Everyone who meets Snowden describes his condition as if he was being held hostage by Iranians rather then living in a small apartment in Moscow. "He appeared lucid and well-informed." Hell he is probably eating better then I: Food-stamps were cut across the board recently.
Germany may invite Edward Snowden as witness in NSA inquiry
It would mean he could file for asylum in Germany, among other things.
It would also mean the US would come down hard on the Germans for willingly entertaining a known US fugitive in their own Parliament and quite possibly violating the
US-German extradition treaty; the "political exception clause" of which is stricter in requirement then that of Hong Kong, and requires considerably more evidence of political persecution. It would move the Germans to "outraged" to actively acting against the US. The US has already preemptively filed a extradition suit, and the majority Christian Democrats are much more bearish then it may sound on offending the US in that way.
Traveling abroad would revoke his asylum with Russia as well, leaving him very much at the mercy of the German Extradition courts.
Anyway, from my point of view, it seems increasingly like Snowden or whoever is handling releasing the documents (legally speaking, he cannot be releasing documents currently, so it is likely that Greenwald, who has recently left the Guardian, has them, as well as other papers) has goofed up this badly. When the NSA scandal came out, people were outraged (Mostly. Sorta. Ehh), but the comments from the government on the matter soothed any particularly bad conclusions, and everyone who didn't already care about privacy dropped off; we all simply took it for granted we were being watched and continued our lives. As the Snowden has continued, it has been clear that there is some rhyme to his methods (releasing Hong Kong information while staying there was not exactly coincidence), and he (or whomever) have upped the ante by releasing more and more damaging info; but the ultimate failure has come from not realizing the short attention span of the public. Even Nations and heads of state have followed this pattern, not particularly caring or, more likely, registering a vague sense of malus but otherwise going "what you gonna do"; that is until they came into the spotlight, and they themselves were being spied on.
If Snowden had released everything immediately, or within a series of days (possibly to allow room for a new really big headline each day) Nations would have been outraged, the public would have protested, and in general people would have been much more upset. But they are losing or have lost the messaging campaign. In the eyes of congressional republicans (who, I regret to remind you, are the official opposition) Snowden is approximately equal to Benghazi, maybe a notch or two below. It happened, they lost a vote, and there have been fewer official inquiries into it then the failed operation Fast and Furious, whom I'm sure a large number of the people here haven't even heard of. I mean think about how easy it should be to hype Snowden into a issue for people already fond of bending the truth and bashing Obama: Obama, is spying on everyone, throughout the entire planet, individually, all the time, even in your sleep. And yet how much rage is there?
The entire issue might go the worst of all worlds: No change, NSA attains Electoral College levels of inertia, and the US has it's spying methods exposed for nothing.
You know, with that logic, it means that since we KNOW they're violating our privacy, we're having our privacy violated massively.
Also, for them to use any intelligence they gather from privacy violation, they'd have to (indirectly) inform the violated that they were spied upon. Thereby violating their privacy! So really, if they want to say "We never violated your privacy!" because we never knew about it, they can't actually USE any of their intelligence.
(Did I get the insane troll logic right? This one is a little out of my expertise.)
First, Catch-22 says that a ordinance can have a clause requiring that the authority of the ordinance be kept a secret. My sig has a abbreviated version of this logic:
Soldiers have just cleared out the girls from a Whorehouse.
"No reason," wailed the old woman. "No reason."
"What right did they have?"
"Catch-22. [...] Catch-22 says they have a right to do
anything we can't stop them from doing. [...] What does it
mean, Catch-22? What is Catch-22?"
"Didn't they show it to you?" Yossarian demanded, stamping
about in anger and distress. "Didn't you even make them read
it?"
"They don't have to show us Catch-22," the old woman
answered. "The law says they don't have to."
"What law says they don't have to?"
"Catch-22."
Secondly, Take that up with your own government: Canada is part of the "
Five Eyes", a intelligence community comprising the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand. They share high-level data, and agree not to spy on each other. Snowden himself has released info on the subject, and the full text of the agreement was only released to the public in 2005. There are third parties, including the Scandinavian states, West Germany, Certain East Asian allies, and, according to Snowden, Israel - these parties are not exempt from being spied on themselves. Among other things, and holding a certain level of delicious irony,
Germany has expressed interest in joining the agreement. The French have stated non-interest, though a leak regarding comments by a US official imply the French spy on the US too much for that to be plausible.
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Topic: NSA Leaks - GHCQ in court for violation of human rights (Read 105538 times)