite to the point where I leave my critical faculties in my other pants.
Defend ideals and the civil liberties that cost so much to achieve, but China or a controlled territory seems a terrible place to make that stand.
Most European countries have to a smaller or greater extent been complicit in illegal CIA rendition flights over the last decade and/or are extradition-happy or have already made it clear he's not a desirable person to host (UK telling airlines not to allow him onto flights).
Poorer countries or countries with unstable governments provide plenty of options to bribe someone to pick him up and/or drone strikes.
It needs to be somewhere where the US can't interfere without local government support without a massive backlash, and where there's at least a chance the local government or judiciary will hinder or delay an extradition, and there's not many places that fits those criteria and even fewer that fits those criteria and are desirable to go to. I assume, e.g. Iran isn't particularly tempting.
Releasing the information was incredibly risky. He might have chosen what he sees as the least bad alternative on a long list of bad alternatives.
> whatever one may think of the ethics, legality or quality of targeting of the drone strikes, they do target people involved in a violent, armed conflict with the US - 'enemy combatants' as the USG likes to call them.
Or so they say. And use as an excuse for all kinds of "collateral damage" including dead children. I don't see why the leap to going after Snowden if he were to hide in a country where they did not see a large risk of political fallout and didn't have other options, would be so great. E.g. if he were to hide in any country with a rebel movement hostile to the US, it'd be easy to claim he was meeting terrorists. I don't we have any basis for saying anything about what his risk of being taken out is.
I also find it interesting that you write off his risk of being killed by questioning the likelihood of drone strikes. US intelligence agencies have decades of history of "quieter" assassination methods.
As to the drone strikes, I was replying to the other commenter who seemed to think drone strikes or some sort or intervention by the US military is a realistic risk Snowden faces. I'd put 'covert CIA assassination' in the same bucket and I don't really know how to put this politely but this is, in my mind, tinfoilhattery.
He's facing a big fat criminal indictment - there are probably people at the DOJ working on it who didn't get to go home this weekend after he started talking about entirely unrelated (to his civil liberties claims) details of US intelligence operations. There's probably nothing the US government would like more than to see him tried on criminal charges in open, civilian court - it's a slam dunk of a case, by this point. There's nothing whatsoever to be gained by killing him.
Once indicted, I think kidnapping is at least a plausible concern - there are documented cases of US Marshals pursuing people wanted by the US courts overseas - with varying degrees of success and with or without the cooperation of local authorities. I can even think of a couple of cases pre-war-on-terror military interventions as part of efforts to apprehend wanted persons. The Achille Lauro hijackers come to mind - and even they, while being actual terrorists and actual murderers, ended up being prosecuted in Italy and serving time in Italian prisons. But again, Snowden could have trivially avoided this entire line of unpleasant possibilities by simply not getting on a plane to Hong Kong.
I don't know how much any of us is in a position to assess the how 'tinfoilhattery' the risk of this is,
its easy to dismiss that as something that only happens in movies, but if it happens in real life, would we be any the wiser?
we do know that Iranian scientists have low life expectancies
couple of thoughts:
1) Snowdon is probably in a better position than us to assess that risk, and seemed to think it was real
2) either way, going public lessened the risk, if he gets in a drunk driving accident next week, or is shot by a mugger, most people won't assume it was coincidence
3) I think Mannings fate is argument enough against staying put
Even if Hong Kong has lots of practical concerns because of its relationship with China it was obviously going to provoke obvious questions about idealistic / vs ulterior motives, a big negative I would think for someone acting from idealistic motivations and knowing from experience how much that would be questioned.
I'm inclined to agree with Glurgh's comment and Occam's razor -- he's surely bright, but doesn't necessarily seem to be some type of master manipulator / strategist to have ended up in Hong Kong at this point, good cell phone access aside.
Phone service is indeed cheap. SIM cards are bought at every kind of venue right on down to carts on the street. No ID needed, no contract. You give money, you get SIM card with nn minutes. Handsets are cheap too, really cheap, like throw away cheap. I hadn't thought about that from a signals intelligence perspective, but I bet that fact combined with the density of people would make it quite challenging to find his signal from among the others. Speaking of people density, guaranteed, no drone strikes in HK. Also, probably no movie-style snatch and grabs in HK. Aside from the tension that would cause in US/China foreign affairs, traffic would prevent that from happening most hours of the day. It would definitely not go unnoticed.
Deportation and removal orders still have to go through the court system though: http://www.hkhrm.org.hk/english/reports/eimrev96.html#Deport...
shuffling between two secure locations and flight paths
Perhaps this still qualifies as striking, but it's becoming rapidly more common, as mainstream journalism becomes ever more predictable and imitative, and individuals with expertise and actual insight, not working for news organizations, stand out as the only voices worth paying attention to.
There's no way most people who just went to Journalism school can compete with, say, an experienced Constitutional lawyer like Greenwald or Lessig, or hacker like PG or Spolsky, or VC like Fred Wilson etc.
But there are some things MSM can still do - good professional journalists can still round up experts and put together a composite of their views. Or they do real investigative journalism that bloggers may not have the resources for, be it Bloomberg suing the Federal Reserve under FOIA [1], or sending reporters to hotspots for first-hand reporting.
Personally I think a combination of data journalism and investigative journalism (like WaPo's Top Secret America [2] and Bloomberg's FOIA lawsuit and reporting) are their best way forward. Both require resources most individual bloggers can't provide, and both are real news, real journalism.
[1]: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-23/fed-s-once-secret-d...
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific...
I haven't seen much coverage of this in the US press, aside from Slate & CSM. The rest of the media seems more interested in Snowden's girlfriend and scholastic record instead (sigh).
Hong Kong has very loose exit visa policies on western passports. You can jump on a plane to some destinations with your passport only being checked at checkin (which is of the ticket). It is very simple to get to any number of ~50 countries in the space of hours and not having your identity checked until you land.
Private banking in Hong Kong means he can have money sent to him and he can spend money without worrying about who finds out who supports him.
He is also likely to find work, since there is a lot of English speaking expat work in the country especially in the IT industry.
I'm unsure if he has a path to citizenship, a path to residency is easy but I think the only way he could swap his passport is if he works out an entire 4 or 5 year residency or go citizenship via asylum.
Most smugglers go through Sha Tau Kok in the north east, but you need a permit to even enter that area.
Now I'm imagining the trouble one could cause with a cell-phone recycling bin at Best Buy.
[1] Yeah, I know.
Many cheap Chinese phones on MTK chipsets produced at non-working time without knowledge of factory owners don't have unique IMEIs, they have all zeroes or all ones in it so user can flash it itself one time; loads of fake iPhones with quadro SIMs and analog TV support can have IMEIs of few real iPhones.
I've had odd troubles with USB devices for the same reason; a bunch of them with identical or overlapping serial numbers. I wonder how much of a problem it causes for the operators, I doubt their systems were originally designed to accept duplicate IMEI.
I could walk today in any second-hand shop (selling used CDs, videogames, books, coffee machines etc...) and buy a crappy old unlocked Nokia, for less than 20 bucks, cash, no ID required.
But if I would need a SIM card, even if top-up, I would need to go to a service provider and give at least a valid ID.
The weak link would still be the SIM, not the phone. A place where you could easily get anonymous SIMs would be a definite advantage in order to mantain anonymity, so I guess the author has a point.
Start with the South China Morning Post, the main English language newspaper here which has been covering this story extensively. The current editor, Wang Xiangwei, joined in 2011, is a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Congress, and has been criticized for self-censorship multiple times since taking over.
Then you have the political system here, where people can vote in local elections but not in the main election that actually decides the Chief Executive (President). The current CE, CY Leung, was dogged by accusations that he was a Communist Party member throughout the election period. These accusations were not without merit given his political history (appointed to a prominent committee at a young age, a position traditionally occupied by party members), and these issues have not died down since he's taken office.
It makes no sense for Snowden to have come to HK for its political freedom. Neither is this city a hotbed for political dissent. The Occupy movement here was largely ineffective (there were often more homeless people than protestors at the camp), and power here is concentrated in the elite (HK has one of the highest Gini coefficients in the world).
He came here because here he can leverage China vs the US. Any talk of political freedom or appreciating the culture is pure fluff.
It's not a outright conspiracy to believe that there's a largely hidden but real power struggle between US and China. China probably likes the fact that Snowden has brought NSA and US government into public scrutiny and they are probably plotting a way to make the best out of it.
"US citizen flees oppressive government, seeking refuge
in China."
Why do you feel the need to add "easily"? It is not easy at all.
Some dissident like the artist Ai Weiwei recently are playing all the time with the sensitive nerves of the regime but he managed to make himself famous enough, and to never crosses the red line too far as to get "suppressed". For instance, there is this picture of him giving the finger to Mao in Tiananmen square, but it is labelled "art".
With these guys trying the system all the time and the highly reactive web sphere, suppressing dissent is far from an "easy" job.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/09/world/asia/chinese-activis...
They don't seem to have had much trouble at all keeping him in jail for 22 years from where he probably didn't get to do a lot of public dissenting.
Another cultural traits: Chinese men are more shy than, say, male US citizen. I have lived in China 10 years, I don't see how anyone could deny this.
And yes, I have met the cliche of the Chinese being "easy to control" a lot of time.
Edit: You may be right that it's not "easy": I'm sure it costs billions and billions of RMB a year. But they've had a lot of success at it.
Phones are incredibly cheap; the cheapest functional Android knockoff smartphones will run you about $50-80 (all prices in USD for simplicity), maybe less if you get it in Kowloon. "Burner"-style phones can be as low as $8. SIM cards are essentially free (usually about $8-10 deposit on the card) and minutes are as lower than $0.01 each[1]. Data is about $5/GB prepaid. All cash, no credit cards, no checks. You don't even have to give them your name.
Coverage is completely universal here because the density is absurd. It's a cell phone carrier's dream; one tower can potentially reach nearly a million people. Taxi drivers here regularly have half a dozen cell phones in their cars. One for personal use, one for work, one for less savory work... who knows, there is always a lot going on, especially in relation to gambling.
Additionally, the broadband is great (and cheap) - I regularly get as much as 250mbps or more to the US from my home connection. I can say with confidence that I browse US sites more quickly from here than I could from my home connection when I lived in the states. The ping is of course higher but it is not as bad as you'd think (150-180ms).
There are great technology centers like Cyberport[2] that will rent you a desk or tiny office with gigabit internet for very little money.
It is easy to disappear in HK because it is so dense. While housing is not cheap it is available and some landlords will take cash. Being white earns you stares here, it is well known that the Chinese suffer from the same problem we do; it is difficult to tell white people apart, much like we may find it difficult to tell some ethnic Chinese apart. I am speculating but it could be used to his advantage: with a hairstyle change and contact lenses it would be difficult for a US citizen to identify Snowden, going only on the news photos. It would be even harder for a foreigner. That is, if the novelty of seeing a young nerdy white man doesn't arouse suspicion alone.
Members of the expat community have been setting up rallies for Snowden and they have been getting decent attendance. The South China Morning Post has been very favorable in their framing of his actions. I think the populace here is very sympathetic to his plight.
As for the legal system, I can't comment; I just work here, man.
[1] Keep in mind, prices are in HKD - 1USD = 7.76 HKD. http://one2free.hkcsl.com/jsp/prepaid_sim_card/o2f_local_pre...
| The ping is of course higher but it is not as
| bad as you'd think (150-180ms).
to cut straight to the chase
a special administrative region of the people's republic of china is actually more free than the USA.
Source: I was born in Hong Kong.
And it's not because the US government isn't doing some pretty horrible things, as we can see.
Then the only debatable thing that remains in censorship, and "absolute power corrupts absolutely".
It might not be a democracy, but if people are truly happy/content ... why would they riot ?
It will only get worse as long as people want security over liberty and elections are decided by money and not voters.
Define 'free' in this context.
Also, the system they have in place for surveillance of telecommunications seems exactly the same as the one the U.S. does: "The use of covert surveillance and the interception of telecommunications and postal communications can be granted only to prevent or detect 'serious crime' or protect 'public security.' The law establishes a two-tiered system for granting approval for surveillance activities, under which surveillance of a more intrusive nature requires the approval of a judge, and surveillance of a less intrusive nature requires the approval of a senior law-enforcement official." (Section 1(f)).
Indeed, the U.S. system is a bit more stringent, because "surveillance of a less intrusive nature" requires a law-enforcement official to get a FISA warrant (from a court that isn't an Article III court but is composed of Article III judges).
US used to be the gold standard in democracy and justice.
It's not a new thing.
Actually I'm not aware of any point in US history where an NSA employee could leak information to foreign journalists and not face charges.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistleblower_Protection_Act
Unfortunately for Snowden, the Act only covers federal employees, not the private subcontractors whose security clearances may expose them to criminal acts, but whose employment status leaves them unable to report them safely.
US used to be the gold standard in democracy and justice.
There's really nothing like Hong Kong in the US-- a New York-sized city with a dramatically different cultural, governmental, and economic history.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+density+by+c...
Less than 25% of total land area of ~400 sq. mi. is actually developed.[0] The average density of those developed areas is thus incredibly high. Mong Kok for example, has a density of 340,000 / sq. mi., which is described as the highest population density of any district in the world.[1]
[0] http://www.gov.hk/en/about/abouthk/facts.htm
[1] http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/11/world_population_wh...
That is nothing short of astonishing. Are the parks and undeveloped areas open to the public?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hong_Kong_Parkview_2.jpg
The downside is that housing is close to the least affordable in the world with respect to median income. The average flat size is ~450 sq. ft., (of which typically less than 80% is actually the inside of the flat itself).
There have been a number of photo exhibits of late depicting the housing conditions that a significant portion of the population have to deal with:
http://www.psfk.com/2013/02/hong-kong-micro-slums.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2306842/Stunning-ima...
Check out the view from abovehttp://www.airpano.com/360Degree-VirtualTour.php?3D=honkong
I paid 50HKD/month for "50mbps" cable internet (some special deal at the time). What a joke. I got 50mbps torrenting and about 0.5mbps from anywhere outside Hong Kong.
The OP's "It's a cell phone carrier's dream; one tower can potentially reach nearly a million people." is the exact opposite of true. Frequencies used for mobile communication are limited and with that the total bandwidth of a cell site is limited.
This is the main reason new G's are coming out, 3G is packing many more bits per Hz then 2G was, and 4G is doing yet more.
New frequency bands are released for mobile communications to further alleviate the problem.
Network planners have to install more and more cells in dense urban areas and be careful not creating too much noise on the frequency as they have to reuse frequencies and codes.
In a place like HK skyscrapers are creating lots of problems with signal shadows and reflections.
Major office buildings sometimes have (unintentionally) selective glass that keeps outside mobile comms frequencies out and have indoor antennas that have strong and clean signals, but this is hardly the case for residential buildings.
In case anybody doesn't know - HK is nothing like (mainland) China in terms of costs of living, quality of infrastructure or the standard of living. It's the Asian version of NYC or London. Really expensive, really high class, really good infrastructure etc. Basically nothing you associate with the word 'China' other than lots of Chinese people.
I don't live in India, but I do live in Argentina, and there are guys selling SIM cards on the subway and outside the train stations for, I think, AR$5, which is about US$0.76. No registration, no questions asked. If you instead go to a cellphone store, not only do you need to register, but they want ID.
I suspect that India is porous enough that there are similar holes in whatever controls they have to require registration.
I don't get 250Mbps in my house though; maybe 1Mbps to the US. And the murder rate is a little higher than in the US.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5854562
Some of the rationales for being in Hong Kong we see attributed to interview statements by him sound like statements by a person who knows a lot less about east Asia than he thinks he knows. In the six years that I lived in east Asia, all spent there after first learning the history, language, and culture of China thoroughly by university studies and independent reading and participation in foreign student clubs before going over, I grew quite tired of instant experts on Asia who can't even speak any local language. Snowden made the move he could make when he decided to leave his employment at Booz Allen Hamilton, but it's not clear that his move was "brilliant" or even very thought out at all.
If you carefully look at Snowden's actions and his statements to various press establishments, his entire strategy is based on playing one group off another. He got the Washington Post to publish a story on Prism by getting the Guardian to run one on the Verizon warrants, for example. If you look carefully he is doing the same thing regarding Hong Kong.
1. He went to Hong Kong and immediately made provocative statements about the commitment of the special administrative province to the rule of law and to political dissent. This does not mean he believes that this is the nature of things. What these statements immediately did was put the image of Hong Kong's independence at risk of Bejing comes in too forcefully.
2. He then makes a number of statements about US intelligence activity which, quite frankly, everyone would probably assume to be the case anyway (hacking Chinese internet backbones etc). This creates a US vs China dynamic and shows that he can be a danger to the US if the US does not back off.
In essence what he has done has been tailored around Hong Kong specifically. He has chosen somewhere to make a stand that fits his strategy, nothing more and nothing less.
I assume he doesn't have a real forged passport. But how hard do they check for leaving Hong Kong? Could he get to Iceland and instead of trying to fool Icelandic passport control, just request asylum?
China has steep controls on its own citizens leaving China. Hong Kong is now part of China, and probably a favoured way out.
Busy border guards are busy. He might slip in unnoticed on some dodgy documents. Also, HK is an island, and China is like, right there. One could get into the country unseen via boat very easily. Boats are coming and going along the coast all the time.
However, he's in Hong Kong. I expect that a "real forged passport" or a high quality fake passport or an actual passport stolen from someone is... procurable. Maybe a nice Australian passport, for example.
- The idea that he can stay hidden for long seems doubtful. He is now a high enough value target that he would have to have money and connections like Osama bin Laden or go off to live in a cave in the middle of nowhere with little (or preferably no) human contact to escape detection.
- There probably are plenty of people that escape international man-hunts, but they aren't people that have pissed off the entire US government, in addition to embarrassing powerful people on the international stage.
I'm not saying that the US will send in a strike team to Hong Kong (or Pakistan or another political heavy-weight) over Snowden. I was operating under the assumption that most of the countries with no extradition to the US might not have the political clout for "anyone to care" if the US sent in a team to capture or assassinate Snowden[1]. I actually went an took a look at the extradition list[2][3], and it seems there are quite a few countries that I could see him stay in without the US caring enough to send in a covert team.
[1] The assassinate is just to drive the point home about how little people might care (other than politicians everywhere decrying the act to gain possible political favour). I agree that the US is probably more interested in putting him on trial than 'taking him out.'
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extradition_law_in_the_United_S...
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_extradition_...
No it would not, because Presidential candidate Obama made it clear he would do this in a debate in October 2008:
And if we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable or unwilling to take them out, then I think that we have to act, and we will take them out.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2011/may/01/...
It's been official presidential policy since the first Bush administration and re-asserted under Clinton.
http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/pdd39.htm is an example of a presidential directive regarding extraordinary rendition to the US. (Never mind the extraordinary rendition to countries such as Libya, Egypt, Syria, etc., used to circumvent legal issues regarding torture.)
There's plenty of historical precedent as well. Israel has many well-known cases of tracking Nazis down on foreign soil and rendering them for trial with US support and assistance. Eichmann, Entebbe, Munich/Operation Wrath of God, etc.
Once you get into 'universal jurisdiction', you'll discover violations of international law committed without the assistance of the country harboring enemies of our United States. Sometimes the US has worked around official channels, such as in the case of the Achille Lauro.
He's not "in hiding" from the intelligence services. I suspect even second tier countries know where he is.
NZ was in the original Echelon program, in terms of intelligence they fall squarely in line with GCHQ and friends. It's really one of the worst locations he could choose, right after the US and Britain.
Argentine here, you can buy SIM cards literally everywhere. Vendors will even sell them to you on trains.
It would be interesting to explore if Edward Snowden has any handler. And how exactly he chose Hong Kong and decided to reveal that the NSA has been hacking the Chinese.
I'm not sure what you are trying to imply - the choice and timing of that particular leak would seem to be a logical choice once he'd chosen somewhere to go.
If the article makes a case that in Hong Kong people can take to the streets, it so happens that they did in Delhi [1]. Hell, India has a superior record of amnesty than most other countries [2].
Plus, the tech work scene is undoubtedly better in India as well as .... um... not being 100% undemocratic.
I personally am of the opinion that one of the big reasons could be that the pay is potentially better in Hong Kong - especially for someone from Booz Allen.
[1] http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2013/0315/Reacti... [2] http://www.unhcr.org/50001ec69.html
By choosing HK, he "kinda" knew what he was getting into. Comfort.
New Zealand is the land of night-raids on Kim Dotcom's home to please American corporations -- not exactly a prime candidate.
Sweden is the country currently responsible for Assange's plight.
Switzerland, as I said elsewhere, is now an EU state in all but name, and their security services are laughable anyway.
What Snowden needs is not "neutrality" in a Cold-War sense. Strictly speaking, no government will ever defend the ideas he's fighting for; he can only choose the lesser evil, the place where he gets the most leverage out of his stance (i.e. most non-US-friendly nations) without losing his rights (i.e. most democratically-run nations with a respectable legal system). There's only a handful of countries in this peculiar intersection, and HK is definitely one of them.
> New Zealand is the land of night-raids on Kim
> Dotcom's home to please American corporations
> -- not exactly a prime candidate.
Agreed. The changes they made to their banking after 911 are a clear indication of how much reach the US has within Swiss borders.
They may not be technological paradises, but it's pretty hard (nearly impossible) to be extradited to the US from any of them.
That depends on how badly the US wants him. If they want him badly enough, they'll buy him from China with an offering big enough to create a winner. That would be trivial for the US to do - they could have Snowden back in a few days - but the price might be very high.
Would that do? Yep, I think it would. Perhaps even just the substantial delay of new arms sales. It's meant as a black and white example, but it proves my point. There are countless things the US could give China that are worth a lot more to China than Snowden is.
Your comment is comical in its lack of realism. And that's comical because you're alluding to me being the unrealistic one. In reality, politics is a game of buying or trading favors. It's that simple, and it works that way locally or internationally.
Or, if that doesn't suit your fancy, any of the WWII dealings among the Allies about how things would be divied up.
Has he set up offshore bank accounts in advance? Won't they get frozen too?
Is he planning on working in HK? He probably doesn't have a visa that allows working, and switching visas usually requires leaving the country. He's too well-known now to work under the table.
Did he carry huge amounts of cash?
If something you don't know becomes vital to a project you're planning, you fire up Google every day for a few hours and learn what's going on. It's clear he didn't leak on a whim: he planned it over a certain period of time and, being a smart fellow, had all the time in the world to read up on the fine points of US international diplomacy, which would significantly narrow down his research pool on extradition systems.
"For one thing, I don't remember Martin Luther King, Jr.,
or Rosa Parks running off and hiding in China. The people
who ran the civil-rights movement were willing to break
the law and suffer the consequences."
"That's a little different than putting the nation's
security at risk and running away."
"What I see in Edward Snowden is just a narcissistic young
man who has decided he is smarter than the rest of us"
"I don't know what he is beyond that. But he is no hero.
If he has a point — which I'm not sure he does — he
would help his cause by voluntarily coming home to face
the consequences."
Schieffer to Snowden: Come home, face the consequences
No, he turned himself in.
Snowden wants all the glory and none of the bruises.
If that doesn't demonstrate a lack of selflessness, what does?
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg#Trial_and_mistr...
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/html5/video?id=9135822&pid=913582...
CIA, NSA and the whole gamut are now much more efficient than they were 40 years ago (no need for due process etc.) If you try to play fair, they'll fuck you over big time.
Look how much good the legal system was to Aaron Schwartz for a minor misdemeanor. You'd never hear from Edward Snowden, until he just came out and admitted he was Chinese spy and that he loves Big Brother, I mean Big Government.
PS. He isn't in China btw, he is in Hong Kong. Which isn't a communist country as comment before me noted.
The difference in technology (between now and then) is huge, since our lives have migrated more towards the Internet. Before the wiretapping could only go so far. You needed to install wiretapping in a room (phones could always be bugged).
Now wiretapping is everywhere. You literally carry the equipment for others to wiretap you (mobile phones, laptops, google glass, etc). It's just an order of magnitude more easier now.
The point is the same, you actually carry around tools that allows others to spy on you (this wasn't the case before). Happy?
I hope we are not forgetting that civil disobedience is not the only legitimate form of resistance. Particularly, when the prerequisites for successful civil disobedience are not precisely met, attempting it is not being noble but rather just being foolish. There is nothing admirable about taking yourself out of the fight for no reason other than to satisfy those who demand strict adherence to the principles of civil disobedience.
The whole point of the Snowden story is that the government is not trustworthy in this era. I would not trust the US government to give him justice any more than they did Aaron Swartz.
I think Snowden knew exactly what to expect if he "faced the music" and exactly how much attention he could keep on his story in exile.
You're kidding me right?!? You honestly think the era he lived in was fair and just to people like him? Do you know how many lynchings there were in Florida alone? Does the name Emmett Till ring a bell? What did you think MLK fought for?
Do any of you believe that there would have been a new Letter from Birmingham Jail if Snowden were imprisoned? Keep in mind the US authorities are calling this civil rights whistleblowing "treason". Aiding the terrorists and enemy combatant status cannot be far behind.
Like it or not, the rule of law has been badly damaged by the endless emergency.
These days you do your nonviolent resistance from behind the safety of a diplomatic minefield.
Not by anyone who understands the legal definition of treason. Among other things, treason presupposes formally declared hostilities. Even Cold War turncoats convicted of espionage for aiding the Soviet Union couldn't be charged with treason, since technically, we were never at war with the USSR.
But of course, they would just as well argue we're in the War on Terror. It would be an obvious flimsy justification but, there you are.
A far more likely tack would be trying him under the Espionage Act, which is vague enough to make prosecution easy and defense hard. Relatively speaking, at least.
That hasn't stopped us from starting or entering numerous wars, of course... they're just "undeclared." Cuts down on the paperwork, dontchaknow.
His belief that justice would someday inevitably prevail belied the injustice of his system. To the degree that any of what you suggest was true in the day, it wasn't true at all for blacks, less so for those who didn't 'keep their place'.
In this modern case, Edward Snowden is the beneficiary of far, far more privilege and opportunity for fairness from his own government than Martin Luther King could ever have hoped for. Just imagine what the discourse would be if Edward Snowden turned out to be Arabic, or Muslim, or went by a Muslim sounding name. If he fled to the wrong country they might already be picking smoking chunks of him off a cafe wall. There would be no debate in the media as to whether he was a 'hero' or 'traitor'.
Maybe, instead of hoping that people will maintain perfect civility throughout a nonstop stream of political discussions, something could instead be done to ratchet back the politics on HN?
Although yeah, implying that blacks in the American South in the mid-20th C could rely on the justice system is ridiculous enough to force me to agree with rayiner for once.
But he essentially implied that a black guy fighting
segregation during the height of communist paranoia and
racial tension in the 1960's could count on a fairer
shake from the justice system than a wealthy white kid in
2013 with the support of a rich and influential segment
of society.
Just wanted to give some encouragement since you seem really discouraged by HN this week. It's been straining on the whole community, I think.
I don't think it's unreasonable to speculate that Edward Snowden, if arrested in the US, would be denied bail. He would be facing decades in prison. It's quite likely he'd be held in solitary confinement and he could even be subjected to "Special Administrative Measures" (a recent invention) that would severely restrict his freedom to communicate with the outside world[3]. There would be no Letter from a Federal Detention Center from Edward Snowden. These draconian sentences and measures make it completely impossible to conduct a meaningful campaign of civil disobedience, as they can be wielded to completely neutralize a movement's leaders and serve as a warning to anyone else who is thinking of doing the same thing.
What's truly ahistoric is comparing Snowden to MLK to suggest he needs to come back to the US and face the consequences. Snowden may not be facing beatings and lynch mobs, but he would be facing a justice system that would treat him far more harshly than it ever treated MLK. We've thankfully lost many of the great evils of the past, but there are new evils. Civil disobedience is even more difficult today, and what's especially insidious is that instead of it being discouraged by lynch mobs and corrupt southern sheriffs, it's discouraged by the justice system itself.
(We should be thinking about the consequences Snowden would face because the essential civil disobedience of the future may very well be about information, but if you'd rather look at "conventional" protesters more akin to MLK, consider Al Sharpton being jailed for 90 days in 2001 for trespassing during a protest against a naval base in San Juan[4], or the case of the anti-nuke protesters that was on HN a few days ago[5]. Not quite as draconian as the situation Snowden could be facing, but the sentences are still unfair, longer than what MLK faced, and make carrying out effective civil disobedience extremely difficult.)
[1] http://www.thekingcenter.org/faqs
[2] http://www.lib.lsu.edu/hum/mlk/srs216.html
[3] They're mostly used for "dangerous" prisoners, like suspected or convicted terrorists, but they're also used for those accused or convicted of espionage charges: http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2009/June/09-ag-564.html
[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/24/nyregion/sharpton-and-3-fr...
As a parallel example, I'm not too enthused about our use of drones in military conflicts these days, but a lot of people who object to the use of drones overlook the fact that 20 years ago we did the same thing with cruise missiles, and 20 years before that we engaged in carpet bombing, with a much higher loss of life in the aggregate as you go farther back in history. So it's reasonable to argue that drones are bad, but naive to omit the fact that they're substantially less bad than how we used to wage war.
I was going to say that we need to adopt a new understanding of what it means to be free.
Maybe most people care more about security than freedom from surveillance or government corruption. If this is what they want, then this is what they'll get and if we're going to talk about being free we need to redefine freedom so that it reflects the unrestricted flow of information instead of arbitrary "endowed" rights, which aren't rights at all if we don't want them.
The Civil Rights movement was a struggle of a minority against a majority for rights that were rightfully theirs. Today, the majority is handing its rights over on a silver platter to the security/intelligence agency. I think we are less free.
It's not something that needs a lot of thought if you consider that the current president allegedly personally authorises deadly drone strikes even on american citizens (on "Terror Tuesdays"), while Nixon had to resign over Watergate.
As to Federal law enforcement, the FBI tried to blackmail him personally with recordings implicating him in extramarital affairs; see http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/01/king-like-all-frauds-yo...
Also, the 1950s Red Scare was a fairly recent memory; that resulted in ruining the livelihoods of numerous Americans, including at least one prominent and politically active African-American, Paul Robeson.
"he would help his cause by voluntarily coming home to face the consequences" - I think that quote suggests who's smarter out of Schieffer and Snowden.
Here the message is "young narcissistic man, who ran away"
"But bob, you are only arguing the means, not the end. Do you think, the idea of a surveillance-free America should be stiffled ?"
That question, will never be asked with equal flair, in a one way propaganda.
What Bob is doing is, he is compressing the issue to a trifle.
It's the reporter equivalent of calling "LOL OP, you are such a short sighted faggot" and receiving precious HN karma for it.
When you can't win a debate, you win by stinking it up and making others leave.
That's how trolls killed love4eva-forum.
Every sell-out reporter is doing it, for quite some time actually.
Edit: Does anyone remember the sheer Debauchery of the press, during the Occupy movement ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Earl_Ray
Head down to the "denial of confession" section. Whether or not there was a conspiracy, I just wanted to bring up that it was still questionable about who actually shot Dr. King.
The jury–six blacks and six whites—found that King had been the victim of assassination by a conspiracy involving the Memphis police as well as federal agencies. [1]
The judge continued: “Do you also find that others, including governmental agencies, were parties to this conspiracy as alleged by the defendant?’ Your answer to that one is also ‘Yes.’” [2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Martin_Luther_...
[2] http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/Unspeakable/MLKconExp.ht...
I submitted reference 2 as a HN story. For further discussion of the MLK conspiracy go here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5891883
That's correct, and I agree that participating in civil disobedience, by nature, requires being willing to "do the time" as part of making a point.
Whistleblowers, however, are a different story. I don't believe that Snowden was trying to be a martyr for Americans' right to privacy; I think he saw something that he wanted to be revealed (or that he thought needed to be, if you're arguing his side of the story) and leaked it.
That's as pristinely analogous a case as it gets to Snowden's, with diametrically opposed approaches the actors took to pursue their causes.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Bradley_Mannin...
However any attorney or advocacy organization will find it extremely arduous to prove that he did this in good faith.
Fleeing only makes it worse.
It is universally considered a symptom of insincerity.
An insincerity of mission and an insincerity of motive.
It will be an entirely unconvincing case even if it were made in the court of public opinion much less closed-door hearings.
Had he even made the slightest of effort to reach out (to whatever institution, individual or group that he trusted, based in the United States) he would have left an indelible impression on privacy advocates, news organizations and the larger public, even if his criminal fate eventually remained unmitigated, by that act of outreach.
How is the problem (that the NSA can record everything we do online) related to a young man's attempts to save his skin?
Would the NSA stop spying on us if it turned out that Snowden was a buddhist monk? Would the NSA stop spying on us if he'd let himself be crucified on a hill near Washington, dying for our sins?
Turning the attention on his means is another way to deflect it from the main problem: that NSA and friends run wild on all the routers in the world with no respect for anyone's privacy or human rights. This is the real issue, regardless of whether Snowden is a saint, a prostitute, a Dutch double-agent or an alien with a penchant for bicycles.
If Snowden had been "crucified on a hill near Washington" (or even just stayed anonymous), it wouldn't have ended the NSA's spying but it would have definitely added force to his message. Focusing on his means may be a deflection, but he is somewhat responsible for allowing the deflection being as compelling as it is.
I'd say the media is to blame, but the act of camping was probably the real problem.
(Or if "journalists" still believed their job was to serve as a check on, rather than an apologist for, the powerful)
MLK was planning a huge "live in" on the National Mall to pursue greater income equality and there were plenty of interested parties that would have wanted to prevent that.
I guess the NSA learned from that episode; apparently they preemptively told every member of Congress about all the awful things they've been doing recently. Of course the secret setting in which they admitted these transgressions was designed to put the legislators at a disadvantage. Multiple Representatives have denied ever understanding what the briefings were about.
IMHO, Snowden should just ask for political asylum if that is what he went to hong kong for. Given the circumstances, he would probably get it.
As for not facing the death penalty, he looks like he's halfway at deaths door already, they're just taking their time about it. The world is watching the way Manning is treated and drawing its own conclusions from that.
Instead that tends to be evaluated as a whole and not just with a narrow lens that happens to mesh with whatever you were looking to find.
It is, in my mind, akin to spending / political contributions in politics. Money has an essential role to play but should not be allowed to corrupt the process.
Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Three branches of government. We hold these truths ...
"Not as brave as MLK" does not make much sense as a put-down.
Sounds awesome, you have to love a lack of options.