Not to mention meretriciously wordy.
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Never mind.
Yep, oneâs girlfriend is not the UK Guardian.
Speak for yourself. You clearly are, anyone.
Serious. Yes. Very serious, Please join us there.
I think you left some words out of this response. I canât figure out what you mean to tell me.
I was going to say that perhaps the important difference is that no good has come from one of the two breaches.
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Comparing Ellsberg with Snowden is silly. Snowden revealed to the world that government spies. Thatâs it. Did no one know that? Other than that he broke the law. Ellsberg revealed something completely different. No history lesson here. This comparison is just another example of how a country remains in a state of infantilism and Ăźberbig guns. #americant. #economicconscription. Good luck suckers. http://worstwriter.com/2014/06/05/creeps-r-us/ http://worstwriter.com/2013/05/09/infantilism-vs-economic-conscription/
No, sorry. My point is that there is a difference between sharing classified material with your girlfriend, who, as a matter of fact, does not release it to anyone else; and releasing classified material to the entire world.
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âIllegalâ according to young Master Edward⌠.Let the lad do whatever he wants.
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And exactly how the government spies.
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You can haggle over whether or not what the NSA was doing was illegal. My impression is that legal scholars generally agree it is illegal and defenses of it tend to rely on bizarre doublespeak (like how recording all phone conversations is not âcollectingâ information).
Whistleblowing as a defense is akin to self-defense as a defense. You do what you have to do in the situation, and you are later judged by whether you were actually in the right.
Daniel Ellsberg, who was charged with and acquitted of similar crimes to the ones Snowden is facing stands behind Snowden. The president admitted that the conversation started by Snowdenâs leaks was an important one for the nation to have.
Polling in 2014 showed 55% of Americans think Snowden did the right thing while only 29% think he did the wrong thing. If they gave him a trial in an actual court heâd be quite likely to follow Ellsberg in being acquitted. Of course they have no intention of doing that. Honestly, among the most important things Snowden revealed was how the government is treating him. If the government subjects people who anger it to Kangaroo courts then the argument over how bad what Snowden did was become irrelevant - the government must be opposed.
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Legality. There are a number of issues. It is established law that the recording of meta-dataâphone numbers, e-mail addressesâis not illegal. Smith v. Maryland. Barrack Obama, an ex-Constitutional law professor, believes the government programs are legal. The 4th Amendment bans search AND seizure without a warrant. The government is recording, but not reading/listening without a FISA warrant. (However, FISA could be improved.)
Whistleblowing. Depends as a matter of law on the question of illegality. Whether you âthink youâre rightâ is irrelevant unless a law has been broken.
Daniel Ellsberg. He faced the music and got the result he did. Snowden is trying to guarantee the result of a trial before giving himself up.
Polls. I donât really think most Americans understand what was really occurring; and in any case, we donât take votes on criminal matters except of jurors, who have heard the evidence presented.
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Hence my comparison to self-defense. Your own belief in the legitimacy of your actions, while necessary, doesnât really help you if the facts donât support it. Whistleblowing is something people do because they feel it needs to be done. Whether they are in the right or the wrong there are usually consequences for them.
Polls show the sentiment of the country that the government purportedly represents. Normally you wouldnât get 55% support for, say, a house burglar. Thereâs a good reason we donât rely on polls to determine guilt and innocence, but when it comes to crimes that basically amount to treason, public opinion matters.
Regarding Ellsberg, yes, Ellsberg faced a trial, though it was an incredibly unfair one and he was merely lucky. The case against Ellsberg was dismissed because the government had collected evidence against him illegally using things like wiretaps - for such a ruling to take place in the Snowden case would be deeply ironic, but I donât think itâs likely.
The judge at Ellsbergâs trial ruled that he could not even explain to the jury why he did what he did because it was deemed irrelevant. Manning was not allowed to use evidence of the lack of damage done, the overclassification of what was released, the benefits of the leaks to the public, or even to explain her own intent at her trial. If that is the model on which trials under the Espionage Act are conducted then fleeing the jurisdiction is the right move. Thatâs what Daniel Ellsberg himself says.
If an Iranian national released documents revealing secret oppressive spying programs of the Iranian government and fled the country, weâd all be nodding along, saying, âYeah, I wouldnât stay in Iran after releasing that stuff.â And if all the things the Iranian government did were legal under its own laws according to its own lawyers, that would not even vaguely colour our opinions of whether what they did was acceptable or not. As a non-American, non-Iranian, I understand Snowden in exactly the same way.
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If you equate what Snowden did with self-defense, as it is understood in
law, then Snowden should fervently hope for you as a juror. Regarding
public support, my original statement holds. Whether the house burglar is
just a thief or one avoiding a greater evilâsay, kicking in the door of a
house afireâis a matter for a judge or jury, not public opinion. I will
not speak to the Manning trialâit is not the subject at hand and I donât
know anything about it. Finally, this is not Iran, and your reference to
the NSA programs as âoppressiveâ begs the question.
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Thatâs you taking their oppressiveness to be in question, and begging the much greater issue of whether a trial would fairly determine that in the first place. They donât always. America may be far from Iran, but anyone who has paid attention to it can see it has a very unfair and punitive record for such cases, for which Ellsberg and Manning are relevant.
Again, I wonder if people know why political asylum exists, that they donât see why Snowden might warrant it. Maybe theyâre just assuming America is too nice and above-board to consider it, but that would be viewing through glasses so rose-colored theyâre opaque.
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I donât, my analogy was only that a person takes a personal risk with the law in doing either thing. I believe you agree with this from what you are saying.
If America wanted foreigners to distinguish between the fairness of the trials that a person like Snowden could expect between America and Iran than it is Americaâs responsibility to demonstrate the difference. Ellsbergâs trial was not fair. Mannings trial was not only not fair, but she was held in a small cell and not allowed to lie down or lean against walls for 23 hours a day for years before she was even given a trial. Her clothes and reading glasses were confiscated. Thatâs America.
As for being âoppressiveâ we would probably automatically assume that a domestic spying program that involved massive scale information collection about ordinary citizens was oppressive. I donât see why America gets the benefit of the doubt, especially when the people running the program can come and lie to congress about it without consequences.
But if the people in the house were thanking the man for saving their lives and the prosecutor was going full bore against him, that would make us wonder what the hell was going on with the prosecutor. One would think it would be up the âvictimâ of the âcrimeâ to say that what happened was good for them rather than bad. Whether or not Snowdenâs releases were good or bad for America is up to the American people. That is why public opinion matters in this particular case.
ETA:
It occurred to me: no, this does not beg the question at all. To quote you:
So whether I or anyone thinks the program was âoppressiveâ doesnât matter. What matters is whether the program broke any laws. It could be oppressive or not and that would not matter.
So letâs see if we can find any common ground.
Do you agree that a trial for Snowden would only be fair if he was allowed to enter evidence that he was whistleblowing - that is, evidence that the programs he released information on were illegal?
Based on your response to my Iran hypothetical, am I right in assuming that you think it is reasonable for a person to flee a country that is going to unfairly try and sentence them?
Since some countries are judged to be default-oppressive (Iran) and others are not, would you agree that the correct way to make that judgement is how the country has acted in the past, for example, how it has conducted trials of others accused of similar crimes?
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No, he revealed to the world that the NSA spies on all of us all the time to the point of collecting all email and all cellphone conversations (and surrounding metadata) on US citizens and possibly as much of the Internet traffic as goes through the United States, which is a lot given our position, Google, and Amazon, among other things.
Kind of a big deal and, oh yeah, illegal.
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You mean his girlfriend the journalist, right?
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Except, along with this metadata, theyâre also grabbing the actual content. Theyâre just saying internal regulations would prevent them from using it and we should trust that they wonât, not that they donât technically have access to it. It is all double-speak. They collect all of our data, all the time. Hell, that was their motto.
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