How America Lost Its Secrets' Depicts A Darker, Complicated Edward Snowden
... on this received narrative. Epstein interviewed as many of Snowden’s former supervisors and co-workers as were willing to speak on the record; he retraced Snowden’s footsteps in Hong Kong and Russia; he sifted the existing reporting on the whole subject in order to determine exactly what happened. And the picture that results from his research is very different from the popular folk tale of the world’s imagination. This is still a story of illegal and overreaching government surveillance programs about which every thinking person should be outraged. But in Epstein’s pages, Snowden is one of the bad guys – or worse, a witless dupe of the bad guys. This Snowden was already deeply enamored of the computer “hacktivist” counterculture before he was hired by the Central Intelligence Agency, and although that job was very comfortable for a young 20-something with no higher formal education, he resigned from it to head off an official inquiry, suspected of hacking the agency’s computer system. This Snowden took his job at Booz Allen Hamilton already determined to steal classified files and, ...
How Edward Snowden Changed History
... Knopf; 350 pages; $27.95. THE effects of Edward Snowden’s heist of secrets from America’s National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013 can be divided into the good, the bad and the ugly, writes Edward Jay Epstein in a meticulous and devastating account of the worst intelligence disaster in the country’s history, “How America Lost Its Secrets”. Even that categorisation is contentious. Mr Snowden’s fans do not believe he did anything wrong at all: he simply lifted the lid on a rogue agency, risking his liberty on behalf of privacy everywhere. For their part, his foes believe his actions lack any justification: he is a traitor masquerading as a whistle-blower, who exposed no wrongdoing but did colossal damage. These stances rest more on faith than facts. Their adherents regard as secondary the details of Mr Snowden’s ...
President Obama Must Pardon Edward Snowden To Show Donald Trump That Freedom Requires Transparency
... government’s most far-reaching powers in the “war on terror,” both the judicial branch and the US congress have generally looked away. We need American media institutions to be aggressive in holding officials to account, and they need sources who can shed light on what the government is doing. It’s thanks to brave individuals from the inside that we learned details of America’s torture of detainees, war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the contours of its mass surveillance programs, and more. It’s also thanks to whistleblowers and their media partners that in some cases, we’ve been able to correct our course. This isn’t to suggest our current president has celebrated leaks. The Obama administration has prosecuted whistleblowers aggressively, and its Department of Justice has threatened at least one journalist with prison for failing to disclose his confidential source. These heavy-handed approaches are meant to deter would-be leakers. But under a Trump administration we’re going to rely even more on the bravery of insiders—working in ...
On Clemency, White House Sees Distinction Between Snowden And Manning Cases
... to distinguish between the cases of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden on Friday, as President Obama nears end-of-term decisions on executive clemency. White House press secretary Josh Earnest emphasized that Obama has not made a decision on granting clemency in either case. But he emphasized that there is a "pretty stark difference" between Manning, an Army private, and Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor. Both have admitted to leaking national security secrets. "Chelsea Manning is somebody who went through the military criminal justice process, was exposed to due process, was found guilty, was sentenced for her crimes, and she acknowledged wrongdoing," Earnest said. "Mr. Snowden fled into the arms of an adversary and sought refuge in a country that most recently made a concerted effort to undermine confidence in our democracy.". Snowden has been in exile in Russia ...
Why President Obama Can't Pardon Edward Snowden
... was invalid. (Even accounting for a 13-hour time difference, the passport was invalid while Snowden was in Hong Kong.) So, instead of scheming to trap him in Moscow, the U. S. government did all it could to prevent him from boarding a plane to Moscow and defecting to Russia. But it failed. On June 23, Snowden boarded an Aeroflot jet bound for Moscow, even though he didn’t have a valid passport. The fact that an airline basically controlled by the Russian government allowed him to board could only mean someone intervened to get Snowden on that plane and then mounted a “special operation,” as the Russian newspaper Izvestia put it, to take him off the plane before the other passengers once it landed. On September 2, 2013, Russian President Vladimir Putin resolved the mystery regarding who intervened on Snowden’s behalf in a televised press conference: He personally authorized Snowden’s trip to Russia after the American had met with Russian “diplomats” in Hong Kong. Putin either made this extraordinary effort on behalf of Snowden out of altruism, or because he expected to get something of value ...
Will Obama Pardon Edward Snowden Next? Probably Not
... when people look at the calculations of benefit, it is clear that in the wake of 2013 the laws of our nation changed,” the whistleblower said in September when calling on Obama to offer him a pardon. “[U. S.] 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.”. In an interview with CNN Tuesday, journalist Glenn Greenwald, who worked with Snowden to write the story about the NSA surveillance program for The Guardian , noted that Snowden is quite proud of what he did. “I think its very unlikely that President Obama intends to commute Snowden’s sentence let alone pardon him because he doesn’t in any way say that what he did was wrong,” said Greenwald, on CNN’s AC 360. “He’s quite proud of what he did except for the fact that he should have done it earlier.”. On Wednesday, Russian authorities announced they had extended a residency permit for Snowden until 2020. Next year, he will qualify for a Russian passport. — With files from The Associated Press. © 2017 Global News, a division of Corus ...
President Obama Should Pardon Edward Snowden
... fled the draft during the Vietnam War, only to offer them clemency years later. Those people didn’t return to stand trial because they knew the political climate would have led to convictions and jail time. Should Snowden turn himself in and hope for the best in the courts? In Trump’s America, would he get a fair trial. Daniel Ellsberg, who blew the whistle by releasing the damaging Pentagon Papers, surrendered himself and stood trial. But once again, I bring up the fact that the window of opportunity for a pardon is vanishing. Under Trump’s administration, I see no path to justice for Snowden. If he came back and surrendered, Trump could lock him up without a fair trial. Ellsberg considers Snowden to be a patriot. And by praising Snowden’s sacrifice, I do not mean to ignore the sacrifices of those who have given their lives for our country, from soldiers to spies. But I ask us to reach back deep into the days of post-Vietnam, when we found it in our minds and hearts to reconcile the fact that people serve in different ways. Those who fought on the front lines exhibited bravery, but so did those who opposed what they viewed as an unjust war. Our ...
Why Chelsea Manning Got Clemency But Not Nsa Whistleblower
... But one other famous leaker was notably absent from Obama's pardon list: Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who revealed government spying on American citizens in 2013. So why did Obama commute Manning's sentence while leaving Snowden a wanted man. In 2013, federal prosecutors charged Snowden with "unauthorized communication of national defense information" and "willful communication of classified intelligence information to an unauthorized person" under the 1917 Espionage Act. He would face at least 30 years in prison if convicted in U. S. courts. He fled to Russia in 2013, where he has been living ever since. On Wednesday, the Russian government announced it had extended Snowden's ability to remain in the country until 2020. Snowden has not denied that he leaked classified documents to journalists that detailed how the U. S. government gathered metadata on the communications of American citizens, created a program called "Prism" that allowed it to gather data through backdoors in internet companies like Google and Facebook, collected phone records ...
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