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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.
Guess that gives him 1 year to plan and execute his trip to South America.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/07/25/2135207/us-lawmakers-want-sanctions-on-any-country-taking-in-snowden
^_^
He'd better be careful. If he waits a few more months, he'll be snowed-in and unable to leave at all.
But seriously. Think back a quarter century and ponder what someone would have said if you told him that a US citizen flees to Russia to beg for asylum because he's being prosecuted for telling the truth...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"There may be a time where it would be constructive to try and meet and ... resolve this in a way that honors due process and the highest principles of fairness and civilization,"
Seems resolved to me. What remains to be sorted out:
* who is accountable for all of the laws broken by the NSA
* what programs they still have in place which are illegal
* when these illegal programs will be terminated
Let's not forget, if the NSA/US had followed the letter of the law, Snowden's claims would have been pointless.
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No, it definitly is not.
And that is why it is so sad to see that the nation that just can't stop telling how free and great they are comes of looking worse than the Russians.
The Russians might just do it to simply piss off the US, but a trully free and just country should not have any problems winning this PR battle.
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That is because the Democratic party is vastly different from your dearly beloved Republican party.
I can tell, because in addition to the end of secret courts and the rest of the Patriot Act, Guantanamo closed, we left Iraq on the Bush timetable, and drone strikes have ceased.
Or did you think the Republicans were going to pass socialized health-care?
You mean like the Medicare Part D that was passed by a Republican House, Senate, and President? You are right, that would never happen.
Otherwise, it goes a bit too far, but is a pretty solid troll.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Back then many of us were naive enough to believe the U.S. propaganda. But that didn't make it true, even then. Looking back, I realize that most of the "U.S. is so free, Soviet Union is so repressive" canards that I grew up on were mostly bullshit. The U.S. was never nearly so free or noble as it pretended, even in its heyday. All these post-911 revelations have done is just highlighted the hypocrisy.
I don't know if Snowden likes those countries anymore than you, however if you want to get away from the US government it isn't a bad move to go to those coutnries least likely to turn you over....
As for Latin America.... compared to the US just about any country could be called 'leftist'. For me (as I am not an American) that doesn't necesseraly mean a bad thing.
Especially since most of those 'leftist' regimes have been democraticly chosen and have replaced US backed rightwing dictators.
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You are deeply wrong and your understanding of privacy is very one dimensional.
Consider walking somewhere in New York city. You will be 'seen' by potentially thousands of people but noticed by none. Ask them 5 minutes later and show them a picture of you and you'll get no useful information. Yet you were in 'public' and were seen many times over. That is the privacy of being lost in a crowd that you can have even in a public space.
That privacy can be violated by following a specific person or (in the case of the NSA) by following everyone such that later you can know where the person came from and where they went.
I run a router in the internet. yes, I can see your IP headers. I could see yoiur email headers but I don't look. I know not who you are and I don't bother to do reverse lookups on the IP addresses. I don't care. I don't store that information. I don't care about it. You have the privacy of being anonymous in a crowd.
Ask me tomorrow if I saw any packets going to 192.168.201.192 and I won't be able to tell you one way or another.
So sorry, but as much as I would like to believe the Democrats are still fundamentally different from the neocons, I'm having a hard time buying it. I wish they were. I hoped they were.At this point, an old-school Republican like Eisenhower better reflects the will of a liberal than the current Democratic party. (I said Better, not necessarily well)
I'd like to see more actions against little brother (the corporate version of big brother) and big brother. I would like to see REAL healthcare reform, not an insurance mandate originally authored by the Republican opposition. I'd like to see the corruption swept out and abominations like NSA, TSA, DHS, and DEA disbanded.
Signed, a disgruntled left leaning libertarian.
That said, I'm just going to note here that the bill to strip the NSA of these powers was supported by more democrats that republicans -- but the split was by no means a party-line vote. Here, left-right is not a good identifier. I
I'm definitely on the side that thinks the NSA program amounts to a general warrant, and is therefore unconstitutional no matter what FISA says about it.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
4th Amendment to the United States Constitution.
-GiH
And that is why this great justice system of yours has worked out great for those in Guantanamo Bay?
As for him bein a traitor in your opinion: history books will judge different about him.
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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.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
People don't want to see this for what it is. There is no need for Deep Throat, or Snowden, or Binney when everything is on the up and up. Whistle blowing isn't from foreign interests trying to harm us. They are patriotic actions that love this country for what it should be. When Putin is pointing out the irony about a US congratulating itself for not wanting to kill the whistle blower who is being persecuted for telling the truth, and it is lost on the bulk of Americans we have a problem. We have lost our way.
Looking at America from a distance, it appears that it has a one party system with two factions - the Democrat and the Republican factions. The name of the party? The Business Party. The sole purpose is to distract the citizens of the USA away from what really matters. Included in the most accurate definition of "fascism" is a description of how corporate interests write the laws, provide the "politicians", and set the government agenda. The country has been taken over and is run by power-hungry monied-elites (a cleptocracy, me-thinks). It's from this perspective that I completely agree with the attached comment:
Wrong! It has not been a flip, it's been a take over. There is no longer a left or right, or Democrat and Republican. It's one team that plays on people's desire to still believe a left-right paradigm exists.
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.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin