All Things Edward Snowden

[The Evil Genius]

You don't have to work for a government to commit espionage. 

[JMS]

Like I said, he's not the only one to bring this up, and others had gotten shut down or harrassed before him.  There's no legal way he could've gotten the program shut down internally, but c'mon with this "he did what he could with due diligence" nonsense.

 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/united-states-of-secrets/

Snowden shouldn’t have been necessary. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (or FISA Court), which evaluates Section 215 requests, is supposed to be interpreting the law to make sure that government surveillance didn’t go outside of it. Congressional intelligence committees, which review the activities of the N.S.A., are supposed to be providing some oversight. The N.S.A. itself reports to the Department of Defense, which reports to the White House, all of which have hundreds of lawyers, who are all supposed to apply the law. The government, in other words, is supposed to be watching itself, especially in matters of national security, which are, by necessity, shielded from daylight.

[The Evil Genius]

Even better - let's use the US definition of espionage.

 

The act of obtaining, delivering, transmitting, communicating, or receiving information about the national defense with an intent, or reason to believe, that the information may be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.

 

Focus on that last "or". I bolded it for you.

[JMS]

You don't have to work for a government to commit espionage.

You have to show classified information went from your hand to that of a foreign government agent directly.

Handing classified documents to a newspaper reporter isn't espionage.

[JMS]

Even better - let's use the US definition of espionage.

 

 

Focus on that last "or". I bolded it for you.

The definition of espionage is a little longer than that... and it involves transferring classified data to foreign governments.. There is a difference between whistleblowers like Snowden and spys. Snowden gave no documents to foreign governments, only to news organizations.

http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/espionage

[The Evil Genius]

Well, if we are going beyond the first part that I posted (the one that the US Navy has chosen as their definition of espionage --> http://www.ncis.navy.mil/coremissions/ci/publishingimages/espionage-new.pdf)- why don't you actually look at the US legal coding and language, as per 18 USC §793.

 

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/793

 

 

Tell us what that first few parts say. 

 

 

edit..Here, I'll make it easier for you to ignore it. 

 

 

 

d)

Whoever, lawfully having possession of, access to, control over, or being entrusted with any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted or attempts to communicate, deliver, transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered or transmitted the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it on demand to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it; or

 

Would you say that the media, specifically Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, and Laura Poitras were deemed entitled to receive the classified information in question?  

 

Yes or no?

[JMS]

Well, if we are going beyond the first part that I posted (the one that the US Navy has chosen as their definition of espionage --> http://www.ncis.navy.mil/coremissions/ci/publishingimages/espionage-new.pdf)- why don't you actually look at the US legal coding and language, as per 18 USC §793.

 

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/793

 

 

Tell us what that first few parts say.

That was in the second paragraph of the link I provided... The only reason I provided that link was you provided a definition without any such link..

From my link.. second paragraph.

Espionage, commonly known as spying, is the practice of secretly gathering information about a foreign government or a competing industry, with the purpose of placing one's own government or corporation at some strategic or financial advantage. Federal law prohibits espionage when it jeopardizes the national defense or benefits a foreign nation (18 U.S.C.A. § 793). Criminal espionage involves betraying U.S. government secrets to other nations.

 

edit..Here, I'll make it easier for you to ignore it. 

 

 

Would you say that the media, specifically Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, and Laura Poitras were deemed entitled to receive the classified information in question?  

 

Yes or no?

Ahhh.. so now we aren't talking espionage any longer.. now we are talking about leaking classified information.. That's good.... Now, have you ever heard about whistle blower protection laws?

[JMS]

Like I said, he's not the only one to bring this up, and others had gotten shut down or harrassed before him.  There's no legal way he could've gotten the program shut down internally, but c'mon with this "he did what he could with due diligence" nonsense.

 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/united-states-of-secrets/

 

 

 

I had no Idea the Attorney General,  Deputy Attorney General, Director of the FBI and a half dozen other officials threatened to resign over the NSA's programs in an election year;  and were only convinced not too when Bush agreed to end the offending program....    Then Bush/Cheney started them up again..     That's amaizing.      

 

They circumvented the law.     When the attorney general wouldn't sign off on it.. they had white house council Robert Gondolas sign it...  

[PeterMP]

Yeah Snowden would have to have fought a class on how to secure your data from Chinese espionage in order to have safeguarded that hardware.. Oh that's right he did.

And of coarse he didn't take any documents with him to Russia. He gave select documents he thought highlighted the abuses going on at the NSA to Newspapers like the NYTimes, Washington Post, and Guardian. He did not leak hundreds of thousands of documents.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/world/snowden-says-he-took-no-secret-files-to-russia.html

There is a lot of misinformation about what Snowden took, and what he did with it.

 

He showed the South China Press IPs that the NSA was hacking in CHINA.

 

http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1260306/edward-snowden-classified-us-data-shows-hong-kong-hacking-targets

 

He released a document that showed that Canada was helping the NSA set up surveillance posts on international targets.

[Renegade7]

I had no Idea the Attorney General,  Deputy Attorney General, Director of the FBI and a half dozen other officials threatened to resign over the NSA's programs in an election year;  and were only convinced not too when Bush agreed to end the offending program....    Then Bush/Cheney started them up again..     That's amaizing.      

 

They circumvented the law.     When the attorney general wouldn't sign off on it.. they had white house council Robert Gondolas sign it...  

 

Since this is the second time you've responded to my post, I'm going to assume you actually watched the documentary I posted this time.

[visionary]

https://news.vice.com/article/edward-snowden-leaks-tried-to-tell-nsa-about-surveillance-concerns-exclusive

Exclusive: Snowden Tried to Tell NSA About Surveillance Concerns, Documents Reveal

 

On the morning of May 29, 2014, an overcast Thursday in Washington, DC, the general counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Robert Litt, wrote an email to high-level officials at the National Security Agency and the White House.

The topic: what to do about Edward Snowden.

 

Snowden's leaks had first come to light the previous June, when the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald and the Washington Post's Barton Gellman published stories based on highly classified documents provided to them by the former NSA contractor. Now Snowden, who had been demonized by the NSA and the Obama administration for the past year, was publicly claiming something that set off alarm bells at the agency: Before he leaked the documents, Snowden said, he had repeatedly attempted to raise his concerns inside the NSA about its surveillance of US citizens — and the agency had done nothing.

 

Some on the email thread, such as Rajesh De, the NSA's general counsel, advocated for the public release of a Snowden email from April 2013 in which the former NSA contractor asked questions about the "interpretation of legal authorities" related to the agency's surveillance programs. It was the only evidence the agency found that even came close to verifying Snowden's assertions, and De believed it was weak enough to call Snowden's credibility into question and put the NSA in the clear.

 

Litt disagreed. "I'm not sure that releasing the email will necessarily prove him a liar," Litt wrote to Caitlin Hayden, then the White House National Security Council spokesperson, along with De and other officials. "It is, I could argue, technically true that [snowden's] email... 'rais[ed] concerns about the NSA's interpretation of its legal authorities.' As I recall, the email essentially questions a document that Snowden interpreted as claiming that Executive Orders were on a par with statutes. While that is surely not raising the kind of questions that Snowden is trying to suggest he raised, neither does it seem to me that that email is a home run refutation."

 

Within two hours, however, Litt reversed his position, and later that day, the email was released, accompanied by comment from NSA spokesperson Marci Green Miller: "The email did not raise allegations or concerns about wrongdoing or abuse."

 

Five days later, another email was sent — this one addressed to NSA director Mike Rogers and copied to 31 other people and one listserv. In it, a senior NSA official apologized to Rogers for not providing him and others with all the details about Snowden's communications with NSA officials regarding his concerns over surveillance.

 

The NSA, it seemed, had not told the public the whole story about Snowden's contacts with oversight authorities before he became the most celebrated and vilified whistleblower in US history.

 

Hundreds of internal NSA documents, declassified and released to VICE News in response to our long-running Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, reveal now for the first time that not only was the truth about the "single email" more complex and nuanced than the NSA disclosed to the public, but that Snowden had a face-to-face interaction with one of the people involved in responding to that email. The documents, made up of emails, talking points, and various records — many of them heavily redacted — contain insight into the NSA's interaction with the media, new details about Snowden's work, and an extraordinary behind-the-scenes look at the efforts by the NSA, the White House, and US Senator Dianne Feinstein to discredit Snowden.