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ACLU Is Launching A Campaign To Convince President Obama To Pardon Edward Snowden (fusion.net)
Coinciding with the launch of Oliver Stone's movie Snowden in select theaters this week, a coalition of civil rights groups are launching a campaign to convince President Obama to pardon NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Fusion reports: The effort, which is organized by the ACLU, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch, will gather signatures from regular people and endorsements from celebrities. Snowden will speak by video link from Moscow at a press conference on Wednesday morning in New York, and an initial list of "prominent legal scholars, policy experts, human rights leaders, technologists and former government officials" in support of the cause will be released, according to a statement from the campaign. A presidential pardon would mean that Snowden could come home from Moscow, where he's lived for the past three years, without the fear of being prosecuted. He currently faces federal charges of violating the Espionage Act and stealing government property, even though his disclosures led to reform of the wiretapping program by Congress. Many Snowden supporters are hoping the movie Snowden, which opens in U.S. theaters on Friday, will spur support for a pardon. "I think the value of the movie is that it's lsikely to reach millions of people who have not been paying close attention to Snowden or to the debate about surveillance and privacy," Snowden's layer at the ACLU, Ben Wizner, told Fusion. "Those people will emerge from the movie more educated about surveillance and with more positive attitudes toward Snowden."
Long ago, the ACLU worked tirelessly to defend the civil liberties of Americans. Now they're just a fundraising organization that mostly exists to elect Democrats. Snowden did a lot of good, but he also acted indiscriminately and betrayed American intelligence-gathering methods to foreign powers. He should be pardoned for whistleblowing on domestic surveillance but punished severely for espionage. Th ACLU knows this but would rather pretend otherwise, in order to get those sweet, sweet donor contacts.
Liberty and justice are 2 key elements that are supposed to differentiate the USA from those other countries.
I'm guessing you're trolling, but unfortunately so many people actually share this viewpoint. Most of them are uneducated, government/military shills, or just scared of the terrorism boogeyman that has been touted as a justification to strip freedom from citizens.
Snowden did the country and incredible service by unveiling the extent to which the government has over reached its authority.
It would be a huge win if Obama pardoned Snowden, but I have a hard time actually seeing that happen. Obama seems to be too attached to the intelligence community, and this would be seen as a stab in the back.
>"Yes, because China and Russia are great examples of free countries where people have the constitutional freedoms of the US."
There is a certain amount of irony in that statement, considering the paths the USA has been taking so often.... the "unpatriot act", the trend to electronic censorships, attacks on gun rights, the endless spying on citizens, the use of searching without probable cause, the misuse of "interstate commerce" to justify just about any law, the tons and tons of Federal programs and laws that are rights reserved to only the States, misuse of the Executive order to make law that is clearly the realm of the Legislative branch, secret lists that deprive citizens of their rights without due process, seizure of property without oversight, trials that take years to start which are certainly not "speedy", cruel and unusual punishments while incarcerated, I could go on, but you get the idea.
The Constitutional freedoms of the US have never been under more attack. Given time, how much like China and Russia will things turn out? So many people act like the Constitution is an outdated list of guidelines or suggestions, and not the rule book... just something that can just be ignored when not convenient or when people scream for more "safety" or just twisted to mean whatever is fashionable at the moment.
As someone who is displeased with how Snowden went about this, I'm not opposed to the idea of a pardon. However I don't believe a carte blanche pardon is appropriate, or sets good precedence.
What I'd like to see is Snowden return to the US of his own volition to stand trial. And then, once the trial is complete, a pardon can be issued if necessary. Even if what Snowden did was ultimately a good thing, I believe there still needs to be repercussions for it - that he needs to take responsibility for his actions. A trial to firmly establish the facts of the case and whether he did anything against the law, even if it can only end in not-guilty or a presidential pardon, is something I think would be a reasonable compromise.
However, his revelations of the NSA's foreign activities crossed the line and makes him a traitor.
He committed Treason. There is no excuse, no "okay, this time it was okay". Treason. While you approve of what he let out, how he did it and why he did it make him a traitor. We need to stop glorifying him.
....Along with those treasonous bastards who formed the country. Every one of them were traitors, inciting revolution an revolt against the King. Suffering a single traitor is to invite ruin and the decay of Executive and Federal authority!
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Thats the wrong question. The better question is: How much harm has the apparatus done to our freedoms and economy? Europe will no longer trust its data in our hands, and much of the world becomes more adversarial. Is nothing sacred anymore? I shutter to think of the day our thoughts can be digitized, stored, analyzed, and archived.
As for the "intelligence apparatus" and its usefulness... Please. To do what? Protect human life? Congress could save more human beings THIS WEEK in the US by banning tobacco and classifying nicotine a narcotic.
Deaths due to terrorism since 1995 in the US: 3,264 (source)
Deaths due to second hand smoke this week: 9,100 or 1,300 deaths every day (source)
I should mention that although smoking kills 10,000 people a week, I don't support banning it, since that would require taking away our liberties and freedoms. But so does government surveillance, and I would ban that. Its too expensive, doesn't protect all that much life, and tramples on our ideology.
If he's pardoned he'll live briefly under a microscope until he stops living suddenly under a car, or off the edge of a rocky cliff edge.
Don't confuse a pardon with an obligation for the government to allow him to keep breathing. Not the same.
He committed Treason.
Actually, it's the intelligence agencies that committed Treason. They obeyed the wishes of America's enemies in their goal to strip all Americans of their Constitutional rights, in order to weaken American and make it more vulnerable.
Snowden was a whistleblower. By definition, all whistleblowers of the government's security apparatus are lawbreakers. If you want nobody to break the law, then you must therefore disallow all such whistleblowers.
I prefer to live in a world where whistleblowers are allowed, even if it results in some lawbreaking. I have no problem with some kinds of lawbreaking. For example, Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years for his crimes, so I believe some criminals have the potential to be great and good people.
At tremendous personal risk to himself, Snowden needed to engage in criminal actions in order to expose the Treason of the government's security apparatus. In the process of uncovering the Treason, there was some collateral damage, due to the exposure of some sensitive intelligence. To call that collateral damage "Treason" is to willfully ignore the true perpetrators of the Treason: the rogue intelligence officials whose crimes are of a much more massive scale, and whose victims number in the hundreds of millions.
"The Constitutional freedoms of the US have never been under more attack" -- man, they need to teach history better in the schools. Constitutional freedoms have always been under attack -- consider the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, Lincoln's suspension of Habeas Corpus, the Espionage Act of 1917, the Sedition Act of 1918, the House Un-American Activities Committee (1938 to 1975), the FBI under Hoover. And that's not even considering that for most of the USA's existence constitutional freedoms were regularly denied to persons of the wrong race. Things are no worse than before, and better for a lot of Americans. It's just that everyone now thinks they are special. The civil libertarians have always had work to do, and always will.
Because the first reaction to what he did was "jail him! Kill him!". But keep it up. Maybe you could scare off all smart people like that.
Look at ALL the laws on the books at federal, state, county, and municipal levels... EVERYONE is a criminal even if they don;t realize it, that's a huge part of the problem, a legal system out of control...