Edward Snowden says he would like to return home

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/edward-snowden-nsa-cbs-this-morning-interview-today-2019-09-16/

by smacktoward • 7 years ago

157 189 7 years ago

cbsnews.com

reeboo• 7 years ago

He wants the jury in his trail to be made aware of jury-nullification.

ceejayoz9• 7 years ago

I'd argue there's a distinction between a public interest defense and jury nullification.

Both ask the jury to vote not guilty despite the legal fact of guilt, but the reasoning is different. Public interest defense says "yes, this was illegal, but morally necessary given the particular details of this case". Jury nullification is more "yes, this was illegal, but it shouldn't be" in my mind.

kerkeslager2• 7 years ago

I don't think you're getting the difference quite right.

A public interest defense is one that argues that a public interest exception, included in a law, applies. In jurisdictions where a public interest defense is possible, i.e. Canada, it applies only to laws which include it as a public interest exception (in Canada, it would be the Security of Information Act of 2001). If a defense argues that a murder was okay because it was in the public interest, that wouldn't be a public interest defense, because the laws against murder don't include a public interest exception. Arguing that such an exception should be made by the jury, rather than that such an exception in the law applies to your case, is a straightforward argument for jury nullification.

In the US, I'm not aware of any laws that include a public interest exception, so a public interest defense would not be possible--appeals to the jury to find someone not guilty because their crime was in the public interest would be appeals for jury nullification.

There are a few defenses that work on these sorts of exceptions which only apply to specific laws. For example, truth is a defense against a libel charge but not against a HIPAA violation charge, and self defense is a defense against a murder charge but not against a robbery charge.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_interest_defence

behringer3• 7 years ago

"And, essentially, the most important fact to the government and this is the thing we have a point of contention on, is that they do not want the jury to be able to consider the motivations. Why I did what I did. Was it better for the United States? Did it benefit us or did it cause harm? They don't want the jury to consider that at all. They want the jury strictly to consider whether these actions were lawful or unlawful, not whether they were right or wrong. And I'm sorry, but that defeats the purpose of a jury trial," Snowden said.

amalcon• 7 years ago

Snowden is not necessarily right about that. The purpose of a jury trial is to establish facts in a minimally biased manner[1]. This is why summary judgement[2] exists: to streamline the proceeding where the disagreement is in the law, not in the facts.

The one thing that clouds this a bit is that the US government cannot constitutionally rule that someone has committed a crime without going through a jury trial. This means that there can never be summary judgement against a criminal defendant (it's mostly a civil litigation thing). Some interpret this as an attempt to explicitly create room for jury nullification. Others interpret this as an attempt to make sure that we never short-circuit the fact finding process in the name of expediency. In practice, it has both of these effects, but there's some debate as to which one is the theoretical grounding.

[1]- At least to the extent that humans can ever either establish a fact or reduce bias [2]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summary_judgment

cm21872• 7 years ago

But are you suggesting the laws that penalise stealing classified information are unfair and should be abolished (like slavery laws in the past)? I think these laws must exist.

If I was a jury (but keeping in mind I am not even a US national), a fair sentencing would be to recognise him as guilty but to sentence him to a short term / time served.

There were many ways in which he could have blown a whistle without releasing wholesale everything he could find on the internal network to some foreign newspapers.

hollerith• 7 years ago

If I was a jury (but keeping in mind I am not even a US national), a fair sentencing would be to recognise him as guilty but to sentence him to a short term / time served.

In the US, the judge decides the sentence and cannot sentence him to less than a minimum. For example, if convicted (by the jury) of treason, the law states that he "shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000", and the judge cannot impose a sentence less than that.

sailingparrot• 7 years ago

"But are you suggesting the laws that penalise stealing classified information are unfair and should be abolished (like slavery laws in the past)? I think these laws must exist."

Where did OP suggest that? Jury nullification is specifically a case by case judgement, not a broad statement.

dsfyu404ed2• 7 years ago

Talk about an adversarial interview. It reads like a higher brow version of the game of 20-questions you play with the cops when you get pulled over for a fishing stop. They're constantly trying to trip him up and get him to say something harmful to his case.

317070• 7 years ago

Exactly, and those fishing expedition questions are not interesting anyway. They are not what I want to find out about the story.

yellow_lead• 7 years ago

Call me tinfoil, but I got the feeling the interviewer was fed questions by the government.

hannasanarion3• 7 years ago

Not necessary. TV media networks have been sucking up to the government basically since the beginning of TV news. See also, TV news' furor to hype up the Iraq War, even as many newspaper journalists and politicians were crying foul. Or the news' complicity in covering up the bombings of Laos and Cambodia, widely reported in foreign news.

excalibur• 7 years ago

Additionally, the transcription is terrible, possibly intentionally so.

If you look back at the history of the United States, it doesn't take very long for the average person to think about a moment in which it was absolutely illegal to do something. But at the same time, it was absolutely the same thing to do.

Was this intentionally misquoted to take some of the wind out of Snowden's sails? I'm not sure, but given the hostile nature of the interview itself I definitely would not rule it out.

mLuby3• 7 years ago

In contrast, his (counter-)interviewing skills are impressive. Thoughtful and unflappable.

rhacker• 7 years ago

I can't fucking believe that it's come to this. Every top social media company was (is?) funneling private data into a search interface presented to an agent with no need of warrants.

The trial should be the other way around - The People Suing the US Government. The top lawyer representing the people? Edward.

smacktoward• 7 years ago

I like to believe there's an alternate-universe America where it's Ed Snowden who is filling stadiums to hear him speak, and Donald Trump who has been exiled to Russia. It feels more like the America I grew up believing in.

DoofusOfDeath2• 7 years ago

Having attended public elementary school in the 1970's, it would seem we were fed a very optimistic, filtered version of American politics.

Schoolhouse Rock's presentation was very selective.

StreamBright3• 7 years ago

You grew up in a America that exiles people to Russia?

linkregister5• 7 years ago

Is that what happened? The PowerPoint slides imply that, but I'm having trouble having that claim substantiated.

adossi• 7 years ago

I believe he is referring to the 'PRISM' program that the NSA used.

nappy-doo2• 7 years ago

Just before PRISM came to light, Google to pains to encrypt all internal traffic. AFAIK, Facebook hasn't done this.

linkregister5• 7 years ago

Cross-DC, not necessarily internal traffic.

pmiller23• 7 years ago

I agree, but, the thing is, in order to sue the government, you need two things: legal standing, and (yes) permission from said government.

Standing is tough, because you can factually know that millions of people are being spied on this way, but if you can’t prove you suffered damages, no standing for you. This was one of the key issues that kept the no fly list alive for so long.

The second arises from the concept of sovereign immunity. The government is essentially immune from lawsuits unless they grant specific permission to sue, or there’s an existing law that says you can sue.

ydnaclementine• 7 years ago

Obama should have pardoned him

ndarwincorn3• 7 years ago

Should have? Sure.

Given how his administration treated Chelsea Manning idk why we'd expect that.

ceejayoz9• 7 years ago

Obama released Manning. Commuted her sentence decades early.

adam122• 7 years ago

Yeah, especially since open government and whistleblower protection was a part of his campaign for president. He is a liar.

soperj• 7 years ago

Fact that Guantanamo Bay is still open speaks volumes.

lern_too_spel6• 7 years ago

Does it count as whistleblowing if 99.9% of the documents you leak don't describe anything illegal the US government did (the only one being phone metadata collection) and if far more of the documents leaked describe compromised foreign systems that will then be patched?

Obama is way smarter than anybody asking for clemency for Snowden.

China: https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1266777/exclusiv...

Pakistan: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/docum...

ocdtrekkie• 7 years ago

Obama talked in public and even campaigned about surveillance state reform, but in actual action doubled down on the darkest parts of our post-Patriot Act government. Obama wasn't responsible for starting our incredibly unethical use of drone strikes on civilian populations, but he massively expanded it, and much of the misconduct revealed by Snowden and Manning's respective leaks were Obama's shames to bear.

I think it's easy to look back fondly on his Presidency in comparison to the travesty we see today, but Obama was not a good person.

lern_too_spel6• 7 years ago

The drones weren't targeting civilians. They were targeting combatants who were in turn targeting the government the US had set up to replace the Taliban. Would you rather Obama ramped up another ground invasion?

As far as doubling down on surveillance, Snowden's leaks showed that Obama shut down surveillance programs that might include Americans' data, including email envelope collection. He did not start any such programs.

WillPostForFood2• 7 years ago

So given that Obama was willing to commute Manning's sentence, and given that the House Intelligence Committee unanimously voted to ask Obama not to pardon Snowden, perhaps Obama had good reason not pardon Snowden, and the damage Snowden did was worse than his advocates are willing to acknowledge.

4ntonius8lock• 7 years ago

House Intelligence Committee unanimously voted to ask Obama not to pardon Snowden
perhaps Obama had good reason not pardon Snowden
the damage Snowden did was worse than his advocates are willing to acknowledge

The damage he did is precisely why his advocates want him pardoned.

He damaged people who were subverting the US constitution. He provided the evidence for this.

Some us think the organizations he damaged were/are acting against our democratic institutions, and therefore the damage is welcome. He not getting granted a pardon would seem to us as evidence that these anti-democratic, anti-bill of rights forces are deeply connected to the highest levels of government.

But the key here is how you perceive the people who are subverting our liberty. Welcome anti-terrorist agents? Or anti-democratic shadow agents with the capacity to implement turn key dictatorship?

devmunchies• 7 years ago

SHOULD HAVE. Presidents actually serving the people ended with Kennedy. The whole Snowden fiasco is one example that Obama is no nobler than any other president in the last couple decades.

paganel• 7 years ago

Agree. Any chance Trump will do it on a whim? I’m not a fan of the political character by any means, but afaik he’s known to be doing contradictory things for whatever reasons (if it matters I’m also not a US citizen and I’ve never been to the States).

opportune3• 7 years ago

I think if the right person got inside his ear he actually might, however I find the chances of that to be low. Most of the republican leadership is of the opinion that he is a traitor (as are most of the non progressive democrats). So it would take someone special

vim-guru• 7 years ago

This! Both Snowden and Obama seems like reasonable guys, this should have been settled years ago.

pgcj_poster2• 7 years ago

Snowden should be brought home, given a medal, and put in charge of the NSA.

—Richard Stallman

derwiki• 7 years ago

Just because Stallman said a thing doesn't lend much credibility to it. See also: his defense of Epstein.

emilfihlman• 7 years ago

Mate... I recommend you read on the matter before making such wild claims. It was basically a hit piece on him.

sixstringtheory• 7 years ago

Just as his saying it shouldn’t _lend_ credibility to the statement, his saying it shouldn’t _detract_ from the credibility either. It’s an adhom either way. Extremely effective unfortunately, since pedophilia is extremely taboo, it’s like if someone is calling out obvious tyranny you can get everyone to ignore them by crying “pedo”. They can be a pedo and still be right about the surveillance state. Of course, I can imagine a world where absolute surveillance is pushed in the name of rooting out things like pedophilia “for the greater good” because we “think of the children.” Go read or watch The Circle if you need a little help imagining.

thinkingemote• 7 years ago

Stallman gets hit pieces all the time. Then five years go pass and people say "I thought he was jerk, but he was right all along". Then it repeats itself.

dx873• 7 years ago

I wish news sites would stop omitting that in addition to the information he leaked about what was going on in the USA, he also leaked a lot of classified information that had nothing to do with the USA. I don't know how he'd argue that providing classified intelligence about China to the Chinese government is in the public interest.

_iyig• 7 years ago

Can you be more specific, or provide a citation?

dx873• 7 years ago

Here's a news article where they say that he showed them classified information about computers in China that the NSA had access to.

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1260306/edward-s...

SolaceQuantum3• 7 years ago

So Snowden here claims there has been no evidence whatsoever he caused any harm. Is this true? I realize I personally haven't heard any cases where the info Snowden leaked was linked to the death or bodily injury of persons of interest or their friends/family. Which is like, hm, ok, is there something I missed here?

If no one's been hurt, and the US has long upheld the need for law breaking when the law is unjust (the unlawful action of a black woman sitting in the white section of the bus) then I don't understand why his asking for a fair trial where established cases of just law breaking are brought up is contentious.

EDIT: I should clarify since I think there might be some confusion- I'm not saying that Snowden broke no laws. I'm saying I don't understand why his law breaking is contentious, given we have cases in the past of people breaking laws for just purposes that are generally accepted as just behavior. If Snowden wishes to make that argument, why are people scandalized about him wanting to go on a fair trial about it?

ceejayoz9• 7 years ago

If Snowden's leaks had caused significant harm of the deaths or blown covers sort, we'd have heard all about it in the news. It would've been instantly leaked or openly disclosed to discredit him.

I'm sure there's monetary harm from security audits, investigations. The argument Snowden wants to make is that those harms were necessary to inform the public of something they had a right to know about.

ganoushoreilly2• 7 years ago

Im not entirely certain we would have. That doesn’t go with the M.O. of protecting classified information and sources. I imagine right or wrong, he created an operational impact and or void with his disclosures that required adequate efforts to mediate. I’m not sure we’ll ever get a true estimate of loss because it’s almost impossible to calculate and state without disclosure and risking operations.

SolaceQuantum3• 7 years ago

"The argument Snowden wants to make is that those harms were necessary to inform the public of something they had a right to know about."

Right... my question is... why is this contentious?

tobylane2• 7 years ago

There was a mild fuss at the time that some undercover agents had to be pulled out of the field, and were outed. I don’t recall anyone being named before returning home.

fortran77• 7 years ago

Rosa Parks was arrested and convicted.

https://nccriminallaw.sog.unc.edu/was-rosa-parks-convicted/

Parks’ conviction seems to have stood despite the unconstitutionality of the ordinance she was convicted of violating.

While she did do a lot to effect change, your statement that "the US has long upheld the need for law breaking when the law is unjust" is untrue.

SolaceQuantum3• 7 years ago

Sorry, I should clarify-

The US has upheld, culturally, that what Rosa Parks did was just. Snowden isn't asking not to go to jail, he is asking if he goes to jail that he be given a fair trial where the cultural impact is also implicated in his law breaking. Thus, I'm confused why his position is so contentious.

docdeek• 7 years ago

Reporting [0] yesterday had him give an interview where he suggested he would love to find asylum in France instead of returning to the US. I get the feeling he just wants something like a life back.

[0] https://www.leprogres.fr/france-monde/2019/09/15/le-lanceur-...

rihegher• 7 years ago

the link for the interview: https://www.franceinter.fr/emissions/l-invite-de-8h20-le-gra...

emilsedgh3• 7 years ago

Another scenario is that extortion of Julian Assange made him realize that sooner or later Russia will use him as a leverage in a negotiation and send him to the U.S.

mrlala• 7 years ago

Then come home. I'm not really on his side here. If he thinks what he did was so morally correct then he should have stayed.

pastor_elm2• 7 years ago

He could have gotten pardoned by Obama, but he preferred to remain under the protection of Vladimir Putin.

alasdair_• 7 years ago

The only reason Edward Snowden is in Russia right now is that the US cancelled his passport while he was in transit, leaving him stuck there.

pastor_elm2• 7 years ago

That prevented him from returning back to the US?

emilsedgh3• 7 years ago

Additional to the passport issue others mentioned (and if I remember correctly) he said he would return, given a non-military trial.

I find it a bit difficult to find the source given the fact that these keywords are on top of headlines now.

kerkeslager2• 7 years ago

I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me that the two most relevant pieces of law to this case are 18 U.S. Code § 798[1] and the First Amendment[2]. I think having read both of these is a minimum prerequisite for having an opinion on how the law should be enforced: you can't say how the law should be enforced if you don't even know what the law is.

I also think that the following are two very different questions:

1. Is what Edward Snowden did legal?

2. Is what Edward Snowden did ethical?

It's dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/798

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_...

AndrewKemendo• 7 years ago

There is nobody who questions whether his actions were legal, they clearly were not. Snowden acknowledges this. So to that end, he could have a completely fair trial and still be found guilty and sentenced to punishment.

The follow on question is whether the law is constitutional.

So far the government hasn't agreed that it is unconstitutional, and the USA Freedom act is a result of the interpreted language, see:

ACLU v Clapper

Klayman v Obama

Jewel V NSA

dragonwriter8• 7 years ago

There is nobody who questions whether his actions were legal,

A number of people have suggested that at least some of the programs he revealed were illegally classified to conceal their own illegality (and at least one was found to be illegal in one of the court cases fueled by the revelations), and that no lawful prosecution can proceed for revealing material illegally classified in that way.

nabla9• 7 years ago

It's obvious that Snowden broke laws.

But Snowden can provide evidence that whistleblowing would not work as way to provide evidence of wrongdooings. Other global surveillance whistleblowers received punitive treatment (William Binney, Ed Loomis, and J. Kirk Wiebe, Thomas A. Drake).

He committed political crime and if he is judged by his peers in open court they can take that into account.

jhales• 7 years ago

The plausibility of a fair trail in the shadow of the Assange debacle is 0.

tgsovlerkhgsel• 7 years ago

I'm wondering what Russia did or did not get.

Assuming we trust that Snowden acted based on the motivation he stated, it's plausible that he destroyed his copy of the documents before traveling to Russia.

However, once there, and stuck in that holding cell for weeks, completely in the hands of Russia, I can't see how he'd withstand the pressure to give them what he still had and couldn't get rid of - the knowledge in his head. (But keep in mind that the US brought the "Snowden in Russian hands" situation upon themselves by cancelling his passport.)

I also can't see how the newspapers would be able to keep the documents secret from a foreign intelligence agency. Such a high-value secret stored and handled in a dozen different places, by people who only have a short opsec training, limited understanding, and few resources and little support to establish effective security...

Not saying Snowden shouldn't have done it; his revelations showed massive illegal spying by the NSA, and triggered (some, not sufficient but better than nothing) reforms. But claiming no harm seems a stretch.

linkregister5• 7 years ago

The US cancelled Snowden's passport prior to his departure from Hong Kong.

cmiles744• 7 years ago

Unless the US has someone from inside Russian intelligence willing to go on the record that Snowden provided actionable intelligence, this seems like a moot point. Certainly this kind of circumstantial evidence (or, really, lack of evidence) wouldn't be allowed in a proper, legal trial.

lern_too_spel6• 7 years ago

We already know that he divulged detailed lists of Chinese targets in a failed attempt to gain asylum in Hong Kong. That would be allowed in a trial, and would lock him away for sure. https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1260306/edward-s...

mLuby3• 7 years ago

Setting aside anything Russia might have gained, there was clear harm done to the reputations of US intel agencies (and US more generally), as well as minor but directly consequent limits placed on their abilities. I don't know if you can tie GDPR into all this but that would likely include "damage" to economies as well.

What matters is whether the disclosure helped more than it hurt. I think the jury's out on that until either the next major terror attack or the US pardons Snowden.

baddox• 7 years ago

Yeah, whistleblowers “do clear damage” to the organizations they expose. Personally I blame that damage not on the whistleblower, who is just telling the truth, but rather on the people who actually did the illegal or inappropriate things that the whistleblower exposed.

wolco• 7 years ago

Your believe that foreign intelligence agencies are all knowing and have the ability to act quickly is probably not accurate. On tv they do but in reality most of their work takes time and their ability to react quickly is based on previous intelligence and careful planning. I can see how the reports could retrieve and filter the materials without issue. No one ever really planned this scenerio or at least put resources in place to opt it.

tyingq2• 7 years ago

All knowing might be a stretch, but on the other hand, there's stuff like "ssl added and removed here" that let the US be pretty close to it for some portions of the internet: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-i...

dsfyu404ed2• 7 years ago

In theory he should have nothing or nearly nothing actionable in his head. The policies and procedures of spy organizations like the NSA are tailored as best they can to avoiding situations where low level people have anything of value in their heads (division of responsibility, siloing teams, etc.). You are very much just a gear in the machine. At least on paper that's how it all works.

tyingq2• 7 years ago

I wonder if he is seriously considering returning, or if this is just to generate some renewed interest, or perhaps offers from countries more comfortable to him than Russia.

While I respect his motivations for doing it, smuggling classified info out of a secure facility on a memory card hidden in a Rubik's cube is a crime. A fair trial won't change that.

He can do a lot more good staying free and sharing his viewpoints, versus rotting in a Federal facility for years.

BucketSort• 7 years ago

Edward Snowden being treated like a criminal instead of a hero really opened my eyes. He's a patriot who tried to warn us about a government agency reaching far beyond the powers granted to it by the people...and he is called a traitor? It's the most outrageous thing I've ever witnessed in this country. We need Snowden back. He put his life on the line for the people of this country. I can't say I know anyone in Washington with an equal commitment to the people.

smolder• 7 years ago

While I agree Snowden did a heroic thing, he is very visible due to being a whistleblower. There are potentially lots of people doing selfless and principled things that stay secret, since secrecy really is important in that business. There is a tension between citizens need to keep their government from going astray and the government's need to outwit its adversaries. It's pretty clear to me we have gone too far in the direction of a surveillance state, but those agencies still serve a good purpose, too.

jameslevy• 7 years ago

Not to tread too much into political territory, but if Warren or Sanders is the next US President I'd assume he will receive a full pardon.

mywittyname• 7 years ago

I don't assume he would, but I do hope he does.

flmontpetit• 7 years ago

Until the pendulum swings Republican again and he gets thrown into jail. Remember Chelsea Manning?

adam122• 7 years ago

That's because Obama didn't give Chelsea a full pardon.

zcrackerz• 7 years ago

If it were an actual pardon there would be no way to retract it. Now if they just declined to prosecute, that would be a different story.

fooker3• 7 years ago

That seems like an interesting assumption, given than Snowden had to escape the country when Obama was the president.

epistasis2• 7 years ago

I'm not fololwing, what's connecting Obama's behavior to Warren's and Sanders's?

imglorp• 7 years ago

That was a disappointment. Obama ran on restoring the rights retracted by the Patriot act, on closing Guantanamo, etc. After taking office though, things went in the other direction. There were new abuses and more National Security Letters issued than ever before.

It makes you wonder if new presidents get "read in" on what the "puppet masters" are expecting of them (/s) or is each simply more corrupt than the last, regardless of Party.

nostrademons2• 7 years ago

It depends how genuinely independent the next president is of the intelligence bureaucracy. This isn't really a partisan issue.

The problem the president faces is that if you piss off the intelligence services, you a.) won't get much useful intelligence to do your job and b.) have powerful organizations with lots of dirt on you who want to see you gone. So from a strict power-play position, it's never wise to piss off the intelligence services. Those who do likely won't find themselves in power for long.

(We've seen some of this with Trump, who did piss off the intelligence services and now sees a steady barrage of leaks designed to damage his reputation and undermine his power, as well as administration officials who keep critical information from him because they don't trust him with it. Personality-wise I would've expected Trump to be more likely to pardon Snowden, but Trump is philosophically an authoritarian and not terribly sympathetic to people who undermine authority.)

I could see Sanders or Andrew Yang potentially pardoning Snowden, but I think Warren or Biden would be too cooperative with the government bureaucracy.

opportune3• 7 years ago

Obama was significantly further right than Sanders or Warren

OrgNet• 7 years ago

Obama was really bad against whistler blowers even previous to Snowden...

emilsedgh3• 7 years ago

Have any of them mentioned anything about it?

dragonwriter8• 7 years ago

Not to tread too much into political territory, but if Warren or Sanders is the next US President I'd assume he will receive a full pardon.

I wouldn't assume that.

I would definitely not assume that it would happen early on, given their policy ambitions, the need for political capital for them, and the fact that both are experienced enough legislators that they are unlikely to have (or succumb to staff who have) naive ideas about the impact it would or would not have on their broader agenda.

Empact• 7 years ago

To my knowledge, only Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard have said they would pardon or drop charges: https://www.newsweek.com/tulsi-gabbard-julian-assange-edward... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/14/edward-snowd...

noelsusman• 7 years ago

He will almost certainly not.

twox2• 7 years ago

I think at best he might get that public trial he's asking for.

helen___keller• 7 years ago

Honestly, I'm pretty over Snowden.

The moment he fled to a foreign power, he should have known he would never be a free man in America. Chelsea Manning's sentence was commuted, but Snowden will never have that opportunity because he fled. Furthermore, since the day he fled, he has literally done nothing but try and shame our government and our system through media.

There's a chance the motivations behind his actions really are what he says they are. There's no doubting that his leaks were a good thing for Americans to know about. But at this point I'm more inclined to believe he's a foreign asset working on a campaign to kill trust in American government and American intelligence.

He's been working this "fair trial" thing for years now. He's just another marketing tool as far as I'm concerned.

AlisdairO• 7 years ago

Whistleblowers in the US are almost universally abused by the system. If the US wants whistleblowers to stick around, it should consider treating them with the kind of respect they deserve.

It's crazy to me that in all the talk of punishing snowden, there's never a mention of punishing those who betray the country by spying on their own citizens.

tssva2• 7 years ago

It is technically impossible for the government to guarantee that he can present a "public good" defense. The most they could agree to is not opposing him presenting such a defense. The judge presiding over the trial would determine whether he could actually present such a defense and could decide to forbid it even if prosecutors don't object and could also decide to allow it if they do.

dragonwriter8• 7 years ago

It is technically impossible for the government to guarantee that he can present a "public good" defense

It is quite possible for the President to guarantee that he will not face any charges for which he is not allowed to present such a defense.

tssva2• 7 years ago

The President can't guarantee he won't face any charges. The President could grant a pardon for any crimes the judge rules he cannot present a "public good" defense for but before a judge makes such a ruling he would have already faced the charges.

Getting a fair trial would mean going through the same process that others charged with a crime must go through. If he is asking for a promise of a presidential pardon based upon a judge's decision then he is not asking for a fair trial but a trial which is slanted in his favor.

jambalaya0• 7 years ago

Video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOlllv-m79k

test2018• 7 years ago

He should be protected.

Simulacra• 7 years ago

I think what Snowden did was treason and if he were to return to the United States he should be put on trial. There were better ways than defecting to Russia. A true patriot would have never defected and run.

sys_64738• 7 years ago

He'll be executed as a traitor by the US government.

Edward Snowden says he would like to return home

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