Or rather patience with people that willfully ignore evidence in order to support a point.
You “ignored” remark was about them storing things for a month, which wasn’t the point I was making and not the actual extent of their storage of emails and phone calls (including content). You’re conflating storage of different types of data, some indefinite and some finite. You’re also ignoring that they store whole classes of data forever and that they also store anything they flag (such as any email encrypted with PGP by US citizens) forever.
So, yeah, you’ve made your point about your support of the NSA and you’ve ignored questions around that which were inconvenient with your line of argument.
Define “fair trial.” Do you mean present evidence to justify his actions in an open court where the rest of the country can read/hear this testimony and submitted evidence, as well as a jury, or do you mean a sealed courtroom where no one but the jury will be allowed to hear the evidence and being charged under an act where disclosure of illegal activity is not an allowed defense for the accused crime (the Espionage Act of 1917)?
Oh, and he didn’t commit espionage. He gave primary documents to journalists documenting crimes engaged in by members of the national security and intelligence apparatus, just like Ellsworth did.
Boy, you should be his lawyer! Of course, in a trial, which seems unlikely to take place, you would have to say what crimes you have in mind…that will be the rub.
For that matter, didn’t Ellsberg just tell everyone the government was fibbing about the progress of the Vietnam War? The government telling lies to the press is not exactly new, or a crime exactly.
Okay, that’s backing up from allowing him to present any defense he wishes, as you said above. But, importantly, I think you have answered:
With a yes. You believe that a trial of Snowden (or any whistleblower) would be unfair if they were not allowed to enter evidence that they were, in fact, revealing legal wrongdoing.
This, I take as a yes to:
If the trial or sentencing will be unfair then it is reasonable to try to escape the jurisdiction.
But now we get to:
So when I asked:
Your answer appears to be “no.” It appears that you do not think that we should judge countries based on their past actions.
To me, it would seem that if we wanted to predict whether or not Snowden would get a fair trial (and if Snowden himself wanted to predict it) the best way to do so would be to look at the trials of other people charged with similar offenses under the same act as see how they were conducted. Since you apparently don’t think that Ellsberg’s or Manning’s trials are relevant to this, it would seem you disagree, and that the proper course of action is to assume that America will give a fair trial without considering how America has acted in the past in similar circumstances.
Normally I would say it is unfair for me to suggest that someone else holds a belief that I find manifestly unreasonable, but I don’t know what my alternative is. You won’t say that you do think using past examples is a good way to make judgements, and you seem to be completely averse to making any such comparisons. Saying you have only my word to go on, when you clearly have google searches to go on if you are so inclined, says that you have no interest in learning whether espionage trials conducted by America in the past have been fair or not.
I think we agree that the best outcome is for Snowden to be tried or not tried based on what crimes he did or did not commit in a fair way. My assessment is that that would probably mean never laying charges against him in the first place, your assessment is that that would mean trying him and likely getting a conviction. That’s a reasonable point of disagreement that can be argued.
But when it comes to blaming Snowden for fleeing the country, we can’t even agree on the basic question of how one would rightly determine whether or not fleeing one’s country is the right decision. How would that person in Saudi Arabia, from your example, even know that they ought to flee their country, if not by looking at how others in situations similar to theirs had been treated?
Yes, I think that’s a fair assessment of what Ellsberg did. Are you suggesting that Ellsberg ought to have gone to jail for what he did?
Of course, even proof of that doesn’t get you a “not guilty” verdict under the Espionage Act. That’s part of Snowden’s point. He could prove legal wongdoing and still go to jail for the rest of his life (since they’ve taken the death penalty off the table, unlike other people convicted under the act).
Snowden has explicitly cited the cases of a number of whistleblowers, including former NSA employees, over the last two decades as part of his decision to not stay and face the music. It was clear he’d never get a fair trial.
Well, I’m trying to haggle out any point of agreement to make a conversation even vaguely possible. So far I can’t get agreement on the idea that we use the past to predict the future, so it could be that if Snowden returned for trial he could find himself tried by a Native American healing circle.
