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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.
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!
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.
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.
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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"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.