Eric Holder Says Snowden Performed 'Public Service' (cnn.com)

An anonymous reader writes from a report via CNN: Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder says Edward Snowden performed a "public service" by triggering a debate over surveillance techniques, but still must pay a penalty for illegally leaking a trove of classified intelligence documents. "We can certainly argue about the way in which Snowden did what he did, but I think that he actually performed a public service by raising the debate that we engaged in and by the changes that we made," Holder told David Axelrod on "The Axe Files," a podcast produced by CNN and the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. "Now I would say that doing what he did -- and the way he did it -- was inappropriate and illegal," Holder added. "I think that he's got to make a decision. He's broken the law in my view. He needs to get lawyers, come on back, and decide, see what he wants to do: Go to trial, try to cut a deal. I think there has to be a consequence for what he has done." "But," Holder emphasized, "I think in deciding what an appropriate sentence should be, I think a judge could take into account the usefulness of having had that national debate." You can listen to the podcast with Eric Holder here.

Comments

Re:You can't have it both ways, Holder.

[swillden]

Had he gone through channels, that public service would never have occurred.

Exactly, and that's not armchair theorizing. We have several clear examples of people who tried to go through channels and got slapped down hard for it. And by "slapped down" I mean "Home raided by armed agents, arrested, indicted, prosecuted on unsustainable charges and rendered unemployable". Hell, we know that a man whose job it was to work with whistleblowers under the law was forced out for trying to do his job in the face of illegal actions by his superiors.

What Snowden did was necessary and it was the only way it could be done.

And, sadly enough, it appears that it was insufficient.