It's fairly obvious that more free countries allow for a greater chance in changes of law than non free countries.
The Snowden of China would not get his day in court....
Because the Snowden of the US did?
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jun/01/julian-assange...
Not sure he'd get the same type of trail in China, Russia, or if it would go that far.
If I were him, I, uh, would not try my hand in a court of law.
I don't think the Snowden of China gets such an option.
If they caught him, he would not have been able to properly defend himself because US law would prohibit him from making his case [2].
Heck, if they would have caught him before his Hong Kong meeting, they could simply have "vanished" him and nobody would have been any the wiser, as Greenwald, Poitras, and MacAskill would have had a very difficult time proving the legitimacy of the leaked documents.
So no, neither the Snowden of the US, nor of China gets any of these options, that's why this whole false dichotomy of "free countries vs nonfree countries" is just another facette of the constantly going on propaganda war.
The best chance whistleblowers like that have is trying to escape the sphere of influence of whoever they blew the whistle on. For Chinese, Russian, Iranian, and others that's large parts of the world they will be welcomed in, for US whistleblowers it's pretty much only a handful of countries out of whom only a very few are actually able to keep them save/not straight up hand them over.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/05/edward-snowd...
[2] https://whistleblower.org/in-the-news/wsj-op-ed-why-edward-s...
There's a whole world of talk of Snowden and others supposedly going to be vanished and it for whatever reason the fact that it hasn't happened seems entirely lost on folks who talk about it.
> "free countries vs nonfree countries" is just another facette of the constantly going on propaganda war.
I don't know what you're trying to say about that. I think there are real differences between freedoms allowed in different nations and they have real impacts.
In that context, in a post-Snowden world, it's kinda grating to still have people talk about all the evil things that supposedly happen in "non free countries", while mostly being completely unaware about what their own, supposedly "free", countries are doing, often on a global scale because they are supposedly way more likely to "hear" about it, while still not being able to change anything about it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
[2] https://opendatacity.github.io/stasi-vs-nsa/english.html