Snowden Granted One-Year Asylum In Russia

New submitter kc9jud writes "The BBC is reporting that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has been granted temporary asylum in Russia. According to his lawyer, Snowden has received the necessary papers to leave the transit zone at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow, and the airport press office is reporting that Snowden left the airport at 14:00 local time (10:00 GMT). A tweet from Wikileaks indicates that Snowden has been granted temporary asylum and may stay in the Russian Federation for up to one year." Reader Cenan adds links to coverage at CNN, and other readers have pointed out versions of the story at Reuters and CBS.

Comments

Hooray for Russia

[prasadsurve]

Guess that gives him 1 year to plan and execute his trip to South America.

Re:Attorney Bruce Fein quote

[Jason Levine]

Exactly. The government is viewing this as "Guy exposed classified programs to the world including our enemies. This helped our enemies and hurt us therefore he needs to be punished severely." This is true (up until "therefore..."), the mitigating factor of the program being extremely illegal is completely overlooked. In fact, worse than overlooked, it's being actively ignored and the rest of the story trumpeted over and over to give the impression that the "government version" of the story is the ONLY version of the story.

Re:Help me out.

[Hatta]

Collecting data sent in the clear across public networks

Phone calls are sent in the clear across public networks. It's illegal for the government to listen to them without a warrant.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[cusco]

Back in the '70s a Soviet general told Farley Mowat, "The difference between Soviet propaganda and American propaganda is that we don't believe ours." A big difference between then and now is that when we tortured people or detained them without trial we pretended it was our ally (South Vietnam, Iran, Israel, etc.) that was doing it and we made polite objections. When we gratuitously invaded other countries we at least had the grace to have one of our puppet government's ask us to do so. We pretended not to be developing biological and chemical weapons and ABM systems contrary to treaties that we had signed.

Today they're not even pretending. They just openly torture prisoners, arrest and murder people without trial, invade on the flimsiest of blatantly false pretenses, and baldly send in taxpayer-paid mercenaries to massacre people resisting corporate theft of their lands. Perhaps the most appalling thing to me is the easy acceptance of all of this by my fellow citizens, most of whom are well aware that the government is doing these things in their name and don't care.