What benefits are you referring to? In reality most other countries have about the same rights that we do. On paper we may have a few more in some cases, but overall the experience of living here isn't better. It's just different. Try living abroad for a year and you will see.
Oops! I just killed 290 innocent people including children. It was just an innocent mistake! Was he imprisoned on charges of manslaughter at least? I'm guessing the answer is no and that the man responsible for a senseless massacre went unpunished.
But they will gladly have them used to kill one intent on murdering a million than let a million die to avoid the blood of the one on their own hands.
And if they are instead used to murder a million people? What do you do then. Take the weapons back? I don't think there is anything wrong with making weapons that are designed to kill people, but knowingly selling them to a government which you know will use them to do bad things is another story. I would never sell any sort of weapon to the US government. Never. I don't trust them to do good things. I expect them instead to do evil things with them.
Life's about choices, and if you've made the kind of choices where the navy is firing at you, it's probably not a big loss to humanity if we have to kick you off the planet. Right now, there are people who will throw acid on girls for going to school or kill their sisters for dancing in the rain. These are not people who will sit down at the breakfast table and discuss their problems calmly over a croissant. They're going to kill people for what we consider no reason at all, and the only thing they can understand is force. If you can figure out a way to get them to the table, fuck man, I'll buy the bagels with my last paycheque.
Pot, kettle. So your solution to someone killing a girl for dancing is to bomb their whole village? Just kill everyone and let God sort out the details? Because it sounds like that is what your precous weapon systems are designed to do. They are devices used to murder people and you have not the slightest control over who uses them and for what end. You may want to believe that only good people will wield your devices, but that is almost certainly not the case. In fact I'm betting that bad people have killed children with your devices. Just like the school girls in your example but on a much more massive scale.
The Constitution limits the powers of the government.
The constitution was mainly intended as an exhaustive enumeration of the powers of their new government. The first eight amendments were very controversial precisely because they were worried that they would encourage people to believe that any human right that wasn't listed could be violated by their new government. They didn't want that. They foolishly were relyiing on people not to simply ignore the ninth amendment which made their desires and concerns pretty clear that the first eight did not represent an exhaustive list of things the government was not allowed to do.
That is a core belief of the US government and to a slightly lesser extent the American people. It's been obvious since, and possibly before, the war of independence.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman, and John Livingston. June 28, 1776
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The only reason they didn't mention that all human beings have a right not to be murdered is because they considered it to be offensively obvious. And like the other amendments in the bill of rights might lend more credence to the modern and incorrect interpretation of the purpose of the constitution. The constitution's purpose was to enumerate everything that the government could do. Everything it was allowed to do. Anything not listed was supposed to be verboten. The constitution was never intended to list every single human right that the Founders believed in. The Declaration of Independence made it quite clear that they believe in every human being's right to exist, to be alive. And not only American lives.
That doesn't make violating the human rights of non-citizens okay. I did not vote for anyone to violate the rights of human beings anywhere in the world. Our government was founded on the basis of natural rights, not on majority rule or tyranny of the majority over the minority. Even if the majority of Americans thinks it is okay to say murder a million people that doesn't make it right. You've at least heard of this whole "right vs wrong" thing, right? If something is wrong to do to Americans then it is also wrong to do to non-Americans. Well, unless of course we are members of a super-race or something and are beyond good and evil or whatever.
Well it was really only ever truly free for people who were not of African descent. If your ancestors were from Africa (in the recent past) then the US had no freedom at all. But since I am of European descent, if I had been born in say 1805 I wouuld have lived in what may have been the freest society that human beings have ever known. It wasn't really until the early 20th century that the US really stopped being free for white people. That's when the US really started to develop a taste for tyranny.
If you are trying to figure out why such an unfree country is full of people who like to talk about freedom that is why. It's because we have a very unusual history. The only other country I know of that had a similar experiment in freedom is France, but their experiment died a lot faster.
The news is not that we were caught spying on our enemies, but that we were caught spying on countries we like to claim are our friends. Friends don't spy on friends. Hence the problem. And then there's the whole part about the US and UK treating 1984 as if it were an instruction manual. People of the world are not too happy about that either.
If it's not news that there's no reason to be grounding planes to try to catch the guy who released the non-news that no one cares about. If it's not news then it is pretty hard to claim that Snowden has caused any harm to US interests.
No country is required under international law to let anyone enter it's territory. Diplomatic immunity applies to people who have been already allowed to enter, and granted formal accreditation by the hosting state. It allows diplomats to leave the country, but it does not mean they can go anywhere they want in it or over-fly it. Morales is actual Head of State, so he's not accredited by anybody, which means he actually has fewer rights to travel then either his embassy staff or ordinary citizens.
Somehow I'm guessing that this won't be your response when Air Force One has to change course because half the countries in Europe or South America decide at the last minute not to allow the plane in their air space.
I think voters would prefer their government to behave in a way that they can be proud of, not ashamed of. That means not spying on your friends. Only on your enemies. In fact if you are spying on someone it is a good bet that they are your enemy whether you realize it or not. It is beginning to look as though the US is everyone's enemy. I'm beginning to think that the US is a bigger threat to world peace than North Korea. Not to say that the UK gets a free pass. It sounds like they are complicit and an important part of this conspiracy to make the entire world into a surveillance state.
As far as the purpose of spying, it is obviously to have the ability to manipulate the internal affairs of a foreign government. If you don't like the opinions of an important government minister. No problem. He will soon be in a fatal car accident. That sort of thing. Intelligence is useless if you are never willing to make use of it.
Fair enough. I think a lot of us are complicit. Maybe not a majority but a lot of people. All of this is going to (or should) ratchet up anti-Americanism around the world and in this case I have to admit that it is justified. I'm planning to leave the US more or less permanently in the near future and I'm a bit worried that I may have some problems due to all of this. But I don't blame Snowden. He clearly did the right thing, although I think his sense of self-preservation may be a bit weak. The real responsibility lies with those in the US government who made the relevant decisions and to a lesser extent with the US citizens who support their actions and who are now enthusiastically in favor of killing the messenger.
Right now all we have are the accusations of one man who, by the way, has his own agenda.
President Morales was not the only one on that plane. It is the accusations of everyone on that plane. And his agenda was just to fly home.
He's riled up sentiment among the Latin American countries against the U.S.
No. We and our French and Portuguese lapdogs (who cannot seem to get enough of our cum down their throats) have riled up sentiment. And rightfully so. If we are willing to essentially ground the plane of a foreign president for just the slightest of rumors can you imagine what we would do if there were some real evidence that Snowden were on the plane. Would we simply shoot the plane down? Maybe. I've never heard of anything like this before. It sounds like the US government wants Snowden more than they have ever wanted anyone. I shudder to think what the government has done that makes them so afraid of this guy.
Maybe what he is saying is true, but the countries involved deny it.
Have you got any evidence for that? They haven't denied it. Even if France and Portugal do deny it no one with any sense is going to believe them because it is by far the most likely sequence of events that could lead to President Morales' plane changing course and landing in Austria.
I'm beginning to suspect that Snowden is dead no matter what he does. If the US governemnt feels he is so dangerous that they have to ground a president's plane like this over the most insubstantial of rumors then he is well and truly fucked. They will simply assasinate him and try to make it look like an accident or extraordinary rendition him to gitmo and torture and murder him there. It is sad because he truly is a brave hero. Obama's protest that this issue is not worthy of his attention is starting to sound more and more like the opposite of the truth. It is becoming clear that they are terrified of what he might reveal. It's sickening to speculate about, but maybe it is something that makes Abu Ghraib seem tame in comparison.
It was Spain, France, Italy, and Portugal. The submitter also neglected to mention that these countries deny the accusations.
Citation? I'm not sure that Spain and Italy were accused, but I know that at least so far Portugal and France have not denied the accusations. They refuse to comment on the matter. Are you gullible enough to believe that the Bolivian president just made up the whole thing and chose to have his plane diverted to Austria and then searched?
There's laws (in theory at least) in the US to protect whistle blowers, even those who release information the way he did.
Citation? Examples?
So why, then, did he choose to go into exile rather than accept the consequences and justify his actions in court?
Because, as someone who only just turned 30 he is not prepared for his life to end either through execution (USC 18, section 2381; http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2381) or just life in prison. It is true that no good deed goes unpunished, but I think Snowden would still like his choice of punishments. Like most people he prefers exile over death.
When he released classified documents he did in fact break US law. He publicly admitted to doing it. Short of a sympathetic jury who believes in jury nullification he has zero chance of being found not guilty of leaking classified documents. So, like everyone else, he has no illusions about living free ever again in the country of his birth.
It always annoys me when people claim that by not choosing to spend the rest of his life in prison he is not facing the consequences of his actions. The dramatic events we are all watching unfold are the consequences. Exile is simply the only option he has that is preferable to suicide. I highly doubt you or any of the others claiming he is avoiding the consequences of his actions would act any differently. Remember that he and many other people all over the world do not believe he did anything wrong. On the contrary, many believe he is a hero.
And what did he think he had to gain by going to Julian Assange?
I'm not sure if you are following the news, but at no point has he been to London. He is still in the Moscow airport. So I'm not sure what you mean by "going" to Assange. He accepted help from one of Assange's associates, which is precisely what you would have done in his situation. Any other questions?
Because no country will "have" him. Are you trying to imply that no country would allow him in even if he could present a valid passport? That he cannot travel because every country on earth is in solidarity with the US and wants to see Snowden tried for treason? That seems pretty silly. His problem is that pretty much every country requires a passport in order to issue any kind of visa. Most countries don't consider the case of someone without a passport or the ability to get one. The ability to trap someone like this between countries is due to a sort of loophole.
Freedom of speech is the freedom to communicate freely. And yes it does mean the freedom to "publish" love letters if you had them lawfully. A letter is of course a physical thing that can be stolen. So I'm assuming that no laws. like breaking and entering, were broken to attain the information.
Porn "surfing"? I thought everyone downloaded porn from torrent sites like civilized folks. But, yes, if I happened to know your porn habits in a free society I could write about them.
Musical recordings have to do with copyright. That's a whole nother can of worms. It's a government granted monopoly for a period of time. It still doesn't mean you own the information and anyway copyright infringement is not what Snowden is being accused of. If that were the only charge he might well come back here to face them.
Your point that he agreed not to publish the information that he did just means he violated a contract. I guess the US government could sue him for breach of contract. Again, if the only charges he were facing upon return were copyright infringement and breach of contract he would probably return to face them.
He doesn't need a passport to return to the US. Or any other country that decides to let him
Going back to the US is obviously not something he wants. He'd be better off killing himself than doing that. In order to enter another country without a passport he will probably have to be granted asylum first. Unfortunately many countries won't grant him asylum until he arrives there. So generally he can't apply for asylum because he cannot travel because he doesn't have a passport. he cannot even enter Russia in order to apply at embassies there because Russia won't give him a visa without a passport. Russia might be willing to grant him asylum and then allow him in, but Russia's asylum is apparantly conditional upon a sort of gag order, the conditions for which he probably could not meet even if he wanted to. I doubt The Guardian is going to stop publishing his stuff even if Snowden asked them not to. So it's a bit of a pickle.
Unless you were thinking in terms of a country that doesn't require a valid passport to enter. It occured to me that Cuba probably doesn't have whatever online computer checking system is necessary to check passport validity. So he might be able to enter Cuba or a country like it except the airline may not be willing to fly him there. In theory he might also be able to enter a country at a land border crossing without computers. Something he clearly can't do from an airport transit lounge of course.
The problem is that you painted your comments with a pretty wide brush. Your statement seemed to imply far more countries than just China and Russia. I agree that China is even worse than the US when it comes to human rights violations. About Russia I know very little. I'd have to look into it further. You've only given one example. That doesn't tell me much.
It's also important to keep in mind that not all laws are enforced. Sometimes the US can seem freer on paper, but when you actually live in that other place for a while you discover that in reality you have more freedom over there. In one of these Snowden threads someone who claimed to have spent a lot of time in Russia claimed that that is the case over there. That most of the time things are freer just because no one seems to care about what you do.
I have lived as an expat in Cuba, Colombia, Laos, and Malaysia and they are all nice places to live. They all have their strengths and weaknesses but overall I prefer all of them to life in the US with the possible exception of Laos and that's only because the locals have an awful habit of just burning their trash instead of paying for it to be picked up. Combine that with a lack of wind and it isn't too pleasant.
I also know that many people from Latin America are very disappointed when they arrive in the US and discover what people are like here. They discover that universal truth that money is not everything. Of course to some of them money is everything. Those are the ones who stay.
It's not uncommon for travellers to get their passports stolen, it's possible to get emergency travel documents if this happens although I'm sure it's not easy. I've never had to do it.
Well I have had to do it. The first step is to go to your embassy. That's where you get your temporary travel documents.
I don't think Snowden was motivated by "look at me". You think he so badly wanted to be famous that he was willing to either be executed, spend the rest of his life in jail, or spend the rest of his life in exile in order to accomplish that? That is a pretty extraordinary claim and I don't see any extraordinary evidence to back it up.
Now, you may want to argue that it was foolish of him not to simply remain anonymous and let his leaked documents speak for themselves. Fair enough. I would guess that he felt releasing his name would give more credibility to his revelations and I think it does give them more credibility, but that greater credibility comes at a very high cost to him.
As for being foolish, I agree that his plan wasn't particularly clever. It really doesn't seem well thought out. But his chief error was his choice of Hong Kong as the location for making his stand. They have an extradition treaty with the US for christ sake. There are even some countries right in Asia that lack extradition treatiest with the US.
If he survives this perhaps he will write about why he made such poor decisions if his goal had been to survive afterword. When I first heard about all of this it sounded like he was willing to sacrifice himself. That he did not mind going to prison or even being executed. If that were true initially it seems clear he has changed his mind about it.
A democracy cannot function properly if the actions that its government takes are secret. In order for US citizens to stop its government from doing bad things, they must first know what those bad things are.
In this case our governmnent has embarked upon a worldwide surveillance program. You may approve of such a program, but not everyone does. What Snowden has done is open up these immoral, shameful activities so that the world can judge whether they are right or wrong and whether something should be done to stop them. At the very least people can take precautions and dump their gmail and yahoo email accounts and be far more careful with email encryption etc.
As far as government secrets in general I think it is permissable to keep such secrets during wartime or perhaps outside of wartime if we are likely to be at war with that country at some time in the near future, but that does not give them carte blanche to do whatever they want. If they are doing something very wrong I would hope that someone like Snowden would be willing to come out and let us know even if it means they have to remain in exile for the rest of their lives.
He's not being sought for anything regarding anything of his his own expression, so it's not about freedom of speech.
I disagree with your interpretation of events. He is being sought for releasing information about some stuff that the government is doing. Communicating that information is a form of speech in our high tech world. It is that communication that is the crime in this case. Doing what he did is the only way to criticize the government when their activities are secret.
Specifically, he engaged "in unauthorized communication of national defense information and willful communication of classified communications intelligence information.
Emphasis mine.
In addition to those charges, both brought under the Espionage Act, the government charged Snowden with theft of government property."
Theft? Did he steal a government car or at least a USB drive? Oh. You mean he stole information? I disagree with the implication that information is something that can be 'stolen'. I do not believe information can be owned. So I don't believe information theft is a crime.
I don't know why he didn't just resign his position and then give an interview to a reporter to make his claims.
How would that have been different? His release of classified information would have still been a crime in this country.
Ah, but no one would believe him without the leaks, right?
No one would believe him about what? The "leaks" are the information that he wants people to know about.
So what do you suggest is the reason why he cannot travel then? His citizenship has not actually been revoked although I'm sure the US would love to do that if they could and clearly the US is not the one making the decision about whether another country will allow him entry.
The airlines are part of the problem of course, but the only reason they would not accept him is because they think he will not be allowed in the arrival country without a valid passport. Cuba would have no way to know that Snowden's passport is not valid except for the fact that he's now famous. He may not be famous in Cuba however.
Slashdot Mirror
What benefits are you referring to? In reality most other countries have about the same rights that we do. On paper we may have a few more in some cases, but overall the experience of living here isn't better. It's just different. Try living abroad for a year and you will see.
Consensus is that it was a horrible mistake.
Oops! I just killed 290 innocent people including children. It was just an innocent mistake! Was he imprisoned on charges of manslaughter at least? I'm guessing the answer is no and that the man responsible for a senseless massacre went unpunished.
But they will gladly have them used to kill one intent on murdering a million than let a million die to avoid the blood of the one on their own hands.
And if they are instead used to murder a million people? What do you do then. Take the weapons back? I don't think there is anything wrong with making weapons that are designed to kill people, but knowingly selling them to a government which you know will use them to do bad things is another story. I would never sell any sort of weapon to the US government. Never. I don't trust them to do good things. I expect them instead to do evil things with them.
Life's about choices, and if you've made the kind of choices where the navy is firing at you, it's probably not a big loss to humanity if we have to kick you off the planet. Right now, there are people who will throw acid on girls for going to school or kill their sisters for dancing in the rain. These are not people who will sit down at the breakfast table and discuss their problems calmly over a croissant. They're going to kill people for what we consider no reason at all, and the only thing they can understand is force. If you can figure out a way to get them to the table, fuck man, I'll buy the bagels with my last paycheque.
Pot, kettle. So your solution to someone killing a girl for dancing is to bomb their whole village? Just kill everyone and let God sort out the details? Because it sounds like that is what your precous weapon systems are designed to do. They are devices used to murder people and you have not the slightest control over who uses them and for what end. You may want to believe that only good people will wield your devices, but that is almost certainly not the case. In fact I'm betting that bad people have killed children with your devices. Just like the school girls in your example but on a much more massive scale.
The Constitution limits the powers of the government.
The constitution was mainly intended as an exhaustive enumeration of the powers of their new government. The first eight amendments were very controversial precisely because they were worried that they would encourage people to believe that any human right that wasn't listed could be violated by their new government. They didn't want that. They foolishly were relyiing on people not to simply ignore the ninth amendment which made their desires and concerns pretty clear that the first eight did not represent an exhaustive list of things the government was not allowed to do.
That is a core belief of the US government and to a slightly lesser extent the American people. It's been obvious since, and possibly before, the war of independence.
http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman, and John Livingston. June 28, 1776
Remember, the constitution does not recognize a right to life,
http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/ninth_amendment
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The only reason they didn't mention that all human beings have a right not to be murdered is because they considered it to be offensively obvious. And like the other amendments in the bill of rights might lend more credence to the modern and incorrect interpretation of the purpose of the constitution. The constitution's purpose was to enumerate everything that the government could do. Everything it was allowed to do. Anything not listed was supposed to be verboten. The constitution was never intended to list every single human right that the Founders believed in. The Declaration of Independence made it quite clear that they believe in every human being's right to exist, to be alive. And not only American lives.
That doesn't make violating the human rights of non-citizens okay. I did not vote for anyone to violate the rights of human beings anywhere in the world. Our government was founded on the basis of natural rights, not on majority rule or tyranny of the majority over the minority. Even if the majority of Americans thinks it is okay to say murder a million people that doesn't make it right. You've at least heard of this whole "right vs wrong" thing, right? If something is wrong to do to Americans then it is also wrong to do to non-Americans. Well, unless of course we are members of a super-race or something and are beyond good and evil or whatever.
Well it was really only ever truly free for people who were not of African descent. If your ancestors were from Africa (in the recent past) then the US had no freedom at all. But since I am of European descent, if I had been born in say 1805 I wouuld have lived in what may have been the freest society that human beings have ever known. It wasn't really until the early 20th century that the US really stopped being free for white people. That's when the US really started to develop a taste for tyranny.
If you are trying to figure out why such an unfree country is full of people who like to talk about freedom that is why. It's because we have a very unusual history. The only other country I know of that had a similar experiment in freedom is France, but their experiment died a lot faster.
The news is not that we were caught spying on our enemies, but that we were caught spying on countries we like to claim are our friends. Friends don't spy on friends. Hence the problem. And then there's the whole part about the US and UK treating 1984 as if it were an instruction manual. People of the world are not too happy about that either.
If it's not news that there's no reason to be grounding planes to try to catch the guy who released the non-news that no one cares about. If it's not news then it is pretty hard to claim that Snowden has caused any harm to US interests.
No country is required under international law to let anyone enter it's territory. Diplomatic immunity applies to people who have been already allowed to enter, and granted formal accreditation by the hosting state. It allows diplomats to leave the country, but it does not mean they can go anywhere they want in it or over-fly it. Morales is actual Head of State, so he's not accredited by anybody, which means he actually has fewer rights to travel then either his embassy staff or ordinary citizens.
Somehow I'm guessing that this won't be your response when Air Force One has to change course because half the countries in Europe or South America decide at the last minute not to allow the plane in their air space.
I think voters would prefer their government to behave in a way that they can be proud of, not ashamed of. That means not spying on your friends. Only on your enemies. In fact if you are spying on someone it is a good bet that they are your enemy whether you realize it or not. It is beginning to look as though the US is everyone's enemy. I'm beginning to think that the US is a bigger threat to world peace than North Korea. Not to say that the UK gets a free pass. It sounds like they are complicit and an important part of this conspiracy to make the entire world into a surveillance state.
As far as the purpose of spying, it is obviously to have the ability to manipulate the internal affairs of a foreign government. If you don't like the opinions of an important government minister. No problem. He will soon be in a fatal car accident. That sort of thing. Intelligence is useless if you are never willing to make use of it.
Fair enough. I think a lot of us are complicit. Maybe not a majority but a lot of people. All of this is going to (or should) ratchet up anti-Americanism around the world and in this case I have to admit that it is justified. I'm planning to leave the US more or less permanently in the near future and I'm a bit worried that I may have some problems due to all of this. But I don't blame Snowden. He clearly did the right thing, although I think his sense of self-preservation may be a bit weak. The real responsibility lies with those in the US government who made the relevant decisions and to a lesser extent with the US citizens who support their actions and who are now enthusiastically in favor of killing the messenger.
Right now all we have are the accusations of one man who, by the way, has his own agenda.
President Morales was not the only one on that plane. It is the accusations of everyone on that plane. And his agenda was just to fly home.
He's riled up sentiment among the Latin American countries against the U.S.
No. We and our French and Portuguese lapdogs (who cannot seem to get enough of our cum down their throats) have riled up sentiment. And rightfully so. If we are willing to essentially ground the plane of a foreign president for just the slightest of rumors can you imagine what we would do if there were some real evidence that Snowden were on the plane. Would we simply shoot the plane down? Maybe. I've never heard of anything like this before. It sounds like the US government wants Snowden more than they have ever wanted anyone. I shudder to think what the government has done that makes them so afraid of this guy.
Maybe what he is saying is true, but the countries involved deny it.
Have you got any evidence for that? They haven't denied it. Even if France and Portugal do deny it no one with any sense is going to believe them because it is by far the most likely sequence of events that could lead to President Morales' plane changing course and landing in Austria.
I'm beginning to suspect that Snowden is dead no matter what he does. If the US governemnt feels he is so dangerous that they have to ground a president's plane like this over the most insubstantial of rumors then he is well and truly fucked. They will simply assasinate him and try to make it look like an accident or extraordinary rendition him to gitmo and torture and murder him there. It is sad because he truly is a brave hero. Obama's protest that this issue is not worthy of his attention is starting to sound more and more like the opposite of the truth. It is becoming clear that they are terrified of what he might reveal. It's sickening to speculate about, but maybe it is something that makes Abu Ghraib seem tame in comparison.
It was Spain, France, Italy, and Portugal. The submitter also neglected to mention that these countries deny the accusations.
Citation? I'm not sure that Spain and Italy were accused, but I know that at least so far Portugal and France have not denied the accusations. They refuse to comment on the matter. Are you gullible enough to believe that the Bolivian president just made up the whole thing and chose to have his plane diverted to Austria and then searched?
There's laws (in theory at least) in the US to protect whistle blowers, even those who release information the way he did.
Citation? Examples?
So why, then, did he choose to go into exile rather than accept the consequences and justify his actions in court?
Because, as someone who only just turned 30 he is not prepared for his life to end either through execution (USC 18, section 2381; http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2381) or just life in prison. It is true that no good deed goes unpunished, but I think Snowden would still like his choice of punishments. Like most people he prefers exile over death.
When he released classified documents he did in fact break US law. He publicly admitted to doing it. Short of a sympathetic jury who believes in jury nullification he has zero chance of being found not guilty of leaking classified documents. So, like everyone else, he has no illusions about living free ever again in the country of his birth.
It always annoys me when people claim that by not choosing to spend the rest of his life in prison he is not facing the consequences of his actions. The dramatic events we are all watching unfold are the consequences. Exile is simply the only option he has that is preferable to suicide. I highly doubt you or any of the others claiming he is avoiding the consequences of his actions would act any differently. Remember that he and many other people all over the world do not believe he did anything wrong. On the contrary, many believe he is a hero.
And what did he think he had to gain by going to Julian Assange?
I'm not sure if you are following the news, but at no point has he been to London. He is still in the Moscow airport. So I'm not sure what you mean by "going" to Assange. He accepted help from one of Assange's associates, which is precisely what you would have done in his situation. Any other questions?
Because no country will "have" him. Are you trying to imply that no country would allow him in even if he could present a valid passport? That he cannot travel because every country on earth is in solidarity with the US and wants to see Snowden tried for treason? That seems pretty silly. His problem is that pretty much every country requires a passport in order to issue any kind of visa. Most countries don't consider the case of someone without a passport or the ability to get one. The ability to trap someone like this between countries is due to a sort of loophole.
Freedom of speech is the freedom to communicate freely. And yes it does mean the freedom to "publish" love letters if you had them lawfully. A letter is of course a physical thing that can be stolen. So I'm assuming that no laws. like breaking and entering, were broken to attain the information.
Porn "surfing"? I thought everyone downloaded porn from torrent sites like civilized folks. But, yes, if I happened to know your porn habits in a free society I could write about them.
Musical recordings have to do with copyright. That's a whole nother can of worms. It's a government granted monopoly for a period of time. It still doesn't mean you own the information and anyway copyright infringement is not what Snowden is being accused of. If that were the only charge he might well come back here to face them.
Your point that he agreed not to publish the information that he did just means he violated a contract. I guess the US government could sue him for breach of contract. Again, if the only charges he were facing upon return were copyright infringement and breach of contract he would probably return to face them.
He doesn't need a passport to return to the US. Or any other country that decides to let him
Going back to the US is obviously not something he wants. He'd be better off killing himself than doing that. In order to enter another country without a passport he will probably have to be granted asylum first. Unfortunately many countries won't grant him asylum until he arrives there. So generally he can't apply for asylum because he cannot travel because he doesn't have a passport. he cannot even enter Russia in order to apply at embassies there because Russia won't give him a visa without a passport. Russia might be willing to grant him asylum and then allow him in, but Russia's asylum is apparantly conditional upon a sort of gag order, the conditions for which he probably could not meet even if he wanted to. I doubt The Guardian is going to stop publishing his stuff even if Snowden asked them not to. So it's a bit of a pickle.
Unless you were thinking in terms of a country that doesn't require a valid passport to enter. It occured to me that Cuba probably doesn't have whatever online computer checking system is necessary to check passport validity. So he might be able to enter Cuba or a country like it except the airline may not be willing to fly him there. In theory he might also be able to enter a country at a land border crossing without computers. Something he clearly can't do from an airport transit lounge of course.
The problem is that you painted your comments with a pretty wide brush. Your statement seemed to imply far more countries than just China and Russia. I agree that China is even worse than the US when it comes to human rights violations. About Russia I know very little. I'd have to look into it further. You've only given one example. That doesn't tell me much.
It's also important to keep in mind that not all laws are enforced. Sometimes the US can seem freer on paper, but when you actually live in that other place for a while you discover that in reality you have more freedom over there. In one of these Snowden threads someone who claimed to have spent a lot of time in Russia claimed that that is the case over there. That most of the time things are freer just because no one seems to care about what you do.
I have lived as an expat in Cuba, Colombia, Laos, and Malaysia and they are all nice places to live. They all have their strengths and weaknesses but overall I prefer all of them to life in the US with the possible exception of Laos and that's only because the locals have an awful habit of just burning their trash instead of paying for it to be picked up. Combine that with a lack of wind and it isn't too pleasant.
I also know that many people from Latin America are very disappointed when they arrive in the US and discover what people are like here. They discover that universal truth that money is not everything. Of course to some of them money is everything. Those are the ones who stay.
It's not uncommon for travellers to get their passports stolen, it's possible to get emergency travel documents if this happens although I'm sure it's not easy. I've never had to do it.
Well I have had to do it. The first step is to go to your embassy. That's where you get your temporary travel documents.
I don't think Snowden was motivated by "look at me". You think he so badly wanted to be famous that he was willing to either be executed, spend the rest of his life in jail, or spend the rest of his life in exile in order to accomplish that? That is a pretty extraordinary claim and I don't see any extraordinary evidence to back it up.
Now, you may want to argue that it was foolish of him not to simply remain anonymous and let his leaked documents speak for themselves. Fair enough. I would guess that he felt releasing his name would give more credibility to his revelations and I think it does give them more credibility, but that greater credibility comes at a very high cost to him.
As for being foolish, I agree that his plan wasn't particularly clever. It really doesn't seem well thought out. But his chief error was his choice of Hong Kong as the location for making his stand. They have an extradition treaty with the US for christ sake. There are even some countries right in Asia that lack extradition treatiest with the US.
If he survives this perhaps he will write about why he made such poor decisions if his goal had been to survive afterword. When I first heard about all of this it sounded like he was willing to sacrifice himself. That he did not mind going to prison or even being executed. If that were true initially it seems clear he has changed his mind about it.
A democracy cannot function properly if the actions that its government takes are secret. In order for US citizens to stop its government from doing bad things, they must first know what those bad things are.
In this case our governmnent has embarked upon a worldwide surveillance program. You may approve of such a program, but not everyone does. What Snowden has done is open up these immoral, shameful activities so that the world can judge whether they are right or wrong and whether something should be done to stop them. At the very least people can take precautions and dump their gmail and yahoo email accounts and be far more careful with email encryption etc.
As far as government secrets in general I think it is permissable to keep such secrets during wartime or perhaps outside of wartime if we are likely to be at war with that country at some time in the near future, but that does not give them carte blanche to do whatever they want. If they are doing something very wrong I would hope that someone like Snowden would be willing to come out and let us know even if it means they have to remain in exile for the rest of their lives.
He's not being sought for anything regarding anything of his his own expression, so it's not about freedom of speech.
I disagree with your interpretation of events. He is being sought for releasing information about some stuff that the government is doing. Communicating that information is a form of speech in our high tech world. It is that communication that is the crime in this case. Doing what he did is the only way to criticize the government when their activities are secret.
Specifically, he engaged "in unauthorized communication of national defense information and willful communication of classified communications intelligence information.
Emphasis mine.
In addition to those charges, both brought under the Espionage Act, the government charged Snowden with theft of government property."
Theft? Did he steal a government car or at least a USB drive? Oh. You mean he stole information? I disagree with the implication that information is something that can be 'stolen'. I do not believe information can be owned. So I don't believe information theft is a crime.
I don't know why he didn't just resign his position and then give an interview to a reporter to make his claims.
How would that have been different? His release of classified information would have still been a crime in this country.
Ah, but no one would believe him without the leaks, right?
No one would believe him about what? The "leaks" are the information that he wants people to know about.
So what do you suggest is the reason why he cannot travel then? His citizenship has not actually been revoked although I'm sure the US would love to do that if they could and clearly the US is not the one making the decision about whether another country will allow him entry.
The airlines are part of the problem of course, but the only reason they would not accept him is because they think he will not be allowed in the arrival country without a valid passport. Cuba would have no way to know that Snowden's passport is not valid except for the fact that he's now famous. He may not be famous in Cuba however.