How Should the US Deal with Wikileaks and Snowden?

Great Debates
61

If Snowden is considered a traitor, Clinton should be, too. Snowden released documents in an effort to inform the American public about the NSA and its pervasive spy programs.
Clinton attempted to hide information, was hacked, and now foreign powers have access to those emails.

What Snowden leaked was information about how and to what extent the NSA is spying on American citizens. Among other information, some of what was in Clinton’s emails relate to foreign policy and espionage – far more damaging in the hands of a foreign power than information about how the US spies on its own citizens.

Snowden is only a “traitor” because the US government has labeled him as one.
George Washington was a traitor to Britain, but we call him a patriot. Think about it.

62

I’ve thought about it. Snowden is/was no George Washington, he’s an opportunist who did what he did for his own selfish, personal reasons. If he was a George Washington he would have released what he released to the US press and stayed to face the music…and he would be the hero some of you are trying to make him out to be. He most likely would have, eventually, been exonerated as a whistleblower, instead of hiding out in another country and trying to figure out how to get back in.

Oh, and even if you disagree with the above, he isn’t George Washington because he isn’t on the winning side, which George was…and which is why he wasn’t a traitor. Had the Americans lost the revolution George would almost certainly have been hung, or at a minimum spent the rest of his life incarcerated.

63

Deliberately putting yourself at the mercy of your enemies doesn’t make you a hero, it makes you an idiot. Manning was sentenced to a longer prison term than everyone responsible for Abu Ghraib put together. John Kiriakou - the whistleblower - is the only person involved in the CIA’s torture program to be punished. If that doesn’t tell you something about the Obama Administration’s contempt for whistleblowers, you’re not paying attention.

64

If the Washington Post receives autonomously information that some minor and unprintworthly burglary in some DC area hotel was, in fact, ordered by a high-ranking government official … the Post is allowed to print this information … the Post had no hand in the stealing of this information. They promptly reported that they received this stolen information to the police in four inch headlines across their next edition. Free Press …

If the police track down and find the person who stole the information, then of course this person can and should be prosecuted to the extent that the law allows (taking in consideration the rights given to whistle-blowers). The important point I’m trying to make is that there is a clear and distinct break between the stealing of information and the receiving of the information. The Washington Post didn’t know of the thief, had no prior knowledge of the crime and broke no law just simply receiving the information and reporting it to the police.

Does this apply to the Assange matter, that I don’t know. Is there evidence Manning and Assange had contacts before the theft, did Assange in any way encourage Manning to do what he did?

Manning raised his right hand and swore an oath to defend the US Constitution. He swore to keep the secrets he was privileged to know. When he divulged these secrets, he betrayed his oath, he betrayed his country and he betrayed the US Constitution. I can forgive him for his youth, but We the People can never tolerate such actions.

Snowden acted strictly for person gain, fortune and fame. His was not to set right a grievous wrong, but rather to enrich himself. I would like the refer back to my first example in this post. For many decades we could only guess where the Washington Post received their information, information that eventually destroyed an entire Presidential administration. This informant received no money, no fame, never received a hero’s welcome. He thought only to right a terrible wrong, which he did and THAT was his only reward … that We the People would be safer from our own government.

Don’t get me started on Major North selling advanced weapon systems to a country that Congress had declared to be our enemy … that is treason.

65

That is the thing: Objectively, Snowden is a Hero while Assange wouldn’t even make mediocre fertilizer for asparagus.

Open the door on the Shitty one & you lose the Good one. So far it seems that the Operational Orders are to stand down until there is a status change.
I see no need to change that (at least not while Snowden lives).

66

So to avoid being an idiot and putting himself at the mercy of the United States, Snowden, a true US Patriot, put himself at the mercy of the Russians. Got it.

67

Let me rephrase this and see if it helps you out,

The NSA and the Federal Government threaten American Security. We can’t always try to play nice and understanding with everyone. We gotta protect ourselves. And the Citizens of this country act in the name of that. How often are we supposed to let other people do bad things to us as penance for something we did which others might argue was bad, but could also be argued were necessary measures?

You seem to legitimately think that the NSA and what they are doing is “good” and exposing their activities to the public is “bad” but there are plenty of Americans who are very thankful to Snowden for exposing the US government for spying on America citizens who have done nothing to warrant being spied on. Show me the place in the Constitution where it says the government of this nation has the right to track our web use, store data on our emails, text messages, and phone calls. Show me the amendment?

I think Snowden deserves a friggin medal.

68

Article 1, Section I: “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.”

And then “An Act to deter and punish terrorist acts in the United States and around the world, to enhance law enforcement investigatory tools, and for other purposes.” a.k.a. the USA Patriot Act.

There’s been some provisions later found unconstitutional by the SCOTUS, but the things done before these rulings cannot be undone. First ask yourself how your own congressman voted … Here you can look for yourself.

69

According to the Pentagon Papers case, yes it does.

70

I admit that I’m not an expert on these matters, but are you sure Clinton’s emails were hacked into? I hadn’t heard that - I thought the only disclosures were what she turned over to the FBI.

71

This is one of the most incorrect things I’ve ever seen. He leaked a bunch of shit that just hurt our foreign relations, did nothing to advance any American interest (including concerns about domestic liberty or freedom), all he revealed was stuff you could’ve known from George W. Bush era legislation had you actually read the statutes, but you didn’t. He just revealed a process, and plus it was primarily about metadata collection. All of the domestic stuff in Snowden’s dump was making mountains out of molehills, and all the foreign stuff just hurt our foreign relations.

72

I’m not sure why but the topics of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange frequently attract insane lack of knowledge of the basics of their cases.

So let’s try to rectify that.

Julian Assange: Is not under U.S. indictment, and in fact as far back as 2013 the Justice Department (anonymously) leaked to the press that there was no serious possibility of sustaining charges against Assange, because he hasn’t done anything in regard to U.S. law any differently than what the New York Times and other major newspapers have done. It’s established precedent, a third party, who was never covered by a security clearance, who is freely given classified information by someone who is breaking the law to do so, is not guilty of a crime if they disseminate it. The “burden of keeping classified information” doesn’t attach to them. It doesn’t attach to domestic journalists, and it certainly doesn’t attach to foreign journalists living abroad when the incident happened.

Additionally, not only is Assange not under any U.S. charges, we’ve never moved to extradite him–because again, he is actually not guilty of any crimes in America. The correct thing for America to do about Assange is “nothing.”

The only reason he’s holed up in an Ecuadorean Embassy is because he left Sweden after two women made sex-crime related claims against him. He is not wanted for trial–he is wanted for a Swedish criminal investigation. Basically, Swedish authorities want to question him. When he found out Britain was, per the terms of its agreements with Sweden, going to extradite him to Sweden’s custody he fled to the Ecuadorean Embassy and has never left. His claim is that somehow this is all a grand secret U.S. plot to extradite him to the United States, a facile claim that is easily disproven. Most obviously because Britain would be far more likely to extradite Assange to America than Sweden is. So if he actually allowed himself to be extradited to Sweden, he’d actually be in a better spot than he is right now.

Assange and his supporters have always asserted Sweden and the UK are all involved in some plot, but not only is there no evidence to support this, executing said plot would be in contradiction to both British and Swedish law. The simpler explanation is under a quirk of the Swedish system, they cannot proceed to close the case until they interview Assange, and they are not willing to “play his game” and interview him in the Ecuadorean Embassy. They have treaty rights to have him extradited as a person of interest and interview him domestically. Britain is fulfilling its treaty obligations by seeking to do so. Ecuador is protecting him via the legal status of its embassy.

Once all the Swedish charges hit their statute of limitations (some already have, I think they all do around 2019), I suspect a grand “nothing” will happen. He’ll be free to leave the Embassy and nobody is going to whisky him away to America. He may or may not be deported from Britain, since I think his fleeing British arrest is in violation of a British court order and possibly some minor crime that may see the Brits want to kick him out. Not only would it be patently insane to assassinate a man who is not a fugitive from justice, not some terrorist leader, not a serious threat to the United States (all Assange does is collect a salary, and before hiding in the Embassy, travel around whoring on it–Wikileaks can/does function without him.)

Snowden: Snowden unambiguously violated the espionage act. While we should continue to seek his extradition, nothing he has done, and nothing he can do, would justify an assassination. Technically assassinations are prohibited by executive order, and at least the ones we’ve publicly acknowledged perpetrating (like against Yamamoto) were justified in a very different time/circumstance.

Snowden isn’t an “ongoing” threat, he stole data, broke espionage laws, and it’s all out there now. He has no ongoing access to our systems, or anything else he can leak. He’s not an ongoing threat, just a simple fugitive. I wouldn’t waste any political capital on even trying to get him back. If he eventually agrees to some deal where he accepts some sanction to get out of Russia and back to the U.S. then more power to him, I don’t care. Killing him is both an insane proposition and frankly absurd.

Now, he’s no hero, and he clearly has broken the law. But he’s also not a “traitor”, while treason is more broadly defined in many countries, America weirdly defines treason in the constitution itself. It is extremely specific, and the evidentiary requirements for proving it are very high. So while he may be a “colloquial traitor”, under the highly specific legal definition of treason in the U.S. he wouldn’t be guilty of treason.

73

I don’t think Snowden or Assange gave any information to our enemies that they didn’t already have. The only people shocked by their info were the American people. So lets not care if our enemies know stuff, just don’t let the people know.

74

I doubt they had much of the back channel communications from our State Department. And the real damage Snowden did was between the US and it’s allies, and to our allies who had communicated to us with the presumption we’d keep their secrets.

So, yeah…we should care who got a lot of that info. We don’t need to care enough about it to whack the asshole, but we shouldn’t hand wave it away either.

75

Well, I think Assage is a space alien. Both your statement and mine have equal factual basis.

Besides, the main reaction of countries like China and Russia have been tu quoque, “See, you do it too, America!” As if there’s no substantive difference between collecting metadata on phone calls in accordance with court reviews – which I acknowledge is a controversial policy – versus routinely collecting the content of phone calls with no court review, as those countries do.

If China and Russia knew everything Snowden leaked, I would have presumed that they would have relished making that information public to damage the reputation of the United States – perhaps in the same manner as many believe that Russia leaked DNC emails to Wikileaks. But instead, these countries “waited” for Snowden to steal all those documents. Why do you suppose these countries were silent until Snowden leaked those documents?

76

I always wondered why the Chinese authorities didn’t snatch up Snowden when he was in Hong Kong … I’d guess the Chinese already had all that information … could well have been their information to begin with and the USA had stolen it from them originally.

77

Is Snowden even in a position to continue leaking information? What’s the point of assassinating him?

Oh, wait, you said “take him out.” Like, to a restaurant. Wine and dine the boy. I…I’m not sure where you’re going with this.

78

Sanctioned assassination isn’t done as a form of punishment. It is done as a defense mechanism to prevent something worse from happening. Snowden doesn’t have the ability to do any more damage to the US, nor does Assange personally.

Are there examples where a sanctioned assassination (other than China or North Korea) was carried out purely as punishment? I’m not aware of any.

79

The Israeli operation against the Munich terrorists, perhaps?

80

Forgot about that one. I even liked the movie, Munich.

Revenge assassinations for murdering your reps to the Olympics, seems a bit more palatable, than assassinating two people for leaking information. But, hey, that’s just me.