As someone who emigrated from Russia and don't want to ever return here (nor I will be able to unless I want to spend my life in jail), I don't understand how anyone could possibly want to voluntarily "flee to Russia". Doesn't compute.
If he was an agent from the start, I doubt we would have learned this much publicly. The materials would have been much more valuable to Russia as pressure points, compared to the public release (yes, of course they spinned it properly, US is watching you and they are hypocrites etc etc, but this was damage control and closure from their part).
As a Russian, I am not 100% convinced that US are evil imperialists [at least before 2025]. Have some humility, there are many more evil imperialists. You are probably not even in top 5.
I'm actually Swedish lol. But I'm still convinced US are evil imperialists, and the only difference between the US and RU is that US have a stronger cultural influence, which is a huge advantage when they want to anchor their fleet all across the world.
If your goal is to discredit Snowden if you cant catch him, revoking his passport is a total win, he can’t flee to any neutral country (if there even is one that wouldn’t bend to the US) and wherever he lands is an enemy of the US. Russia or China make no material difference, but it’s a bit too “smart” of Snowden for his passport to be revoked while he was laying over en-route to Ecuador... It’s 3D chess when he doesn’t have the ability to move pieces.
I mean: We know his flight details, we know when his passport was revoked, and we know he can’t revoke his own passport, so that leaves very few plausible avenues.
Or it was a crime of opportunity on Russia's part. "Hey, we didn't plan this but since his passport just got revoked, what if Good Ol' Uncle Putin extended a hand? Maybe we could flip him."
Whether the play worked or not doesn't really matter. I don't think his citizenship status is contingent on him leaking to Russia explicitly, and I don't think he started as a Russian spy. I think it was a crime of opportunity; a play.
“Hand yourself in” is not the compelling argument you seem to think it is.
He put egg on the face of the US government, proving that neither democrats or republicans have done anything to preserve peoples right to privacy, even US citizens.
So, what does anyone gain from his capture? Except for people claiming him to be a Russian asset, which they would still do because there is literally no bar that can be cleared for people to believe he did something he believed to be right for the public benefit.
You just want him punished for daring to speak out, because it marginally weakened the US hegemony on digital goods and services.
He leaked WAY more than necessary and didn’t seek out official whistleblower channels. Stuff that didn’t even have to do with US privacy. Say what you want about spying on foreign adversaries but every government does it to another one and that didn’t need to be leaked.
Can you point to anything that he leaked that wasn't necessary to leak?
He didn't release it to the public, he chose journalists specifically who had a lot of integrity and would go through the data with lawyers and release only what pertained to the public interest, with the rest being destroyed or kept encrypted. It was also recorded and those recordings are the basis for the "citizenfour" documentary, so you can see for yourself.
You can contrast this cleanly with Wikileaks which usually dumped only barely redacted information - this was a deliberate systemic filtering conducted by neutral journalists; Snowden published literally nothing himself and the vast majority of documents never made it to the public. In fact when he travelled out of Hong Kong he had literally no documents anymore.
I'm not sure what you'd expect him to do honestly.
The abuse of these systems was so systemic and widespread that the nature of them needed to be understood so that the scale of abuse could be comprehended.
If you didn't know what xkeyscore was, then "civil servants spy on people they find attractive, routinely" doesn't have the same sting..
.... if Google engineers didn't know that there was an internal wiretap on the unencrypted part of there network ("data unencrypted and renecrypted here, LOL!" - actual quoted slide) then the push from big tech companies to encrypt internal traffic never happens, then mass surveillance of literally everyones email continues... heck, it probably still did... I'd bet money that they've planted staff who planted backdoors...
So, what didn't he need to leak, point me to.. say, two things.
NSA spying in China? Maybe, but USA spying on Angela Merkel was necessary, because spying on allied politicians is against several agreements. GCHQ leaks were important because it detailed the mechanism in which Five Eyes governments were circumventing their own laws that protect civilian rights to privacy. In fact, it was seeing James Clapper, then Director of National Intelligence, lie in front of the Senate that triggered Snowden to leak things, because it was clear that the laws were not being applied- and everything released reinforces that point.
Did anything change in terms of policies or people responsible seeing criminal charges as a result of these findings?
I hate to be so cynical, but among people who are concerned about privacy and american influence, these findings are sort of like "no surpise the military surveillance state that built the internet for military and surveillance purposes would continue using it for military and surveillance purposes." I mean after all, many of us grew up getting threatening letters from the powers that be saying "hey, we surveilled your network traffic on behalf of the private moneyed interests who own all the IP in this country and found illegal activity." Witch hunts like McCarthy going after communists are public record and known parts of our history. MKultra. COINTELPRO. FBI writing a letter to MLK asking him to kill himself. CIA selling crack. Lying about Vietnam. Lying about Iraq WMDs. This has always been a bit of a banana republic.
One thing I know for sure is that those leaks caused a lot of the tech community to go a lot harder into encryption.
The reason practically all sites are HTTPS now can be traced to this. Many, if not most, sites in 2012 were plain http. Which is actually difficult for me to remember despite working on sites as a sysadmin back then.
I don’t think anyone was convicted, maybe some resignations and a lot of very uncomfortable questions from the senate- and likely some policy changes, though I can’t point to them.
Wikileaks leaked more than necessary. The diplomatic cable dumps included content that put the lives of diplomats at risk (eg honest, undiplomatic assessments of leadership/individuals, etc). Spying on foreigners wasn't the scandal, but that they were knowingly spying on Americans.
As for Snowden? I dunno. The NSA was pretty much breaking the law and everybody knew it. I really want to like and believe in the romantic notion of his actions. But something just doesn't add up with him...
There are secure ways to whistleblow inside the org he was in and not to the press and not to Congress itself. He didn’t use those avenues.
He also leaked information that didn’t need to be leaked which had nothing to do with the privacy issues people keep being up (which btw were not ruled to be in violation of the 4th amendment only that they went beyond the FISA approved collection standards)
Who do you leak to when you believe even your organization is compromised/complicit? Who watches the watchmen? He chose 'the people' and I can't fault him for it.
You report it to the Inspector General (IG). How are you not familiar with it ? Snowden even talked to them before not about this but something else. He is a traitor. The other stuff he leaked had nothing to do with Americans “privacy concerns”. It was fairly minor
You report it to the Inspector General (IG). How are you not familiar with it ? Snowden even talked to them before not about this but something else. He is a traitor. The other stuff he leaked had nothing to do with Americans “privacy concerns”. It was fairly minor
Ah yes, he "even talked to them". You don't think that perhaps therefore Edward Snowden might've had a better conception of the viability of "the proper channels" than you do?
And, before you answer that too hastily - have you ever heard of William Binney? How about Thomas Drake? Do you know what happened when they used "the proper channels"? If so, your failure to mention them when discussing Snowden's motivation is in bad faith. If not, you're simply not informed enough to be coming into threads speaking authoritatively about this.
“Snowden talked to the IG” only applies to his conversation with the CIA IG about management and IT. There was no NSA IG complaint about surveillance which contrasts with the others (Binney and Drake that you mentioned). So no he did not even try. Was the Binney and Drake incidents ugly? Yes. But neither are in jail and both still live in the US.
They said that Snowden caused a shift in the public debate not that nobody listened to them beforehand (you should know they were raising concerns going back to 2002).
Baltimore Sun was reporting on Drake in 2006. Binney was publicly talking about it to Wired News and Democracy Now in 2012. Snowden happened in 2013.
So that makes my point even plainer than it possibly could have been made. The people who did the right thing by your definition got nothing done (and this was what caused Snowden to do it the way he did) and since Snowden, those previous cases were taken seriously by the government
Well their complaint triggered a formal DoD IG investigation and produced a highly critical audit plus fraud investigations. Trailblazer program was killed in 2006. That all happened well before Snowden. Snowden skipped all of those channels entirely. Binney and Drake were taken seriously but you are glossing over all do the other stuff that Snowden leaked that had nothing to do with the privacy concerns deemed that went beyond what FISA courts authorized (and no court found violation of 4th amendment).
Snowden did it completely wrong and you can’t convince me otherwise. I don’t see this conversation going further as you move the goalposts.
