Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

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> Andreessen says Snowden's a traitor by the basic definition, in which he stole national secrets and gave them to our enemies.

Ugh. That's ridiculous. The basic definition of a traitor is somebody who betrays.

Snowden didn't give the secrets to enemies: he gave them to journalists, the informational representatives of the general public. Saying that because of that he's a traitor is like saying people who work at Mozilla are traitors because they're giving software to Al Qaeda and Boko Haram. Sure, it also goes to those people, because open source software goes to everybody.

From what I've read about Snowden, he's definitely not a traitor, in that he seems to have felt that his oath and his allegiance to America required him to alert the citizenry to other people betraying America by creating an enormous, unconstitutional surveillance apparatus. I'm entirely ok with people saying he's wrong, or saying that he's a fool. But calling him a traitor strikes me as either hysterical or manipulative, and I'm sad to see that coming from Andreessen, as I have a lot of respect for his other work.

If I give secret information to Bob, and Bob gives it to the enemy, that could land me on the hook for giving it to the enemy. Bob may not be at fault, either, since I'm the one that signed the secret clearance agreement with the government, not him.

I think this is all besides the point, though. Unless I'm missing something big, Snowden's crimes are all conditions of his having a security clearance.

The terms of his security clearance cannot be allowed to nullify his oath to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States, can they?

That might make you in violation of your security clearance agreement, which might be a crime. But it doesn't make you a traitor.

Snowden is only a traitor if you believe that "the American people" - who are the primary recipients of the disclosed information - are the enemies of the American government. Which Andreessen may well.

No, not even then. The government and the nation are not the same thing. The oath of allegiance is to the nation and the Constitution, not to the government, and it specifically includes the proviso of protecting the nation against "all enemies, foreign and domestic". If there are traitors here, they are the ones who violated the Constitution, the ones who helped conceal those violations, and the ones who saw all this happening and said nothing.

> Snowden is only a traitor if you believe that "the American people" - who are the primary recipients of the disclosed information - are the enemies of the American government.

While I don't buy into the "Snowden is a traitor" argument (as traitor has a specific Constitutional definition for a reason, unlike any other crime), you can certainly be guilty of espionage even if you also provide information to the American public.

E.g. The Soviet spies who got information on American nuclear weapons development programs were clearly guilty of espionage; note that this is true even if they didn't actually manage to get the information to their Soviet case handlers.

But if they leaked those same nuclear weapons programs to the American public (and by extension, the world public) in addition to their Soviet case handlers they'd still be guilty of espionage.

Snowden is the Manning case all over again. You can make an argument for whistleblowing for information he revealed showing crimes committed against the American people. For literally all other information (stuff that doesn't reveal crimes, stuff that reveals the NSA doing its literally assigned security mission, etc.) it's illegal espionage, whether the American public happened to be CC'ed or not.

Agreed - one might think Snowden misguided, but his reasonings seem to hold up given certain prior assumptions (e.g., allegiance to the constitution).

I would also be quite shocked if other major Powers didn't have a really good idea of what exactly the NSA is doing: they probably know better than most publics. Spies are gonna spy on spies, and that should be expected. The question is the limits on the spying the law & polity have put in place. I agree with Snowden that the polity of the US has a right to understand the scope of what's being done in their (our) name (specifics I think are quite fine being kept to trade secrets).

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