Pardon Snowden
Quite sure for writing here we are all added to the database or our attention factor gets slightly increased if we already are in it, maybe depending on how critical the word cloud of our comment looks to their analytics software. You can easily be put in the bucket of “HN users that visited the support Snowden page” and be stalked accordingly by advertisers across millions of Adsense-supported sites, Google search, Facebook, and the general web with just two or three remarketing cookies. The organisation was well respected and had before I got there forced Britain’s Security Services to admit and release to holding files on all the workers there — people who later became cabinet ministers under Blair / brown. Go to Istanbul as a tourist and you will see absolutely no problems whatsoever (Well, a different story if you speak Turkish and can understand people when they’re complaining).
IMO libertarianism that gives corporation more freedom than people, just make it easier for them to push through any legislation and “cultural propaganda”and they want, not so much solving this problem. The strategy is still extremely effective, and so in this election cycle we had good old Bernie Sanders act as an acceptable vent for social and economic discontent of working people by ranting about “the billionaire class”. Finally, the judicial system that’s supposed to hold other two in account was (a) provided with disinformation and (b) told in Jewel case that it had no business making rulings on the topic. It’s a chilling effect because the current view in the US is that something as seemingly innocuous as peaceably assembling (virtually in this case) and exercising your right to free speech would possibly result in more data being added to “your permanent record” which, it is believed, has the potential to be used against you in unpredictable ways.
When parts of the opposition chose to fight on the other side because they had legitimate reasons to fear a party that had just conducted a coup, it just made it easier to crush them and write them off as traitors and counter-revolutionaries. I agree with you that many of their members probably did support democracy — in fact, many of them lost their lives for holding on to that belief and resisting an increasing authoritarian leadership. Yeah it’s a tough question, and due to the complex nature of the technical and political systems involved, it’s probably impossible to simplify/distill the situation down so that ordinary people can have any sort of informed opinion. The ridiculous setup of that Act essentially says he can be hit with highest charges, not provide anything classified for his defense, have released entirely legitimate stuff, and still get convicted due to technicality of the law.
Whereas you find it more productive to post brave internet messages about how other people should face off with the National Guard, while simultaneously arguing that “no matter how bad” a state behaves, someone who exposes that badness/illegality should be tried for treason. In the best case scenario, I envision Trump will be unable to govern because capitol hill won’t respond to his small ball policies, belligerence, and whining. …So, AcluOptIn is being forced to false?I guess we can give them the benefit of the doubt and presume that my http client information is being saved to prevent automated form submissions? It’s also, distantly, possible that the act of allowing for the potential good of his actions might lead more to question an unwavering support of present American principles, values, and policies.
But after reading about the case in which a Goldman Sachs programmer aroused suspicion [0] from the FBI for using “Subversion” and occasionally erasing his “bash history”, I think it’s reasonable to remember that anything you say can and will be used against use in the eyes of the law Just like subscribing to Linux Journal, or running a tor node, if you sign this petition your information will end up on a list of “person to keep tabs on”. It’s a lot simpler to just mark people who the government doesn’t agree with as conspiracy theorists or nut jobs and let the idiot masses discount them with their idiocy. Effectively, in that it’s “tradition” for the president to issue a bunch of pardons right before leaving office, largely because it’s the last chance to do so, partly because at that point it’s too late for any political opponents to use it against him.
For my part: I don’t like that Snowden took incredibly serious (forget illegal) actions that served to cast aspersions on both the one and only meaningful US cybersecurity institution and the legitimacy of the United States government as a whole, and is now being harbored by Putin. According to a journalist who gave a talk here (Stuttgart, Germany) last week, there is a speed radar and license plate scanner at the local NSA installation, and going by too slow gets you on the ‘suspicious people’ list. Personally, I think he should be criminally pardoned but left open to civil proceedings for breach of contract should his former employer seek to bring forward a suit. If doing so proves beyond a shadow of doubt that our government officers are lying both to the people of the United States and to their representatives in Congress, as Director of National Intelligence did, isn’t that a good thing?
If your personal beliefs are such that this is a hinderance, it might be a bad thing, but I suspect most folks would find this to mean more actual economic freedom because there aren’t so many surprises to plan for. I don’t side with Snowden (or Greenwald, or Wheeler, or…) on everything (or even “a lot”), but I probably am a zealot by your definition, because I believe the “moderate” approach here is a vastly (as in arguing over orders of magnitude) scaled-back, retooled NSA/FBI/CIA. Let us assume the best about Snowden: that he did do this for noble reasons, that he was acting on his own initiative, that he did attempt to restrict the documents he took to those dealing with unethical or unconstitutional espionage that a fair and impartial Inspector General or similar authorized party should have reviewed. > Sadly, American citizens and the West in general have been trained from a young age to be apathetic and those that have the audacity to fight back have been systematically beaten down.
Snowden has done a service to the world, revealing the threats they’re under (through both the NSA and any other entity which could exploit the weaknesses they use), and promoted a great deal of relevant and useful information into the public discussion. Whatever your opinion on the actual Snowden case — I think pardoning someone is seen to active condone whistle-blowing within the miltary / intelligence community, which I can’t see the Government wanting to do. I imagine at some future point and well within our lifetimes it will be trivial to infer our political attitudes and assign semi-anonymous screen names to real persons just by scrapping the web of 2016. Also, the FAQ page https://www.pardonsnowden.org/faq mentions, “We’ve partnered with the nonprofit Center For International Policy (CIP) so that we can offer tax deductibility to donors.
You might still divide your feelings about the American ruling class, and Edward Snowden, presently facing criminal prosecution and long time, possibly (though doubtfully) death. I tend to doubt your fear is to have your “terrorism points” incremented in some database, but rather the cold and distant nature of the federal government makes it nearly impossible to reason through how you’re _not_ a terrorist (assuming you’re not). What happened if something completely unrelated (but classified) was also in the dump (say, information about Russian nuclear forces or Pakistani cooperation with a terrorist group) that ended up being vetted not by him (in an authorized facility prior to his flight) but by Greenwald or another journalist (out in the wild)? I was lucky enough to work at a pharmacy that didn’t mind the bright hair in the US, but heard a good number of folks lament their employers wouldn’t allow such things.
The generation that survived Mao is, imo, probably psychologically shorn of any will to express robust dissent given the state terrorism that they had to endure. But of course we’re NATO allies, and with the not too distant history of Mossad carrying out a botched assassination (successful kill, wrong person) on Norwegian soil, and Norway being complicit in extralegal detention and torture by allowing CIA’s “white planes” to transit through — it would probably have been hopelessly naive for Snowden to try to flee here, even if offered “safe passage”. Where was the due process for Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a 16 year old American who was killed by a drone strike without any evidence of being involved as a combatant or part of an insurgent group? In my view, digital surveillance is a complex issue because people don’t really understand how it’s done, the west is still waging a war against terror to avoid attacks in land, and agencies will often want to screw the due process to catch terrorists however they can.
Well he was a patsy so pardoning him reduces the risk he will blow true story of the most successful increase in intelligence gathering capacity since WWII… Or, he could be a populist and flop around whichever way the wind blows — he could pardon Snowden just to placate the mob and get some short-term bump in approval ratings — or just as easily put a hit on the guy to get the same. The strictures against in abstentia convictions make it little more than a myth, and it probably shouldn’t be offered without noting that it violates numerous elements of US statutory and case law. Sadly, American citizens and the West in general have been trained from a young age to be apathetic and those that have the audacity to fight back have been systematically beaten down.
When the constituent assembly elections provided evidence that showed they had pretty much no support outside of the big cities, it was easy for them to dismiss it as the result of “counter-revolutionary” activity etc. After the Snowden thing blew up, Obama made an angry rant about wanting to punish whistleblowers to the utmost extent the law allows. I think the mass dump was a little ill advised, and he maybe could have thrown his lot in with slightly more responsible journalists who could have arbitrated what would be useful for the public to know a little more judiciously (I like Greenwald, but he can be unreasonable sometimes).
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