Also, you are allowed to say "Yeah, he broke the law, but we don't give a fuck." It's called jury nullification.
As soon as you excuse the law because it doesn't "feel" right, you walk a shaky path to anarchy.
The United States hasn't been walking to the path of anarchy, but quite the opposite. We actually need more anarchy.
I think you'll have quite a task convincing anyone though that Snowden would get a fair trial. If you can't guarantee a fair trial, then you can't expect people to submit to one.
If the President were today to pardon Snowden, that is also allowable by law.
More importantly here in particular, it's called a presidential pardon.
What, so hiding Anne Frank couldn't be excused?
The espionage act is bullshit and needs to be changed. It's pretty clear that he wasn't spying and what he did shouldn't have been covered by the act.
For over 100 years there were laws in the South that made it illegal to racially integrate businesses and public places. It was the government that kept this horrible practice alive; a free market would never have tolerated such inorganic demand suppression (as evidenced by the state of the North).
Most people are so trusting of statism and its hamster wheel that they never take the time to actually contemplate what most "laws" really are: subjective shit a group of people decided to write on dead trees and direct squads of soldiers to force on you under the threat of violence.
I can and will say that, and then I will say that the value of the laws in question is low (negative, really). You seem to be painting this as a contradiction, as if disliking one particular law implies disliking the fundamental concept of laws. There is no such contradiction.
What if the laws are wrong to begin with? Slavery and segregation were both at one point in time laws but I would never say the people who enforced them were right simply because it was a law.
The law isn't simply a if() statement.
The usual process is the adversarial legal system in the US, which does allow a fair amount of leeway for changing laws. I think there are a class of bad laws that people think are very difficult to change by this head-on method, however.
It sends a message that if, in good conscience, you believe that what we're secretly doing is wrong enough that you need to reveal it to the American people, you can do so without facing inordinate punishment.
This is the best possible message we can send! If we are going to have secret programs doing this kind of stuff, this is an important check that we're not being horrendously evil in the world.
Remember that we're not polling a random collection of people, but people who have chosen to work on this kind of thing, whose paycheck relies on accepting it, who are regularly thinking about how to make it do more good and less bad and want to believe they're being somewhat competent at that, and people who have already been extensively vetted for security access. If one of those people are sufficiently concerned to raise this kind of alarm, it needs to be raised.
> Additionally, legal experts including an Army inspector general have said that the 1998 law does not protect whistleblowers from reprisals.
> The protections that Clinton referenced do not seem to be as strong as she suggested, and most of the expert opinion suggests they would not apply to Snowden.
> We rate this claim Mostly False.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/oct/...
>Did Snowden break the law? In passing classified information to reporters, he did. The Espionage Act explicitly prohibits such actions. But this violation surely needs to be balanced against the public service that Snowden carried out in informing the American public about the extent to which their government had been spying on them.
I don't think you can say that someone broke real laws and then excuse it because public opinion or a subjective idea of public "service" somehow trumped the laws. The U.S. is a nation of laws. If something doesn't work as expected, laws are changed. The laws are either good or bad, but the nation runs because of these laws. You can debate the merits or lack thereof in what Snowden did, because that is a subjective opinion. You cannot debate the laws he broke. You cannot say "yeah, he broke the law, but...." because then, what is the value of law? It is possible to agree with Snowden's actions while still accepting that he broke laws. As soon as you excuse the law because it doesn't "feel" right, you walk a shaky path to anarchy.
I see I am downvoted for this, but ironically it is not because I disagree with Snowden. I support what he revealed. But this article is not proper logic, in my opinion.
I think it is interesting that Snowden himself prefers to be punished for breaking these laws, and spend his life in prison, rather than live out a life in another country. He accepts that he broke laws, why doesn't everyone else? Hillary's attitude on this is not "wrong" as the article claims. If you are running for president and think that you can excuse the Espionage Act, of all laws, that to me seems like the wrong attitude.