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A comment on Time to Pardon Edward Snowden?. Parent comment

Re:Time to Pardon Edward Snowden? by lern_too_spel on Sunday October 04, 2020 @01:40PM (#24680763)
Why not? 99% of the things Greenwald et al published from his leaks were perfectly legal, and that was just a small subset of the total documents Snowden leaked. Why not just expose the illegal phone metadata program? If he had done that, he would easily qualify as a whistleblower.
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Re:Time to Pardon Edward Snowden? by LatteLazy on Sunday October 04, 2020 @02:04PM (#24680957)
Exposing the phone meta data program would expose it both domestically and internationally. That exposure would limit the US ability to keep doing it internationally and open him to exactly the critism made above.

The issue here is that none of these programs care about national boundaries (or citizenship etc). So exposing domestic surveillance exposed it internationally as well. There was no way to avoid that. So criticism of it seems unfair to me...

Also, 99% of the programs he exposed were Illegal. Some have been legalised after the fact, others semi legalised.

SCOTUS has refused to rule on any of it, so the ultimate compatibility with the constitution remains unclear...

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Re:Time to Pardon Edward Snowden? by lern_too_spel on Sunday October 04, 2020 @03:30PM (#24681643)
> Also, 99% of the programs he exposed were Illegal.

The only US program he leaked that was illegal was the phone metadata collection. The vast majority of programs he leaked involved surveillance on foreign targets outside the US.

> SCOTUS has refused to rule on any of it

None of it has made it to SCOTUS due to the vast majority being completely legal, so SCOTUS hasn't even had a chance to refuse to rule on any of it. The only program that could have gone to SCOTUS was phone metadata collection, but the government already shut that down, so they aren't going to waste time challenging its legality.

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