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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."
He's about to leave office. The elections are in less than 4 weeks.
They're targeting the wrong president.
They should be targeting Donald Gump or Hilary Pneumonia and trying to convince them to make an election promise.
Except that it's become tradition for presidents to pardon a bunch of people on their last day in office. If your political career is basically over then noone can do much if you pardon all your friends.
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.
but he also acted indiscriminately and betrayed American intelligence-gathering methods to foreign powers
So why shouldn't he be pardoned for that? People keep forgetting that it was that or not say anything at all. Legal whistle blowing doesn't work. That means there will always be some legal angle like the one you espouse that allows the powers-that-be to punish anyone that steps out of line.
>"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.
Yes.
1) exposed the fact Eric holder lied to congress multiple times concerning domestic intelligence and broad data collection against us citizens accused of no crimes. (Purgery is a crime)
2) irrefutably exposed that the NSA performs illegal wiretapping on a routine, standard operating policy basis. (Illegal search is a high crime, specifically denounced in the constitution.)
3) irrefutably exposed that the NSA shares data on foreign persons collected in bulk in exchange for bulk data on american citizens, again, for people who are not accused of any crime, or part of any investigation. (Some of these countries are not on diplomatically friendly terms, making this very close to genuine treason.)
But of course, the guy who calls attention to the elephant in the room is the bad guy.
There was a clear demarcation between the domestic related material and the foreign intelligence related material.
No, there was not.
That was the whole point and why people are upset! Supposedly 'foreign' intelligence-gathering scooping up masses of domestic data on US citizens and being retained in essence forever.
Way to (intentionally) miss the pachyderm sitting in your lap!
Of course it's quite likely you're paid (like many others posting on related topics in which governments have an interest) to post such utter nonsense so it's not really surprising.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Now? The right wing have always accused the ACLU of having a liberal bias.
Then again, I'm not sure there is anything they haven't accused of having a liberal bias.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Are you suggesting that Richard Nixon was tried and convicted? Or that Gerald Ford did *not* pardon him?
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
There is no need to pardon anyone that has not been charged with anything.
Somebody should have told that to Gerald Ford.
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!
Whatever China and Russia are, neither is a dictatorship. That is an ignorant characterization.
The President of China (head of state; mostly a figurehead) is elected by the National People's Congress, which in turn is elected by an interesting hierarchical election system, ultimately by the people. The Premier (leader of the State Council; head of government) is nominated by the President and approved by the Congress.
Russia is a multi-party state; more so than the US. The President is elected by the people. He appoints the Prime Minister. The Federal Assembly (Parliament) has two houses: the Duma, elected by proportional representation, and the Federation Council, whose members are separately selected by 85 "federal subjects" (very loosely analogous to "states" in the US) - similar to the original method of selection to the US Senate.
Sure, China has a shadow government in the form of the Communist Party, which controls the selection of those who stand for election Congress. Big deal. The USA has a shadow government in the form of the Demopublican establishment, with a death grip on the selection of those who stand for election to Congress and for President.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I count 57. Bigger number for Bush, and other presidents.
Number of ever people pardoned that embarrassed a government: 0.
(Possible exception during the revolution, when the rebels became the government.)
Obama is deeply conservative. Hell will freeze over before he would pardon Snowden.
And let us not forget CIA director George Tenet was given a Presidential Medal of Freedom for lying about "Weapons of Mass Destruction" in Iraq. Resulted in many thousands of dead. Never challenged by Obama. Because Tenet worked for the system. Snowden worked against the system.
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.
What I'd like to see is Snowden return to the US of his own volition to stand trial.
Stand trial for what, though?
One of Snowden's complaints (and the chief reason, according to him, that he has not returned to the US to stand trial) is that he has been charged on two counts under the Espionage Act, which prevents him from defending himself in open court. Presumably you, too, would prefer that he was allowed to make a public interest defense?
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Besides as a man of principles, I am sure he is anxious for his day in court where he can stare down the corrupt powers-that-be under the unblinking gaze of public scrutiny, [...]
It's flowery language you're using here, but according to Snowden and his lawyer, this is more or less correct. The Espionage Act does not allow Snowden to make a "I did it in the public interest"-type defence.
Whether or not he would actually return, were he charged with something that did give him the possibility of saying in open court why he was motivated to do what he did, is an open question. Still, right now he doesn't have the option of having his day in court. A show trial is never your day in court.
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"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.
Would Edward Snowden ever accept a carefully worded pardon, seriously he would have to be nuts. You can guarantee the US would treat that pardon exactly like they treated treaties with the citizens of the original American nations, and just like the treat citizens of the current nation. Those agreements worth less than toilet paper (the paper they use simply to hard and shiny to be used effectively). When being investigated those government organisations lied under oath, and that was corruptly protected by the current government administration, who broke their constitutional oaths to do so.
Edward Snowden is hero for freedom, democracy, justice and the truth. The secrets they corruptly kept and the lies they told, all funded by tax payers funds broke all the core required elements of democracy and it is only mass corruption that is keeping them all from being properly prosecuted and serving extended custodial sentences.
Forget about pardoning Snowden, let's focus of prosecuting the real criminals Edwards Snowden's courage exposed. I am sure he will find that of far, far more value that a vapour ware peace treaty between himself and a corrupt government.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Attacks on gun rights? What attacks on gun rights have there been?
"1) exposed the fact Eric holder lied to congress multiple times concerning domestic intelligence and broad data collection against us citizens accused of no crimes. (Purgery is a crime)" -- Normally one should let grammar issues go, but it's perjury - not purgery. It sounds like you're saying that AG Holder barfed all over Congress (which he did do in a way..)
Check the Fox News site. Didn't you know the government is taken everybody's guns ? No really. Bunch of jackbooted government thugs showed up at my cousin's place in Shitville Idaho and took her guns. No really. It happened. Told her the 2nd ammendment doesn't apply to an S-300 Surface to Air Missile launcher. She said she uses it to go duck hunting but would they listen ?
By this time next week you won't be able to carry an AK-47 gun into Arby's and scare the kids without some government thug showing up cause the 'owner called the police because he thought he was being robbed' and shooting you ... I mean, seriously, that's only supposed to happen to black people ! And on Friday, they'll come collect them from your house. Honest! My niecedaughter told me !
Okay. Getting serious. Just a couple of months ago a man, guilty of no crime, was pulled over in a 'routine traffic stop'. He happened to be black. He had a gun, which he legally owned. He informed the cop that he had a, legal, gun and did absolutely nothing violent - obeying the officer completely. When the officer asked for 'license and registration' he reached for it... and was promptly shot dead. All this was captured on video - we have undeniable proof of what happened. Now you would THINK that the NRA would be up in arms about this. For once there we have an example of an ACTUAL assault on gun rights - when cops shoot you for having a gun you legally own and informed them you had with you. A gun you did not threaten them with, or commit any crime with. This actually WAS an assault on gun rights (that it was yet another black man killed by a cop is another matter). ... crickets. Not a single response from the NRA. No press release. No protest. No rally. No mention on their website. Not so much as a fucking tweet.
And what
The NRA may have gotten a tiny glimmer of sympathy from me - if they were acting against genuine oppression of legitimate gun owners - all of them, that includes black people in traffic stops.
If they wouldn't stand up for him - then nothing they DO stand up for is worth protecting.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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...
If that were true, then several current and former Presidents, some of their cabinet members, a bunch of senior military officers, many, many CIA, NSA, FBI and DEA officers, and probably quite a few members of Congress would be in jail right now.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz