By Hanson Reed | Echo
It sounds like I'm pitching a movie. I'm not pitching a movie.
It should be a movie. Actually, I hear one is being made. But folks, this is real life, and it all went down this year.
Edward Snowden's Wikipedia page reads like an espionage thriller that would make Tom Clancy jealous. You remember Snowden, right? He let the cat out of the bag that all of us (including a few heads of state-and MAYBE even a few terrorists) have been under NSA surveillance for years. Some say he's a whistle-blower. Some say he's a traitor. I say he should start looking for a good publisher.
According to a poll conducted by Time Magazine in June, 54 percent of Americans think what Snowden did was "a good thing." Assuming this is still accurate, it would mean a fugitive from the federal government being charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 has a higher approval rating than the president (which was down to 39 percent a few days ago).
Snowden has received temporary political asylum in Russia for one year, and it is renewable annually. He got a job working for a Russian website. His dad has already been to visit. Basically, Snowden has no reason to return to the U.S. just so he can put his life on the line at trial (figuratively, of course. The pansies at the Department of Justice would never think of pursuing the death penalty.).
He's already taken enough risks.
As you can imagine, the NSA keeps track of people with access to the information Snowden had access to. Merely establishing a contact to publish it was tricky business. Email encryption, go-betweens, secret meetings and the like (think "All the President's Men" minus the typewriters). And then he had to get out of Dodge before the story broke.
So he went to Hong Kong, which wasn't as simple as it would be for you or me because, as I said, the NSA likes to keep an eye on its people (not to mention the rest of us). That's where he rode out the initial heat, with "our guys" doing everything they could to get their hands on him. He eventually holed up at the Russian Consulate before flying to Moscow, and with his passport revoked, he was forced to stay at the Sheremetyevo International Airport until Aug. 1, when he was granted temporary political asylum.
I'm not saying it's completely OK what he did, and we shouldn't prosecute him, I'm just saying-no wait, that's exactly what I'm saying.
What the government has been doing is unconstitutional. Gathering personal information from American citizens without warrants is not all right, and it's not legal. You can't just issue an across-the-board warrant in a secret hearing and claim it's all legal. If that were the case, one judge could simultaneously authorize a warrant for every household in America, and "legally" circumvent any protection from unlawful search and seizure.
Yes, Edward Snowden broke the law. But the purpose of the law is to preserve justice, or rather, prevent injustice. If a just law is being broken (as was being done by the NSA), is that not an injustice? Therefore, if a law must be broken to reveal and prevent this injustice, does breaking that law not serve justice, and therefore the entire reason the law exists? In such a case it would be unjust to follow the law, but just not to.
For the moment, Snowden is safe in Russia, but I don't think he should have to spend the rest of his life unable to return to his home country because he had the guts (or desire for attention, or whatever) to do the right thing.
President Obama says he had already called for a thorough review of the programs in question, and it would have been better to let that play out than to broadcast our indiscretions to the world (paraphrasing, of course), but he simultaneously claims not to have known that we were listening in on the German Chancellor, among many other allies. Maybe if Snowden hadn't leaked that information, Obama never would have known. He really did Obama a service by thus enlightening him. Isn't that worth a pardon?
Apparently it's not. He's in Russia and we've got our panties in a twine because we have this wonderful case against a known traitor-I mean, he did donate to Ron Paul's primary campaign-and there's not a thing we can do.
I guess there's nothing for it but to wish him good luck.
