Snowdon is a dummy

oralloy wrote:

What the US government was and is doing is: trying to stop terrorist murders of US citizens....

Bullshit none of those billions had been shown to had stop one terrorist attack

are doing is taking away the privacy rights of US citizens

to the degree that no other nation on earth had done before to it citizens including all the police states in the history of the human race.

As far as I am aware, Snowden didn't expose war crimes. Name some.

Getting a fair trial under an unfair law such as Espionage Act of 1917 is not likely and would be similar to getting a fair trial under the Fugitive Slave Act.

Under this law there is no defense that the actions of the government is itself unconstitutional or that the classification was not properly done in fact there is no defend for releasing anything that someone in the government had placed a secret stamp on.

If Snowden had run into a top secret document detailing the take over of the US by the US military his revealing such a plot would still be a crime under the Espionage Act of 1917.

The articles I quoted listed quite a few specific examples. Take Karl Rove who leaked Valerie Paine (name?) CIA's job. How many years in jail is he doing?

Since Snowden did not expose any wrongdoing to begin with, it matters little that he will be unable to use that as an argument.

oralloy wrote:

Since Snowden did not expose any wrongdoing to begin with, it matters little that he will be unable to use that as an argument.

A very large percent of the citizens of this country do not agree with that statement including myself.

Nor is lying to congress under oath or hacking into a congress computer network either legal or moral.

Even if that hacking is taken to be wrongdoing, it has nothing to do with the NSA or with anything that Snowden exposed.

Based on the fact you think Manning is a more sympathetic character, how do you feel about the sentence of 35 years? It seems excessively long from over here. Anthony Blunt was just stripped of his knighthood, and he was spying for the Soviets. He did give intelligence once discovered, but even so.

In Arkansas, corrections officials obtained sodium thiopental from British distributors and then shared it for free with Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. But the states soon ran afoul of federal regulators for violating trade restrictions. The Drug Enforcement Agency seized Georgia’s supply of sodium thiopental in 2011 after records suggested that state officials might have broken the law by purchasing and importing the drug from Dream Pharma, a British distributor operating out of the back of a driving school in London. Kentucky handed over its sodium thiopental to the DEA that same year.

On that we disagree...

It is my opinion that the Europeans in general, and the British in particular...have a MUCH more enlightened notion of punishment for crime than we here in the US.

But nothing I have said there should detract from my opinion that capital punishment, in my opinion, is a much better and more humane alternative to putting someone into prison for life.

I suppose, Snowden would get a discharged sentence of two years here. At first, because afterwards it would go as appeal to the Federal Court and then, the Joint Senate of the Supreme Courts of Germany had to decide the discrepancy between labour courts (whistleblowing is legal in such a case) and the criminal court.

We can't bring someone back to life here, who was sentenced for life innocently. (Beside that, only a very small percentage really stays a life long in prison - 15 years it's usually for life long.)

If a person is deemed to be a danger to society…that person has to be kept confined. Not sure why you Germans feel differently, but I hope it works for you.