NSA Whistle-blower Ed Snowden

[jollyjacktar]

I bet that will look like the scene from the Matrix where everyone is shucking and jiving down below when you pack in all those lefties for the show.

 

[tomahawk6]

At what point I wonder will Snowden be arrested on the outstandin warrant from the US ?Before the showor after the show ?

 

[larry Strong]

At what point I wonder will Snowden be arrested on the outstandin warrant from the US ?Before the showor after the show ?

He will be a big "talking head" on a screen.......I would be very surprised if he has the intestinal fortitude to show up in NA.....

Cheers
Larry

 

[Oldgateboatdriver]

However, it shows just how far some of our alleged institution of higher learning have been co-opted by left wing Canadians that will not hesitate a moment before doing something that will piss on our neighbour and good friend the US ... almost looks like its being done on purpose.

It  :rage: me !!!!!

 

[Good2Golf]

OGBD, SFU has been the flagship institution in that regard for decades. :nod:  I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lot of American tourists 'visiting' from Va. to "check out the scene..."  (i.e. Keep their files up to date) ;D

op:

 

[cupper]

However, it shows just how far some of our alleged institution of higher learning have been co-opted by left wing Canadians that will not hesitate a moment before doing something that will piss on our neighbour and good friend the US ... almost looks like its being done on purpose.

It  :rage: me !!!!!

OGBD, SFU has been the flagship institution in that regard for decades. :nod:  I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lot of American tourists 'visiting' from Va. to "check out the scene..."  (i.e. Keep their files up to date) ;D

op:

When I started at Saint Mary's it was a bastion of right leaning though, and Dalhousie the left. When I went back to SMU a few years later it was the complete opposite. But I'm proud to say at my true alma mater The Technical University of Nova Scotia were were either too busy or too drunk to give a rat's patooty about such things.  ;D

 

[Cloud Cover]

Ron Diebert from Citizens Lab will also be hosting a "Fireside Chat" with Snowden at the RSA conference in San Francisco.  Now, I get all the piling on Snowden for what he did, and I have built an entire career working in that space, and I will tell you it really was getting out of hand. The checks and balances went from grey to blur to gone. If Snowden and others thought that stealing documents and leaking them would trigger a re-boot of the system towards a more transparent intelligence collection system of laws, then he really doesn't understand what Intelligence is all about anyway.

The driving issue issue here, as always, was and is money- defence and other security contractors constantly pushing new ideas for projects towards a chequebook with an unlimited overdraft account. We had to hire project managers just to manage the inflow of unsolicited proposals and fit them under somebody's empire or silo, and that was 10 years ago. It did not stop under Obama (or Cameron or Harper), and these leaks really have not slowed anyone down.

I see that Snowden is also aligning himself with Apple on the encryption issue, which is probably driving Tim Cook straight to the bottle of Scotch for pain relief.       

 

[CougarKing]

So if he loses, the CIA/FBI will be happily waiting for him outside the Norwegian court? (Not sure if the US has an extradition treaty with Norway)

Reuters

Snowden to take Norway to court to secure free passage
World | Thu Apr 21, 2016 11:51am EDT

Reuters/Andrew Kelly

Edward Snowden will take the Norwegian state to court in a bid to secure free passage there, a Norwegian law firm representing the former U.S. spy contractor said on Thursday.

Snowden has been invited to Norway to receive a freedom of speech award from the local branch of writers' group PEN International, but is worried that he would be handed over to the United States, his lawyers say.

"The purpose is to get legally established that Norway has no right to extradite Snowden to the U.S.," the law firm, Schjoedt, said in a statement.


(...SNIPPED)

 

[CougarKing]

And the Snowden saga movie trailer is out:

(first 10 seconds of trailer is the part where he tries to go through US Army Basic despite injured limbs.)

Snowden: 2016 movie trailer

 

[The Bread Guy]

Go figure ...

... In a remarkable interview this week, Franz Klintsevich, a senior Russian security official, explained the case matter-of-factly: “Let’s be frank. Snowden did share intelligence. This is what security services do. If there’s a possibility to get information, they will get it.”

With this, Klintsevich simply said what all intelligence professionals already knew – that Snowden is a collaborator with the FSB. That he really had no choice in the matter once he set foot in Russia does not change the facts ...

 

[CougarKing]

If Trump becomes president, can he reverse a pardon if Obama gives it?

ABC News

Snowden Says He Deserves a Pardon From Obama

Former NSA contractor and American fugitive Edward Snowden said overnight he deserves to be pardoned before President Obama leaves office, suggesting that his actions, while maybe against the letter of the law, changed the country for the better — an argument that has so far fallen on deaf ears at the White House.

"Yes, there are laws on the books that say one thing, but that is perhaps why the pardon power exists — for the exceptions, for the things that may seem unlawful in letters on a page but when we look at them morally, when we look at them ethically, when we look at the results, it seems these were necessary things, these were vital things," Snowden told The Guardian in an interview from Moscow. "I think when people look at the calculations of benefit, it is clear in the wake of 2013 the laws of our nation changed. The Congress, the courts and the president all changed their policies as a result of these disclosures. At the same time, there has never been any public evidence that any individual came to harm as a result."

Snowden has been living in Russia since the summer of 2013, after he stole a huge trove of electronic documents from a National Security Agency office in Hawaii and leaked them to journalists, exposing the incredible breadth and power of the NSA's foreign and domestic surveillance capabilities. After the leak, Snowden — seen as a civil liberties hero by some and a traitor by others — was charged with espionage-related crimes.

"Mr. Snowden has been charged with serious crimes, and it's the policy of the [Obama] administration that Mr. Snowden should return to the United States and face those charges," White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters Monday. "He will, of course, be afforded due process, and there are mechanisms in our criminal justice system to ensure that he's treated fairly and consistent with the law."

Earnest said that the way Snowden chose to act "harmed our national security and put the American people at greater risk."

But the Snowden disclosures prompted the Obama White House to re-evaluate the way the NSA did its job, especially through the mass collection of communication metadata, and an expert panel created by the White House to study the issue came back with some sweeping suggested changes — many of which were implemented to better protect Americans' privacy.

Richard Clarke, a former White House counterterrorism adviser and current ABC News consultant, was on the White House panel.

"What Mr. Snowden did is treason, was high crimes, and there is nothing in what we say that justifies what he did," Clarke said after the panel recommendations were made in December 2013. "Whether or not this panel would have been created anyway, I don't know, but I don't think anything that I've learned justifies the treasonous acts of Mr. Snowden."

 

[cupper]

Snowden seems to be missing the point that in order for him to apply for a pardon, he would need to have been convicted of the charges, completed any sentence that was given and then complete a waiting period of 5 years from date of release from confinement or from date of sentencing if no confinement was given in the sentence.

So, if he wants a pardon, he needs to get his ass back to the US, stand trial, be convicted and serve his sentence. Based on all that, He would need to apply for his pardon sometime after Donald Trump has completed his second term.  :facepalm:

 

[expwor]

Snowden seems to be missing the point that in order for him to apply for a pardon, he would need to have been convicted of the charges, completed any sentence that was given and then complete a waiting period of 5 years from date of release from confinement or from date of sentencing if no confinement was given in the sentence.

So, if he wants a pardon, he needs to get his *** back to the US, stand trial, be convicted and serve his sentence. Based on all that, He would need to apply for his pardon sometime after Donald Trump has completed his second term.  :facepalm:

I agree with your sentiment but history has examples of Presidential Pardon's both of people who never were charged and convicted of offences. Best example of that, President Nixon being pardoned by President Ford, yet Nixon never was charged or convicted of anything. 
I'm sure if I went to the library or Google searched I could find more examples.  But I'll bet Presidential Pardon Power has been used so people didn't even have to face up at all to any legal consequences of their actions.  It should IMHO only be applied after the person has been arrested, charged and convicted.
But what do I know.

Tom

 

[cupper]

I agree with your sentiment but history has examples of Presidential Pardon's both of people who never were charged and convicted of offences. Best example of that, President Nixon being pardoned by President Ford, yet Nixon never was charged or convicted of anything. 
I'm sure if I went to the library or Google searched I could find more examples.  But I'll bet Presidential Pardon Power has been used so people didn't even have to face up at all to any legal consequences of their actions.  It should IMHO only be applied after the person has been arrested, charged and convicted.
But what do I know.

Tom

That is true. And the US Constitution does not limit the power of presidential pardons to only those who have been charged and / or convicted, so it is within the President's power to pardon someone for crimes that he may have committed but has not been charged.

An interesting point on the implication of a pardon is that the Supreme Court has held that a pardon carries an "imputation of guilt" and acceptance of a pardon "is an admission of guilt". A person who is granted a pardon is within their right to refuse to accept the pardon with it's implication of an admission of guilt.

But I cannot see any president from Obama onwards issuing a pardon to Snowdon.

 

[cupper]

The House Select Committee on Intelligence approved the committee report on it's investigation into the Snowden Affair.

House Intel Panel: Edward Snowden 'Was No Whistleblower'

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/15/494157921/house-intel-panel-edward-snowden-was-no-whistleblower

Summarizing its investigation of Edward Snowden, the House Intelligence Committee says the former National Security Agency contractor did tremendous damage to the U.S.

The Committee published the summary findings of a two-year investigation today as a new film about Snowden opens across the country.

Snowden stole 1.5 million classified government documents that he had access to as an NSA contractor. He then fled to Russia via Hong Kong.

As NPR's David Welna reports,

Most major congressional reports are rolled out with news conferences, floor speeches and press releases. Not this one. There is only a three-page unclassified summary of the House Intelligence Committee's actual 36-page report, which remains classified. Devin Nunes is the California Republican who chairs that panel.

Nunes:

The report is based on facts, so it's just all the facts that we gathered over a two-year process, and the report ... I think, speaks for itself.
The summary is available here. It contains five major points:

Snowden caused "tremendous damage to national security" and the documents he stole had nothing to do with programs effecting individual privacy interests. Rather, the documents pertained "to military, defense, and intelligence programs of great interest to America's adversaries." The report says the government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to mitigate the damage Snowden caused.

Snowden is not a whistle blower, but a disgruntled employee whose actions infringed on the privacy of thousands of government employees and contractors. A real whistleblower, the report suggests, would have remained in the U.S. and not fled to China and Russia.
Two weeks before he began the massive download of 1.5 million documents, Snowden had a "workplace spat" with NSA managers.

Snowden is "a serial exaggerator and fabricator" who told a series of untrue stories about his health, education, and performance reviews.
The Committee says it is concerned that NSA and intelligence community in general have not done enough to prevent "another massive unauthorized disclosure of documents."

The Committee unanimously voted to endorse the report and all members signed a letter to President Obama urging him not to pardon Snowden.

The Committee's report may or may not have anything to do with the release of the new bio-pic, Snowden, directed by Oliver Stone and starring Joseph Gordon-Leavitt in the title role.

NPR's David Welna also reports that committee member Rep. Tom Rooney, R-Fla.) was especially bothered by the trailer he's seen for the movie.

Welna:
The Edward Snowden portrayed in that trailer by actor Joseph Gordon-Leavitt, Rooney says, is not the serial exaggerator and fabricator the committee's report says he is.

Rooney:
He was like this little guy fighting this behemoth of oppressive government, when that's exact, not at all what it was. But, you know, I guess it makes for good, uh,cinema.

[Welna] — Do you plan to see the movie?

—Absolutely. I absolutely will see the movie.

Link to the unclassified Executive Summary:

http://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/hpsci_snowden_review_-_unclass_summary_-_final.pdf

 

[cupper]

Interesting Op-Ed by the Washington Post Editorial Board about the Pardon Snowden movement. Considering that Snowden was their source for some major award winning reporting, they have no qualms about throwing him to the winds.

No pardon for Edward Snowden

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/edward-snowden-doesnt-deserve-a-pardon/2016/09/17/ec04d448-7c2e-11e6-ac8e-cf8e0dd91dc7_story.html?utm_term=.3e0e72bde5e0

EDWARD SNOWDEN, the former National Security Agency contractor who blew the cover off the federal government’s electronic surveillance programs three years ago, has his admirers. After the inevitably celebratory Oliver Stone film about him appears this weekend, he may have more. Whether Mr. Snowden deserves a presidential pardon, as human rights organizations are demanding in a new national campaign timed to coincide with the film, is a complicated question, however, to which President Obama’s answer should continue to be “no.”

Mr. Snowden’s defenders don’t deny that he broke the law — not to mention oaths and contractual obligations — when he copied and kept 1.5 million classified documents. They argue, rather, that Mr. Snowden’s noble purposes, and the policy changes his “whistle-blowing” prompted, justified his actions. Specifically, he made the documents public through journalists, including reporters working for The Post, enabling the American public to learn for the first time that the NSA was collecting domestic telephone “metadata” — information about the time of a call and the parties to it, but not its content — en masse with no case-by-case court approval. The program was a stretch, if not an outright violation, of federal surveillance law, and posed risks to privacy. Congress and the president eventually responded with corrective legislation. It’s fair to say we owe these necessary reforms to Mr. Snowden.

The complication is that Mr. Snowden did more than that. He also pilfered, and leaked, information about a separate overseas NSA Internet-monitoring program, PRISM, that was both clearly legal and not clearly threatening to privacy. (It was also not permanent; the law authorizing it expires next year.) Worse — far worse — he also leaked details of basically defensible international intelligence operations: cooperation with Scandinavian services against Russia; spying on the wife of an Osama bin Laden associate; and certain offensive cyber operations in China. No specific harm, actual or attempted, to any individual American was ever shown to have resulted from the NSA telephone metadata program Mr. Snowden brought to light. In contrast, his revelations about the agency’s international operations disrupted lawful intelligence-gathering, causing possibly “tremendous damage” to national security, according to a unanimous, bipartisan report by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. What higher cause did that serve?

Ideally, Mr. Snowden would come home and hash out all of this before a jury of his peers. That would certainly be in the best tradition of civil disobedience, whose practitioners have always been willing to go to jail for their beliefs. He says this is unacceptable because U.S. secrecy-protection statutes specifically prohibit him from claiming his higher purpose and positive impact as a defense — which is true, though it’s not clear how the law could allow that without creating a huge loophole for leakers. (Mr. Snowden hurt his own credibility as an avatar of freedom by accepting asylum from Russia’s Vladi­mir Putin, who’s not known for pardoning those who blow the whistle on him.)

The second-best solution might be a bargain in which Mr. Snowden accepts a measure of criminal responsibility for his excesses and the U.S. government offers a measure of leniency in recognition of his contributions. Neither party seems interested in that for now. An outright pardon, meanwhile, would strike the wrong balance.

And predictably, Glenn Greenwald is not happy with the Post's viewpoint.

Washpost Makes History: First Paper to Call for Prosecution of its Own Source After Accepting Pulitzer

https://theintercept.com/2016/09/18/washpost-makes-history-first-paper-to-call-for-prosecution-of-its-own-source-after-accepting-pulitzer/

 

[MarkOttawa]

More on House committee's bipartisan damning of Snowden by the inimitable ex-NSA John Schindler:
http://observer.com/2016/09/the-real-ed-snowden-is-a-patsy-a-fraud-and-a-kremlin-controlled-pawn/

His blog, The XX Committee:
https://20committee.com/

Mark
Ottawa

 

[FJAG]

Yet one more:

Insider's View: How 'Snowden' Gets It Dangerously Wrong
By RICHARD CLARKE
NEWS ANALYSIS — Sep 26, 2016, 9:58 AM ET

Richard Clarke is an ABC News national security consultant. He held senior national security positions in the White House during the administrations of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. Following the Snowden disclosures, he served as a member of President Obama’s Review Group on Intelligence and Information Technology.

Oliver Stone’s movie "Snowden" is apparently part of a campaign by Edward Snowden and his supporters to obtain a legal pardon from President Obama for Snowden’s violation of U.S. criminal law.

Snowden, who was a technician working for a company contracted to support the National Security Agency (NSA), illegally downloaded thousands of documents classified Top Secret, fled the country with them and gave the documents to people who published them online. He remains in exile in Moscow.

I recently watched the movie from the perspective of a private citizen, but one who had once worked in the government in world of intelligence, counter-terrorism and security. I am also one of the five people who President Obama asked to serve on the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology, a panel he created to review the issues raised by the Snowden revelations. Our conclusions and recommendations are all publicly available on the White House website.

As part of that Review Group, I had unrestricted access to what NSA was doing and came to some personal judgments about their value and about the effects of Snowden’s revelations.

There was one NSA program that I had not heard of before and which gave me pause. Without a clear Congressional authorization, NSA was collecting telephone “metadata” on calls made in the U.S. Metadata in this case means not the content of the calls, but the “to/from” numbers and the duration of the calls. They were collecting that information on all calls on certain networks, not just calls made by specific people identified in a court order.

That process reversed the American legal tradition of only collecting such data with the permission of a judge and only narrowly targeting people who had raised suspicion of illegal activity. Although I understood the motivation in collecting that data to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed an over-reach. However, other than a handful of incredibly rare, superficial instances, there was no evidence that NSA or any other government agency had abused that data access to in anyway harm or damage innocent Americans.

The Review Group recommended that program be terminated. The President and the Congress agreed and it was shut down. Snowden pointed to that action, shutting down that one program, as justification for his massive leak of Top Secret information to the world.

Snowden, however, did not just reveal that one somewhat dubious NSA collection program -- he revealed scores of NSA collection activities.

Those other programs were effectively tracking the activities and individuals in terrorist groups, drug cartels, human trafficking rings, nuclear proliferation programs, cyber crime gangs and foreign espionage agencies like Russia’s Federal Security Bureau (FSB), the successor of the Cold War KGB.

After Snowden's revelations of how the U.S. tracked those activities, many of the targeted groups changed the way they communicated to evade NSA’s collection. The U.S. suddenly had less ability to prevent terrorist attacks, cocaine smuggling, and espionage.

It is true that the U.S. may ultimately re-gain some of the access it lost because of Snowden -- some but not all. Gaining any new ability to track terrorists, criminals and spies will likely cost taxpayers billions of dollars.

With that knowledge, it was hard to reconcile what I saw on the big screen in "Snowden" or what Snowden himself says in interviews with what I know to be the facts.

Edward Snowden was not ever a trained "spy", as he claims, nor did he conduct special programs on the direct orders of the number two person in NSA, as shown in the movie. He was a computer network technician employed by a contractor, working to support NSA. He never met the Deputy Director of NSA.

Edward Snowden also did not heroically act as a whistle blower on one questionable program. He indiscriminately collected and dumped information on dozens of valuable programs designed to keep Americans and our allies safe. Americans, you and me, are less safe because of what he did.

Edward Snowden is a hero, however. He is a hero in the eyes of people in groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda, in the minds of drug cartel kingpins and in the view of the leadership of enemy intelligence agencies, places like the FSB headquarters in Moscow. For Snowden, now a resident of Moscow, has made their jobs easier, their lives safer.

I know movies have to take liberties with facts to fit a story into two hours. I recognize that directors like Oliver Stone have every right to create cinema with a point of view, ignoring facts and giving just one side of the story. The U.S. president, however, knows the facts and is painfully aware of the damage Snowden did.

If Snowden thinks he can persuade a jury of his peers that what he did was right or a federal judge that he deserves a light sentence for the myriad laws he broke, then he can get on any of the daily flights from Moscow to the U.S. No one is stopping him.

If, however, he is waiting in Moscow for a presidential pardon before he returns to the U.S., he is likely to wait there forever.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/insiders-view-snowden-dangerously-wrong/story?id=42361611

:cheers:

 

[jollyjacktar]

I hope he never gets a pardon and is thrown to the trash heap once the Russians are done sucking him dry.  Just what a traitor deserves.

 

[expwor]

He should just stay in Moscow till old age and when he dies he can be buried next to Kim Philby.
Snowden betrayed the United States (and by extension it's allies)
He's no hero, he's a traitor

Tom