Free Snowden, Please

House Intelligence Committee Asks Obama to Just Say No

House Intelligence Committee sends a bipartisan letter to President Obama urging him not to pardon Snowden, reminding him that he said in a news conference in 2013, “I don’t think Mr. Snowden was a patriot.”

↩︎ posted Sept. 16, 2016

The two candidates have not talked about surveillance state or Mr. Snowden. Or, for that matter, about the wars America’s involved in. Or, for that matter, about environmental change. This is a strange, superficial election.

Oliver Stone does publicity for his Snowden film.

↩︎ Rockcellar, posted Sept. 15, 2016

The Obama Appeal

Kenneth Roth (head of Human Rights Watch) and Salil Shetty (head of Amnesty International) make an appeal to President Obama in the New York Times to pardon Snowden on merit, and for the public good. It’s all part of a much larger campaign.

In his biography on Twitter, Mr. Snowden says: “I used to work for the government. Now I work for the public.” That should not be something that gets you locked up for a lifetime or compels you to live in exile. The president has an opportunity to correct that injustice. It’s time to pardon Mr. Snowden and bring him home, not to face the music but to work for the security and privacy of us all.

↩︎ posted Sept. 15, 2016

In case you don’t work for the government and see this every morning by the coffee machine, here’s one of a now-retracted series of posters produced by the US Department of Defense’s Defense Security Service for Defense agencies “to download and promote security awareness in the workplace.”

↩︎ posted Sept. 15, 2016

In more Snowden news, Peter Gabriel’s new song pays tribute, using “footage from military training exercises, real-life combat images and surveillance tapes” (NPR).

↩︎ posted Sept. 15, 2016

The First Time the Government Disclosed a FISA Court Opinion in Response to a Freedom of Information Act Lawsuit

When assessing Snowden’s impact, it’s fun to dig back into old newspapers (old = 2013) and refresh our freak-out about the scale of surveillance that Snowden helped uncover. From the Washington Post: “The redacted 85-page opinion, which was declassified by U.S. intelligence officials on Wednesday, states that, based on NSA estimates, the spy agency may have been collecting as many as 56,000 “wholly domestic” communications each year.”

↩︎ posted Sept. 15, 2016

Unfortunately, many candidates in the political mainstream today, even pundits and commentators who aren’t running for office, believe we have to be able to do anything, no matter what, as long as there is some benefit to be had in doing so. But that is the logic of a police state.

Snowden makes his own moral case for his presidential pardon.

↩︎ The Guardian, posted Sept. 15, 2016