Snowdon is a dummy

Ok, isn't the Guardian a British newspapers making it a foreign newspaper to an American?

Regardless of where the office is located, it is still a British newspaper isn't it?

he would have stayed to face the consequences of actions if he believed so strongly in them.

Quote:

From what I understand, Snowden and his lawyers are asking for that justification defense be granted before he comes back rather than the usual way through the court. Once again asking for special favors and calling a fair trial.

Asking for a fair trial, rather. That's his only defense.

That such a defense would be made unavailable to anyone would be grossly unfair. Imagine the neighbour's house is on fire with a baby trapped inside. You courageously go in to save the baby. Next thing you know, you are arraigned and accused of trespassing private property (which you did of course) And in your trial, you are not allowed to even mention to the jury that you went in the house to save the baby!... That would have "kangaroo court" written all over it.

Renegade National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden has been praised as a heroic whistleblower who exposed illegal and immoral actions by the United States government.

Perhaps this was true at the beginning, such as when Snowden outlined the NSA's quasi-legal practice of scooping up telephone metadata of millions of Americans over Verizon's telecommunication lines .

But as time goes on, Snowden's leaks have increasingly related to international spying and other legitimate actions of the U.S. government, which he has neither legal nor moral justification for exposing.

Snowden's leaks include outing NSA foreign surveillance targets to the Brazilian government, the German government, the U.N., and even the Chinese government . Just this week reports came out that the NSA had targeted Indian diplomats for spying at their Embassy in D.C. and in New York City .

Even Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who broke the Snowden saga, said that he would not have published those Chinese addresses.

"What motivated that leak though was a need to ingratiate himself to the people of Hong Kong and China,” Greenwald told The Daily Beast.

Snowden, caught in Moscow and looking for asylum countries, would presumably have felt the need to "ingratiate" himself by feeding information to Moscow as well. While some may call it "pure speculation" that Russia and China in some way got information from Snowden, still others take it as a matter of common sense.

Following the China disclosures, Snowden "lost of all his standing to be considered a whistleblower," Joshua Foust, former intelligence analyst turned freelance reporter, told Business Insider. "I t’s silly to pretend like they’re not ... rival government[s]. Massive amounts of government and corporate breaches come from Russia and China, on incredibly sensitive targets."

Another example of Snowden's dubious leaks includes his disclosure of British GCHQ's location of a surveillance center in the Middle East.

"So we should just be friends with everyone?" Foust asks. "I genuinely don't get why people don't understand how that [the surveillance center] serves legitimate security interests."

Meanwhile the Washington Post's Barton Gellman — who notably quibbled with Snowden about disclosing certain information — recently published a piece about a government paper Snowden supplied called "Threats to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles." Drones are in fact controversial, but Snowden didn't leak any evidence of their misuse. Instead, he leaked a comprehensive guide to their battle for security against weaknesses.

Luckily, Gellman exercised caution, choosing not to publish anything he thought damaging to national security from this report.

In the same article, Gellman mentions that Snowden had distilled "dozens of intelligence assessments” over the last seven years. It's not clear why Snowden was doing this in the first place, when his crusade arguably centered on domestic spying practices.

"I'll just repeat for the record that Snowden told me he wanted me to decide for myself what was in the public interest to publish, accounting for potential harm," Gellman wrote in an email to Business Insider. "If he had wanted to dump the whole thing online, he could have done that with a lot less personal risk."

Foust, who argues that espionage is a normal function of government, says that should Snowden ever leave Russia, he should focus on the domestic spying issues.

"That's the only way to get popular support for [his] cause," said Foust.

Indeed, most of the reforms gaining steam in Congress have more to do with raising the bar for domestic intelligence gathering.

As for spying on foreign bodies, “Nobody wants to be seen as weakening defenses against terrorism,” Michael Mandelbaum, a professor of foreign policy at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, told Bloomberg.

In any case, spying is an accepted part of foreign relations. The U.S. government employs spies, as does every other modern government. These spies gather intelligence on other governments for use in statecraft (diplomatic negotiations) as well for military application.

Yes, even allies spy on each other, and no, it is not illegal (but it may get you detained for prisoner trade, and it will definitely get you deported).

Richard Lourie of The Moscow Times wrote last year:

Like the poor, spies are always with us. Everybody does it: Enemies spy on each other, but so do allies. During the Cold War, the Soviets were, of course, the most active in spying on the U.S., but the Israelis were right behind them in second place.

And Michael Bohn of the same publication wrote this gem, titled, "Spying is a Sovereign Right":

One of the more ridiculous aspects of the Edward Snowden affair has been Russia's feigned and exaggerated indignation over his revelations that the National Security Agency conducted a spying campaign aimed at Russia and other foreign countries.


At this point, it's pretty clear that he should not be considered (or eligible for protections for being) a whistleblower, who is "a person, usually an employee in a government agency or private enterprise, who discloses to the public or to those in authority, mismanagement, corruption, illegality, or some other wrongdoing."

It's up for debate whether he is an American hero.

It's de facto his defense, his justification for doing what he did. If he is not allowed to use it, then there is no possibility of a fair trial.

And I don't see why a judge must veto any defendant's legal argument... Why can't defendants chose their own defense?

Snowden is no coward. Those who accuse him of being a coward wouldn't know brave if they saw one. He gave his all; his freedom, his country, and asylum.
Who amongst those who called him otherwise have done anything so brave?
What have they sacrificed for this country?

I am still waiting for the FBI swat team to march into the NYT news room and arrests those who now have control over all those secret documents.

After all having such material let alone releasing parts of it is a "crime" and thye are not under the protection of the Russian government.

Is the same government that have another nation head of state plane force down trying to seized Snowden is not brave enough to enforce the same laws again the most important newspaper in the world.

Are they indeed cowards?

The way it works here in America is that the people from Germany, England, France and Canada...and a few America-hating Americans DO NOT get to decide if the actions were justified.

A trial will determine that.

Ok, isn't the Guardian a British newspapers making it a foreign newspaper to an American?

I am still waiting for the FBI swat team to march into the NYT news room and arrests those who now have control over all those secret documents.

http://pacific.scoop.co.nz/2014/08/edward-snowden-the-most-wanted-man-in-the-world/


Snowden’s concerns over the NSA’s capabilities and lack of oversight grew with each passing day. Among the discoveries that most shocked him was learning that the agency was regularly passing raw private communications—content as well as metadata—to Israeli intelligence. Usually information like this would be “minimized,” a process where names and personally identifiable data are removed. But in this case, the NSA did virtually nothing to protect even the communications of people in the US. This included the emails and phone calls of millions of Arab and Palestinian Americans whose relatives in Israel-occupied Palestine could become targets based on the communications. “I think that’s amazing,” Snowden says. “It’s one of the biggest abuses we’ve seen.” (The operation was reported last year by The Guardian, which cited the Snowden documents as its source.)
Another troubling discovery was a document from NSA director Keith Alexander that showed the NSA was spying on the pornography-viewing habits of political radicals. The memo suggested that the agency could use these “personal vulnerabilities” to destroy the reputations of government critics who were not in fact accused of plotting terrorism. The document then went on to list six people as future potential targets. (Greenwald published a redacted version of the document last year on the Huffington Post.)
Snowden was astonished by the memo. “It’s much like how the FBI tried to use Martin Luther King’s infidelity to talk him into killing himself,” he says. “We said those kinds of things were inappropriate back in the ’60s. Why are we doing that now? Why are we getting involved in this again?”

In the mid-1970s, Senator Frank Church, similarly shocked by decades of illegal spying by the US intelligence services, first exposed the agencies’ operations to the public. That opened the door to long-overdue reforms, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Snowden sees parallels between then and now. “Frank Church analogized it as being on the brink of the abyss,” he says. “He was concerned that once we went in we would never come out. And the concern we have today is that we’re on the brink of that abyss again.” He realized, just like Church had before him, that the only way to cure the abuses of the government was to expose them. But Snowden didn’t have a Senate committee at his disposal or the power of congressional subpoena. He’d have to carry out his mission covertly, just as he’d been t

Covered in the first amendment.

justification defense?