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Q: Edward Snowden, what punishment will he get if he is taken back to America?
8 years 19 weeks ago in Relationships - China
May 25, 2021 16:34 
After winning a landmark ruling against the UK’s GCHQ spy agency, activist groups praised former NSA contractor Edward Snowden for blowing the lid off the UK’s surveillance regime. Activists called yet again for his pardoning.
In a ruling issued on Tuesday morning, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) declared that GCHQ’s bulk interception of online communications, which was first brought to light by former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in 2013, was illegal. GCHQ stands for Government Communications Headquarters.
In its findings, the ECHR found three “fundamental deficiencies” in the GCHQ’s interception process: it had been authorised by a politician and not an independent body, search terms that would be flagged by the spy agency had not been included in the application for a warrant, and search terms linked to individuals – for example names, email addresses, and phone numbers – had not been authorised internally prior to their use.
Former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, who published Snowden’s revelations in 2013 and destroyed hard drives belonging to the whistleblower rather than handing them over to the government, celebrated the ruling. “It’s taken a long time,” he tweeted, “but turns out @Snowden was right.”
Big Brother Watch, a state-surveillance watchdog involved in the case against GCHQ, described the court’s ruling as “a finding that vindicates @Snowden's whistleblowing.”
Snowden himself downplayed his own significance. “Without journalists to tell the story, the public would not have known about it. Without human right lawyers defending that public, the courts would not have cared about it. Without those courts, politicians would still be denying it,” he tweeted, adding “I could not have done this alone.”
However, Snowden remains in exile in Moscow, and is still wanted by US authorities on espionage charges. With his passport canceled by Washington, Russia remains a safe haven for Snowden, and earlier this year he applied for Russian citizenship. Following the ECHR’s verdict, Big Brother Watch Director Silkie Carlo called on European leaders to protect Snowden, saying that he “clearly deserves the protection of democratic nations across Europe for his selfless defence of human rights."
Yet even if Snowden were to have a passport, leaving Russia would be fraught with danger. Back in 2013, Bolivian President Evo Morales found his plane forced to land in Austria after officials in France, Italy and Spain closed their airspace due to a tip-off that Snowden was on board. Snowden was in fact in Moscow, and the US is believed to have been behind the tip-off and grounding.
Snowden’s supporters have long called for his pardoning, and in the final days of the Trump administration, rumors circulated that the Republican president would grant him, and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, a pardon – if for no other reason than a shared animosity toward the US’ intelligence agencies and ‘deep state’. However, a pardon never materialized, and the Biden administration has given zero indication that it will entertain the idea.
Nevertheless, calls for a pardon proliferated online after the ECHR’s ruling.
Why should he be punished? Read this and open your mind.
www.adbusters.org Are you ready to turn on the light?
Maybe you are not aware of a small fact, and it is that as a condition of employment (or as a condition to be offered employment) in most security agencies in USA and elsewhere, you must sign a statement of confidentiality. In it, clearly says that you are not to talk or write one word of what you are about to see, be exposed to, or involved in to anyone. And, it also says what punishment you will get if you breech the agreement. In fact, even after you are working at whatever agency, if you become involved in a new particular area, you may be required to sign a second agreement. Of course, you are not forced to do anything, if you do not sign, you are not allowed to become involved.
Those agreements are legal and do stand in a Court of Law. And normally penalty is a number of years in jail, and that will depend on the severity of the damages caused by your "leaks"
As Happy said, regardless of WHY he did what he did, it is still illegal. Moral or immoral is not an issue in the eyes of the law.
Now, I personally applaud his bravery. In interviews you can see that he is a well spoken and very intelligent person. He obviously feels very strongly about spreading the word because he has given up a lot to do it.
With that said, I think he should be tried and sent to prison. If an example is not made of him, then national security is in serious trouble since any person with a gripe about government secrets/policies will think it is okay to tell our secrets to the world.
No matter what you think of what he brought to light, you have to look at the bigger picture. Secrets, are a fact of world politics. No country on Earth could survive without them. So the people who have access to these secrets must be able to look beyond their own moral judgment, and perhaps even the common good, in order to protect the whole.
There's a lot we don't know, but the first thing he did was fly to China (Hong Kong, but still) and then disappear. I don't trust anyone who flies into the arms of our enemies after leaking national security secrets which he agreed NOT to leak.
I agree with Xpat.John, but I think Snowden should be executed.
the question i have now is, was he a plant.? first release info about the us spying on citizens and regular people to get the public on his side then talk about us spying on china. either way he is now a traitor. edit: i forgot to answer the question, he should be executed (life in prison)
I agree with crimo. I think he's a plant. He's basically telling the Chinese government exactly what they want to hear, and I'm not sure what proof he is offering that what he is saying is true. Oh wait. It's China, so you don't need proof.
The question is, which side planted him?
depends if hes found guilty of treason the death penalty if hes found guilty of espinage 50 years to life
China of all places? why did he fly to China? There is a catch to this thing. let us all wait as it unfolds.
Hong Kong want to extradite him, as they have with other American fugitives in the past. However, Beijing is making it very clear they intend to use a technicality to overrule Hong Kong, and not allow the extradition.
This almost entirely shreds the agreement China made when UK agreed to return HK to China - One Country, Two Systems. China are now showing that the agreement has no meaning as far as they are concerned, and that they will dictate to HK.
Perhaps that is what the whole thing was supposed to be about from the very beginning. It is clear Snowden doesn't know that much.
Honestly, I think he will be disappeared before he could be able to be back in the US
As Ron Paul said, I think Obama should send him a thank you note. He is helping Obama keep his campaign promise of transparency.
Does anybody really know where he is? I could be Edward Snowden, or Spartacus. Or was it him I saw in the crowd at Wimbledon? If the European community has got any sense they will offer him sanctuary.
I'm guessing the reason nobody wants him is because he doesn't really know anything. It seems clear the information he is giving is of no real use to anybody, otherwise they would be offering him asylum.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0kIvDlE4y4
possible pardon for Snowden from a pragmatic New Yorker that never worked as a politician, a lawyer or any military background, this was predictable if anybody was actually paying attention and not suffering from "trump derangement syndrome", next time let's elect Joe the Plumber and really piss off the establishment.
Are you a law buff ... like me?
I-Told-You-So ... is approaching. he he
Ruling of US High Court makes "Up-Yours" 'whistleblower' ... contrary to all yours 'He is a traitor ..', he he.
He is coming back home... and if pardoned by POTUS ... no trial will occur after his return to USA.
NSA violated the Highest Law of the Land, i.e. US Constitution ... by collecting data of US citizens without consent ..., which was mentioned to you here soon after his HK landing in 2013 ... he he ... am so smart ...
https://news.yahoo.com/u-court-mass-surveillance-program-221948135.html
U.S. court: Mass surveillance program exposed by Snowden was illegal
Reuters - September 3, 2020
Seven years after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the mass surveillance of Americans' telephone records, an appeals court has found the program was unlawful - and that the U.S. intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth.
In a ruling handed down on Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the warrantless telephone dragnet that secretly collected millions of Americans' telephone records violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and may well have been unconstitutional.
Snowden, who fled to Russia in the aftermath of the 2013 disclosures and still faces U.S. espionage charges, said on Twitter that the ruling was a vindication of his decision to go public with evidence of the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping operation.
"I never imagined that I would live to see our courts condemn the NSA's activities as unlawful and in the same ruling credit me for exposing them," Snowden said in a message posted to Twitter.
Evidence that the NSA was secretly building a vast database of U.S. telephone records - the who, the how, the when, and the where of millions of mobile calls - was the first and arguably the most explosive of the Snowden revelations published by the Guardian newspaper in 2013.
Up until that moment, top intelligence officials publicly insisted the NSA never knowingly collected information on Americans at all. After the program's exposure, U.S. officials fell back on the argument that the spying had played a crucial role in fighting domestic extremism, citing in particular the case of four San Diego residents who were accused of providing aid to religious fanatics in Somalia.
"Today's ruling is a victory for our privacy rights," the ACLU said in a statement, saying it "makes plain that the NSA's bulk collection of Americans' phone records violated the Constitution."
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/case-pardoning-edward-snowden-presid...
The Case For Pardoning Edward Snowden By President Trump: Greenwald
MONDAY, DEC 14, 2020 - 20:40
A U.S. appellate court in September unanimously ruled that the NSA’s program of mass domestic surveillance was illegal, as well as likely a violation of the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” The court, and the broader public, knew about this illegal mass surveillance program created by the NSA only because Edward Snowden, while working inside that agency, discovered its existence and concluded in 2012 that the American public has the right know about what was being secretly done to them and their privacy by their own government.
Upon making the decision to blow the whistle on this security state illegality, Snowden delivered the documents relating to that program and other then-unknown systems of mass online surveillance not by dumping them indiscriminately on the internet or selling them or passing them to foreign governments, but by providing them to journalists (including myself) with The Guardian, The Washington Post and other news outlets. The documents Snowden provided were accompanied by requests to report them responsibly. He thus relinquished the power entirely to make decisions about which documents would and would not be published, leaving those decisions exclusively to news outlets.
...more ...
Subscribe to Glenn Greenwald's substack here.
May 25, 2021 16:34
After winning a landmark ruling against the UK’s GCHQ spy agency, activist groups praised former NSA contractor Edward Snowden for blowing the lid off the UK’s surveillance regime. Activists called yet again for his pardoning.
In a ruling issued on Tuesday morning, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) declared that GCHQ’s bulk interception of online communications, which was first brought to light by former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in 2013, was illegal. GCHQ stands for Government Communications Headquarters.
In its findings, the ECHR found three “fundamental deficiencies” in the GCHQ’s interception process: it had been authorised by a politician and not an independent body, search terms that would be flagged by the spy agency had not been included in the application for a warrant, and search terms linked to individuals – for example names, email addresses, and phone numbers – had not been authorised internally prior to their use.
Former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, who published Snowden’s revelations in 2013 and destroyed hard drives belonging to the whistleblower rather than handing them over to the government, celebrated the ruling. “It’s taken a long time,” he tweeted, “but turns out @Snowden was right.”
Big Brother Watch, a state-surveillance watchdog involved in the case against GCHQ, described the court’s ruling as “a finding that vindicates @Snowden's whistleblowing.”
Snowden himself downplayed his own significance. “Without journalists to tell the story, the public would not have known about it. Without human right lawyers defending that public, the courts would not have cared about it. Without those courts, politicians would still be denying it,” he tweeted, adding “I could not have done this alone.”
However, Snowden remains in exile in Moscow, and is still wanted by US authorities on espionage charges. With his passport canceled by Washington, Russia remains a safe haven for Snowden, and earlier this year he applied for Russian citizenship. Following the ECHR’s verdict, Big Brother Watch Director Silkie Carlo called on European leaders to protect Snowden, saying that he “clearly deserves the protection of democratic nations across Europe for his selfless defence of human rights."
Yet even if Snowden were to have a passport, leaving Russia would be fraught with danger. Back in 2013, Bolivian President Evo Morales found his plane forced to land in Austria after officials in France, Italy and Spain closed their airspace due to a tip-off that Snowden was on board. Snowden was in fact in Moscow, and the US is believed to have been behind the tip-off and grounding.
Snowden’s supporters have long called for his pardoning, and in the final days of the Trump administration, rumors circulated that the Republican president would grant him, and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, a pardon – if for no other reason than a shared animosity toward the US’ intelligence agencies and ‘deep state’. However, a pardon never materialized, and the Biden administration has given zero indication that it will entertain the idea.
Nevertheless, calls for a pardon proliferated online after the ECHR’s ruling.
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European Court Of Human Rights Rules Mass-Spying Was Illegal; Snowden Vindicated
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