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This is not considered a credible source because anyone can edit the information which means that the information people post can be incorrect since it is not always checked - even though a lot of errors do get fixed. Also, the people who write on Wikipedia don’t need to show anything that indicates how much of an expert they are on the topic or where they got their information. The more credible sources on Wikipedia are the ones labeled ‘Featured’ or ‘Good’ because they are heavily reviewed and edited and pass a lot of ‘tests’ in order to earn that label so that they can be used for research. However, the article I am using is not labeled as being a Featured article or Good article so, therefore, it is not reliable.

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Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is a United States and naturalized Russian citizen who was a computer intelligence consultant and whistleblower who leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013 when he was an employee and subcontractor. His disclosures revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many run by the NSA and the Five Eyes intelligence alliance with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments and prompted a cultural discussion about national security and individual privacy.

In 2013, Snowden was hired by an NSA contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, after previous employment with Dell and the CIA. Snowden says he gradually became disillusioned with the programs with which he was involved, and that he tried to raise his ethical concerns through internal channels but was ignored. On May 20, 2013, Snowden flew to Hong Kong after leaving his job at an NSA facility in Hawaii, and in early June he revealed thousands of classified NSA documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Barton Gellman, and Ewen MacAskill. Snowden came to international attention after stories based on the material appeared in The Guardian, The Washington Post, and other publications.

On June 21, 2013, the United States Department of Justice unsealed charges against Snowden of two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and theft of government property, following which the Department of State revoked his passport. Two days later, he flew into Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport, where Russian authorities observed the canceled passport, and he was restricted to the airport terminal for over one month. Russia later granted Snowden the right of asylum with an initial visa for residence for one year, which was subsequently repeatedly extended. In October 2020, he was granted permanent residency in Russia. In September 2022, Snowden was granted Russian citizenship by President Vladimir Putin, and on December 2, 2022 he swore the oath of allegiance.

A subject of controversy, Snowden has been variously praised and condemned for his leaks. Snowden has defended his actions as an effort "to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them." His disclosures have fueled debates over mass surveillance, government secrecy, and the balance between national security and information privacy, something that he has said he intended to do in retrospective interviews.

In early 2016, Snowden became the president of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization that aims to protect journalists from hacking and government surveillance. He also has a job at an unnamed Russian IT company. In 2017, he married Lindsay Mills. "I have to lay my head down in Moscow on a pillow at night," he told an Israeli audience in November 2018, "but I live on the internet and every other city in the world." On September 17, 2019, his memoir Permanent Record was published. On September 2, 2020, a U.S. federal court ruled in United States v. Moalin that the U.S. intelligence's mass surveillance program exposed by Snowden was illegal and possibly unconstitutional.

Edward Joseph Snowden was born on June 21, 1983, in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. His maternal grandfather, Edward J. Barrett, a rear admiral in the U.S. Coast Guard, became a senior official with the FBI and was at the Pentagon in 2001 during the September 11 attacks. Snowden's father, Lonnie, was a warrant officer in the Coast Guard, and his mother, Elizabeth, was a clerk at the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland. His older sister, Jessica, was a lawyer at the Federal Judicial Center in Washington, D.C. Edward Snowden said that he had expected to work for the federal government, as had the rest of his family. His parents divorced in 2001, and his father remarried.

In the early 1990s, while still in grade school, Snowden moved with his family to the area of Fort Meade, Maryland. Mononucleosis caused him to miss high school for almost nine months. Rather than returning to school, he passed the GED test and took classes at Anne Arundel Community College. Although Snowden had no undergraduate college degree, he worked online toward a master's degree at the University of Liverpool, England, in 2011. He was interested in Japanese popular culture, had studied the Japanese language, and worked for an anime company that had a resident office in the U.S. He also said he had a basic understanding of Mandarin Chinese and was deeply interested in martial arts. At age 20, he listed Buddhism as his religion on a military recruitment form, noting that the choice of agnostic was "strangely absent."

In September 2019, as part of interviews relating to the release of his memoir Permanent Record, Snowden revealed to The Guardian that he married Lindsay Mills in a courthouse in Moscow. The couple's first son was born in December 2020, and their second son was born sometime before September 2022.

Feeling a duty to fight in the Iraq War, Snowden enlisted in the United States Army on May 7, 2004, and became a Special Forces candidate through its 18X enlistment option. He did not complete the training due to bilateral tibial stress fractures, and was given an administrative discharge on September 28, 2004.

Snowden was then employed for less than a year in 2005 as a security guard at the University of Maryland's Center for Advanced Study of Language, a research center sponsored by the National Security Agency (NSA). According to the University, this is not a classified facility, though it is heavily guarded. In June 2014, Snowden told that his job as a security guard required a high-level security clearance, for which he passed a polygraph exam and underwent a stringent background investigation.

After attending a 2006 job-fair focused on intelligence agencies, Snowden accepted an offer for a position at the CIA. The Agency assigned him to the global communications division at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

In May 2006, Snowden wrote in Ars Technica that he had no trouble getting work because he was a "computer wizard". After distinguishing himself as a junior employee on the top computer team, Snowden was sent to the CIA's secret school for technology specialists, where he lived in a hotel for six months while studying and training full-time.

In March 2007, the CIA stationed Snowden with diplomatic cover in Geneva, Switzerland, where he was responsible for maintaining computer-network security. Assigned to the U.S. Permanent Mission to the United Nations, a diplomatic mission representing U.S. interests before the UN and other international organizations, Snowden received a diplomatic passport and a four-bedroom apartment near Lake Geneva. According to Greenwald, while there Snowden was "considered the top technical and cybersecurity expert" in that country and "was hand-picked by the CIA to support the president at the 2008 NATO summit in Romania". Snowden described his CIA experience in Geneva as formative, stating that the CIA deliberately got a Swiss banker drunk and encouraged him to drive home. Snowden said that when the latter was arrested for drunk driving, a CIA operative offered to help in exchange for the banker becoming an informant. Ueli Maurer, President of the Swiss Confederation for the year 2013, publicly disputed Snowden's claims in June of that year. "This would mean that the CIA successfully bribed the Geneva police and judiciary. With all due respect, I just can't imagine it," said Maurer. In February 2009, Snowden resigned from the CIA.

In 2009, Snowden began work as a contractee for Dell, which manages computer systems for multiple government agencies. Assigned to an NSA facility at Yokota Air Base near Tokyo, Snowden instructed top officials and military officers on how to defend their networks from Chinese hackers. Snowden looked into mass surveillance in China which prompted him to investigate and then expose Washington's mass surveillance program after he was asked in 2009 to brief a conference in Tokyo. During his four years with Dell, he rose from supervising NSA computer system upgrades to working as what his résumé termed a "cyber strategist" and an "expert in cyber counterintelligence" at several U.S. locations. In 2010, he had a brief stint in New Delhi, India where he enrolled himself in a local IT institute to learn core Java programming and advanced ethical hacking. In 2011, he returned to Maryland, where he spent a year as lead technologist on Dell's CIA account. In that capacity, he was consulted by the chiefs of the CIA's technical branches, including the agency's chief information officer and its chief technology officer. U.S. officials and other sources familiar with the investigation said Snowden began downloading documents describing the government's electronic spying programs while working for Dell in April 2012. Investigators estimated that of the 50,000 to 200,000 documents Snowden gave to Greenwald and Poitras, most were copied by Snowden while working at Dell.

In March 2012, Dell reassigned Snowden to Hawaii as lead technologist for the NSA's information-sharing office.

On March 15, 2013 - three days after what he later called his "breaking point" of "seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress" - Snowden quit his job at Dell. Although he has said his career high annual salary was $200,000, Snowden said he took a pay cut to work at consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, where he sought employment in order to gather data and then release details of the NSA's worldwide surveillance activity.

At the time of his departure from the U.S. in May 2013, he had been employed for 15 months inside the NSA's Hawaii regional operations center, which focuses on the electronic monitoring of China and North Korea, first for Dell and then for two months with Booz Allen Hamilton. While intelligence officials have described his position there as a system administrator, Snowden has said he was an infrastructure analyst, which meant that his job was to look for new ways to break into Internet and telephone traffic around the world. An anonymous source told Reuters that, while in Hawaii, Snowden may have persuaded 20-25 co-workers to give him their login credentials by telling them he needed them to do his job. The NSA sent a memo to Congress saying that Snowden had tricked a fellow employee into sharing his personal private key to gain greater access to the NSA's computer system. Snowden disputed the memo, saying in January 2014, "I never stole any passwords, nor did I trick an army of co-workers." Booz Allen terminated Snowden's employment on June 10, 2013, the day after he went public with his story, and 3 weeks after he had left Hawaii on a leave of absence.

A former NSA co-worker said that although the NSA was full of smart people, Snowden was a "genius among geniuses" who created a widely implemented backup system for the NSA and often pointed out security flaws to the agency. The former colleague said Snowden was given full administrator privileges with virtually unlimited access to NSA data. Snowden was offered a position on the NSA's elite team of hackers, Tailored Access Operations, but turned it down to join Booz Allen. An anonymous source later said that Booz Allen's hiring screeners found possible discrepancies in Snowden's resume but still decided to hire him. Snowden's résumé stated that he attended computer-related classes at Johns Hopkins University. A spokeswoman for Johns Hopkins said that the university did not find records to show that Snowden attended the university, and suggested that he may instead have attended Advanced Career Technologies, a private for-profit organization that operated as the Computer Career Institute at Johns Hopkins University. The University of Maryland University College acknowledged that Snowden had attended a summer session at a UM campus in Asia. Snowden's résumé stated that he estimated he would receive a University of Liverpool computer security master's degree in 2013. The university said that Snowden registered for an online master's degree program in computer security in 2011 but was inactive as a student and had not completed the program.

In his May 2014 interview with NBC News, Snowden accused the U.S. government of trying to use one position here or there in his career to distract from the totality of his experience, downplaying him as a "low-level analyst". In his words, he was "trained as a spy in the traditional sense of the word in that I lived and worked undercover overseas-pretending to work in a job that I'm not-and even being assigned a name that was not mine." He said he'd worked for the NSA undercover overseas, and for the DIA had developed sources and methods to keep information and people secure "in the most hostile and dangerous environments around the world. So when they say I'm a low-level systems administrator, that I don't know what I'm talking about, I'd say it's somewhat misleading." In a June interview with Globo TV, Snowden reiterated that he "was actually functioning at a very senior level." In a July interview with The Guardian, Snowden explained that, during his NSA career, "I began to move from merely overseeing these systems to actively directing their use. Many people don't understand that I was actually an analyst and I designated individuals and groups for targeting." Snowden subsequently told Wired that while at Dell in 2011, "I would sit down with the CIO of the CIA, the CTO of the CIA, the chiefs of all the technical branches. They would tell me their hardest technology problems, and it was my job to come up with a way to fix them."

During his time as an NSA analyst, directing the work of others, Snowden recalled a moment when he and his colleagues began to have severe ethical doubts. Snowden said 18 to 22-year-old analysts were suddenly:

...thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility, where they now have access to all your private records. In the course of their daily work, they stumble across something that is completely unrelated in any sort of necessary sense-for example, an intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually compromising situation. But they're extremely attractive. So what do they do? They turn around in their chair and they show a co-worker ... and sooner or later this person's whole life has been seen by all of these other people.

Snowden observed that this behavior happened routinely every two months but was never reported, being considered one of the " fringe benefits" of the work.

Snowden said that he had told multiple employees and two supervisors about his concerns, but the NSA disputes his claim. Snowden elaborated in January 2014, saying "[I] made tremendous efforts to report these programs to co-workers, supervisors, and anyone with the proper clearance who would listen. The reactions of those I told about the scale of the constitutional violations ranged from deeply concerned to appalled, but no one was willing to risk their jobs, families, and possibly even freedom to go to [] through what [Thomas Andrews] Drake did." In March 2014, during testimony to the European Parliament, Snowden wrote that before revealing classified information he had reported "clearly problematic programs" to ten officials, who he said did nothing in response. In a May 2014 interview, Snowden told NBC News that after bringing his concerns about the legality of the NSA spying programs to officials, he was told to stay silent on the matter. He said that the NSA had copies of emails he sent to their Office of General Counsel, oversight, and compliance personnel broaching "concerns about the NSA's interpretations of its legal authorities. I had raised these complaints not just officially in writing through email, but to my supervisors, to my colleagues, in more than one office."

Self-description as a whistleblower and attribution as such in news reports does not determine whether he qualifies as a whistleblower within the meaning of the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 (5 USC 2303(b)(8)-(9); Pub. Law 101-12). However, Snowden's potential status as a Whistleblower under the 1989 Act is not directly addressed in the criminal complaint against him in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia (see below) (Case No. 1:13 CR 265 (0MH)). These and similar and related issues are discussed in an essay by David Pozen, in a chapter of the book Whistleblowing Nation, published in March 2020, an adaptation of which also appeared on Lawfare Blog in March 2019. The unclassified portion of a September 15, 2016, report by the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), initiated by the chairman and Ranking Member in August 2014, and posted on the website of the Federation of American Scientists, concluded that Snowden was not a whistleblower in the sense required by the Whistleblower Protection Act. The bulk of the report is classified.

The exact size of Snowden's disclosure is unknown, but Australian officials have estimated 15,000 or more Australian intelligence files and British officials estimate at least 58,000 British intelligence files were included. NSA Director Keith Alexander initially estimated that Snowden had copied anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000 NSA documents. Later estimates provided by U.S. officials were in the order of 1.7 million, a number that originally came from Department of Defense talking points. In July 2014, The Washington Post reported on a cache previously provided by Snowden from domestic NSA operations consisting of "roughly 160,000 intercepted e-mail and instant-message conversations, some of them hundreds of pages long, and 7,900 documents taken from more than 11,000 online accounts." A U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report declassified in June 2015 said that Snowden took 900,000 Department of Defense files, more than he downloaded from the NSA.

In March 2014, Army General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the House Armed Services Committee, "The vast majority of the documents that Snowden ... exfiltrated from our highest levels of security ... had nothing to do with exposing government oversight of domestic activities. The vast majority of those were related to our military capabilities, operations, tactics, techniques, and procedures." When asked in a May 2014 interview to quantify the number of documents Snowden stole, retired NSA director Keith Alexander said there was no accurate way of counting what he took, but Snowden may have downloaded more than a million documents. The September 15, 2016, HPSCI report estimated the number of downloaded documents at 1.5 million.

In a 2013 Associated Press interview, Glenn Greenwald stated:

In order to take documents with him that proved that what he was saying was true he had to take ones that included very sensitive, detailed blueprints of how the NSA does what they do.

Thus the Snowden documents allegedly contained sensitive NSA blueprints detailing how the NSA operates, and which would allow someone who read them to evade or even duplicate NSA surveillance. Further, a July 20, 2015 New York Times article reported that the terror group Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) had studied revelations from Snowden, about how the United States gathered information on militants, the main result is that the group's top leaders used couriers or encrypted channels to avoid being tracked or monitoring of their communications by Western analysts.

According to Snowden, he did not indiscriminately turn over documents to journalists, stating that "I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest. There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn't turn over" and that "I have to screen everything before releasing it to journalists ... If I have time to go through this information, I would like to make it available to journalists in each country." Despite these measures, the improper redaction of a document by The New York Times resulted in the exposure of intelligence activity against al-Qaeda.

In June 2014, the NSA's recently installed director, U.S. Navy Admiral Michael S. Rogers, said that while some terrorist groups had altered their communications to avoid surveillance techniques revealed by Snowden, the damage done was not significant enough to conclude that "the sky is falling." Nevertheless, in February 2015, Rogers said that Snowden's disclosures had a material impact on the NSA's detection and evaluation of terrorist activities worldwide.

On June 14, 2015, the London Sunday Times reported that Russian and Chinese intelligence services had decrypted more than 1 million classified files in the Snowden cache, forcing the UK's MI6 intelligence agency to move agents out of live operations in hostile countries. Sir David Omand, a former director of the UK's GCHQ intelligence gathering agency, described it as a huge strategic setback that was harming Britain, America, and their NATO allies. The Sunday Times said it was not clear whether Russia and China stole Snowden's data or whether Snowden voluntarily handed it over to remain at liberty in Hong Kong and Moscow. In April 2015, the Henry Jackson Society, a British neoconservative think tank, published a report claiming that Snowden's intelligence leaks negatively impacted Britain's ability to fight terrorism and organized crime. Gus Hosein, executive director of Privacy International, criticized the report for, in his opinion, presuming that the public became concerned about privacy only after Snowden's disclosures.

Snowden's decision to leak NSA documents developed gradually following his March 2007 posting as a technician to the Geneva CIA station. Snowden later made contact with Glenn Greenwald, a journalist working at The Guardian. He contacted Greenwald anonymously as "Cincinnatus" and said he had sensitive documents that he would like to share. Greenwald found the measures that the source asked him to take to secure their communications, such as encrypting email, too annoying to employ. Snowden then contacted documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras in January 2013. According to Poitras, Snowden chose to contact her after seeing her New York Times article about NSA whistleblower William Binney. What originally attracted Snowden to Greenwald and Poitras was a article written by Greenwald detailing how Poitras's controversial films had made her a target of the government.

Greenwald began working with Snowden in either February or April 2013, after Poitras asked Greenwald to meet her in New York City, at which point Snowden began providing documents to them. Barton Gellman, writing for The Washington Post, says his first direct contact was on May 16, 2013. According to Gellman, Snowden approached Greenwald after the Post declined to guarantee publication within 72 hours of all 41 PowerPoint slides that Snowden had leaked exposing the PRISM electronic data mining program, and to publish online an encrypted code allowing Snowden to later prove that he was the source.

Snowden communicated using encrypted email, and going by the codename " Verax". He asked not to be quoted at length for fear of identification by stylometry.

According to Gellman, before their first meeting in person, Snowden wrote, "I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions and that the return of this information to the public marks my end." Snowden also told Gellman that until the articles were published, the journalists working with him would also be at mortal risk from the United States Intelligence Community "if they think you are the single point of failure that could stop this disclosure and make them the sole owner of this information."

In May 2013, Snowden was permitted temporary leave from his position at the NSA in Hawaii, on the pretext of receiving treatment for his epilepsy. In mid-May, Snowden gave an electronic interview to Poitras and Jacob Appelbaum which was published weeks later by Der Spiegel.

After disclosing the copied documents, Snowden promised that nothing would stop subsequent disclosures. In June 2013, he said, "All I can say right now is the US government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped."

On May 20, 2013, Snowden flew to Hong Kong, where he was staying when the initial articles based on the leaked documents were published, beginning with The Guardian on June 5. Greenwald later said Snowden disclosed 9,000 to 10,000 documents.

Within months, documents had been obtained and published by media outlets worldwide, most notably The Guardian (Britain), Der Spiegel (Germany), The Washington Post and The New York Times (U.S.), (Brazil), (France), and similar outlets in Sweden, Canada, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and Australia. In 2014, NBC broke its first story based on the leaked documents. In February 2014, for reporting based on Snowden's leaks, journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Barton Gellman and The Guardian′s Ewen MacAskill were honored as co-recipients of the 2013 George Polk Award, which they dedicated to Snowden. The NSA reporting by these journalists also earned The Guardian and The Washington Post the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for exposing the "widespread surveillance" and for helping to spark a "huge public debate about the extent of the government's spying". The Guardian's chief editor, Alan Rusbridger, credited Snowden for having performed a public service.

Slide from an NSA presentation on "Google Cloud Exploitation" from its MUSCULAR program;[130] the sketch shows where the "Public Internet" meets the internal "Google Cloud" where user data resides.[131]

Data visualization of U.S. intelligence black budget (2013)

The ongoing publication of leaked documents has revealed previously unknown details of a global surveillance apparatus run by the United States' NSA in close cooperation with three of its four Five Eyes partners: Australia's ASD, the UK's GCHQ, and Canada's CSEC.

PRISM: a clandestine surveillance program under which the NSA collects user data from companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Yahoo, Facebook and YouTube

On June 5, 2013, media reports documenting the existence and functions of classified surveillance programs and their scope began and continued throughout the entire year. The first program to be revealed was PRISM, which allows for court-approved direct access to Americans' Google and Yahoo accounts, reported from both The Washington Post and The Guardian published one hour apart. Barton Gellman of The Washington Post was the first journalist to report on Snowden's documents. He said the U.S. government urged him not to specify by name which companies were involved, but Gellman decided that to name them "would make it real to Americans." Reports also revealed details of Tempora, a secret British surveillance program run by the NSA's British partner, GCHQ. The initial reports included details about NSA call database, Boundless Informant, and of a secret court order requiring Verizon to hand the NSA millions of Americans' phone records daily, the surveillance of French citizens' phone and Internet records, and those of "high-profile individuals from the world of business or politics." XKeyscore, an analytical tool that allows for collection of "almost anything done on the internet," was described by The Guardian as a program that shed light on one of Snowden's most controversial statements: "I, sitting at my desk [could] wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email."

The NSA's top-secret black budget, obtained from Snowden by The Washington Post, exposed the successes and failures of the 16 spy agencies comprising the U.S. intelligence community, and revealed that the NSA was paying U.S. private tech companies for clandestine access to their communications networks. The agencies were allotted $52 billion for the 2013 fiscal year.

It was revealed that the NSA was harvesting millions of email and instant messaging contact lists, searching email content, tracking and mapping the location of cell phones, undermining attempts at encryption via Bullrun and that the agency was using cookies to piggyback on the same tools used by Internet advertisers "to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to bolster surveillance." The NSA was shown to be secretly accessing Yahoo and Google data centers to collect information from hundreds of millions of account holders worldwide by tapping undersea cables using the MUSCULAR surveillance program.

The NSA, the CIA and GCHQ spied on users of Second Life, Xbox Live and World of Warcraft, and attempted to recruit would-be informants from the sites, according to documents revealed in December 2013. Leaked documents showed NSA agents also spied on their own "love interests", a practice NSA employees termed LOVEINT. The NSA was shown to be tracking the online sexual activity of people they termed "radicalizers" in order to discredit them. Following the revelation of Blackpearl, a program targeting private networks, the NSA was accused of extending beyond its primary mission of national security. The agency's intelligence-gathering operations had targeted, among others, oil giant Petrobras, Brazil's largest company. The NSA and the GCHQ were also shown to be surveilling charities including UNICEF and Médecins du Monde, as well as allies such as European Commissioner Joaquín Almunia and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In October 2013, Glenn Greenwald said "the most shocking and significant stories are the ones we are still working on, and have yet to publish." In November, The Guardian's editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger said that only one percent of the documents had been published. In December, Australia's Minister for Defence David Johnston said his government assumed the worst was yet to come.

By October 2013, Snowden's disclosures had created tensions between the U.S. and some of its close allies after they revealed that the U.S. had spied on Brazil, France, Mexico, Britain, China, Germany, and Spain, as well as 35 world leaders, most notably German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said "spying among friends" was unacceptable and compared the NSA with the Stasi. Leaked documents published by Der Spiegel in 2014 appeared to show that the NSA had targeted 122 high-ranking leaders.

An NSA mission statement titled "SIGINT Strategy 2012-2016" affirmed that the NSA had plans for the continued expansion of surveillance activities. Their stated goal was to "dramatically increase mastery of the global network" and to acquire adversaries' data from "anyone, anytime, anywhere." Leaked slides revealed in Greenwald's book No Place to Hide, released in May 2014, showed that the NSA's stated objective was to "Collect it All," "Process it All," "Exploit it All," "Partner it All," "Sniff it All" and "Know it All."

Snowden said in a January 2014 interview with German television that the NSA does not limit its data collection to national security issues, accusing the agency of conducting industrial espionage. Using the example of German company Siemens, he said, "If there's information at Siemens that's beneficial to US national interests-even if it doesn't have anything to do with national security-then they'll take that information nevertheless." In the wake of Snowden's revelations and in response to an inquiry from the Left Party, Germany's domestic security agency Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV) investigated and found no concrete evidence that the U.S. conducted economic or industrial espionage in Germany.

In February 2014, during testimony to the European Union, Snowden said of the remaining undisclosed programs, "I will leave the public interest determinations as to which of these may be safely disclosed to responsible journalists in coordination with government stakeholders."

In March 2014, documents disclosed by Glenn Greenwald writing for The Intercept showed the NSA, in cooperation with the GCHQ, has plans to infect millions of computers with malware using a program called TURBINE. Revelations included information about QUANTUMHAND, a program through which the NSA set up a fake Facebook server to intercept connections.

According to a report in The Washington Post in July 2014, relying on information furnished by Snowden, 90% of those placed under surveillance in the U.S. are ordinary Americans and are not the intended targets. The newspaper said it had examined documents including emails, message texts, and online accounts that support the claim.

In an August 2014 interview, Snowden for the first time disclosed a cyberwarfare program in the works, codenamed MonsterMind, that would automate the detection of a foreign cyberattack as it began and automatically fire back. "These attacks can be spoofed," said Snowden. "You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What happens next?"

Snowden speaks about the NSA leaks, in Hong Kong, filmed by Laura Poitras.

Snowden first contemplated leaking confidential documents around 2008 but held back, partly because he believed the newly elected Barack Obama might introduce reforms. After the disclosures, his identity was made public by The Guardian at his request on June 9, 2013. "I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded," he said. "My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them."

Snowden said he wanted to "embolden others to step forward" by demonstrating that "they can win." He also said that the system for reporting problems did not work. "You have to report wrongdoing to those most responsible for it." He cited a lack of whistleblower protection for government contractors, the use of the Espionage Act of 1917 to prosecute leakers and the belief that had he used internal mechanisms to "sound the alarm," his revelations "would have been buried forever."

In December 2013, upon learning that a U.S. federal judge had ruled the collection of U.S. phone metadata conducted by the NSA as likely unconstitutional, Snowden said, "I acted on my belief that the NSA's mass surveillance programs would not withstand a constitutional challenge, and that the American public deserved a chance to see these issues determined by open courts ... today, a secret program authorized by a secret court was, when exposed to the light of day, found to violate Americans' rights."

In January 2014, Snowden said his "breaking point" was "seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress." This referred to testimony on March 12, 2013-three months after Snowden first sought to share thousands of NSA documents with Greenwald, and nine months after the NSA says Snowden made his first illegal downloads during the summer of 2012-in which Clapper denied to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the NSA wittingly collects data on millions of Americans. Snowden said, "There's no saving an intelligence community that believes it can lie to the public and the legislators who need to be able to trust it and regulate its actions. Seeing that really meant for me there was no going back. Beyond that, it was the creeping realization that no one else was going to do this. The public had a right to know about these programs." In March 2014, Snowden said he had reported policy or legal issues related to spying programs to more than ten officials, but as a contractor had no legal avenue to pursue further whistleblowing.

Snowden made a number of claims about the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) of New Zealand. He accused the agency of conducting surveillance on New Zealand citizens and engaging in espionage between 2008 and 2016, when John Key served as the Prime Minister of New Zealand.

In May 2013, Snowden quit his job, telling his supervisors he required epilepsy treatment, but instead fled the United States for Hong Kong on May 10. He chose Hong Kong for its "spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent" at the time. Snowden remained in his room at the Mira Hotel after his arrival in the city, rarely going out.

Hong Kong rally to support Snowden, June 15, 2013

Snowden vowed to challenge any extradition attempt by the U.S. government, and engaged Hong Kong-based Canadian human rights lawyer Robert Tibbo as a legal adviser. Snowden told the South China Morning Post that he planned to remain in Hong Kong for as long as its government would permit. Snowden also told the Post that "the United States government has committed a tremendous number of crimes against Hong Kong [and] the PRC as well," going on to identify Chinese Internet Protocol addresses that the NSA monitored and stating that the NSA collected text-message data for Hong Kong residents. Glenn Greenwald said Snowden was motivated by a need to "ingratiate himself to the people of Hong Kong and China."

After leaving the Mira Hotel, Snowden was housed for two weeks in several apartments by other refugees seeking asylum in Hong Kong, an arrangement set up by Tibbo to hide from the US authorities.

The Russian newspaper Kommersant nevertheless reported that Snowden was living at the Russian consulate shortly before his departure from Hong Kong to Moscow. Ben Wizner, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and legal adviser to Snowden, said in January 2014, "Every news organization in the world has been trying to confirm that story. They haven't been able to, because it's false." Likewise rejecting the Kommersant story was Anatoly Kucherena, who became Snowden's lawyer in July 2013 when Snowden asked him for help in seeking temporary asylum in Russia. Kucherena said Snowden did not communicate with Russian diplomats while he was in Hong Kong. In early September 2013, however, Russian president Vladimir Putin said that, a few days before boarding a plane to Moscow, Snowden met in Hong Kong with Russian diplomatic representatives.

On June 22, 18 days after the publication of Snowden's NSA documents began, officials revoked his U.S. passport. On June 23, Snowden boarded a commercial Aeroflot flight, SU213, to Moscow, accompanied by Sarah Harrison of WikiLeaks, with an intended final destination of Ecuador due to an Ecuadorian emergency travel document that Snowden had acquired. However Snowden became initially stranded in Russia upon his landing in Moscow when his U.S. passport was revoked. Hong Kong authorities said that Snowden had not been detained for the U.S. because the request had not fully complied with Hong Kong law and there was no legal basis to prevent Snowden from leaving. On June 24, a U.S. State Department spokesman rejected the explanation of technical noncompliance, accusing the Hong Kong government of deliberately releasing a fugitive despite a valid arrest warrant and after having sufficient time to prohibit his travel. That same day, Julian Assange said that WikiLeaks had paid for Snowden's lodging in Hong Kong and his flight out. Assange also asked Fidel Narváez, consul at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, to sign an emergency travel document for Snowden. Snowden said that having the document gave him "the confidence, the courage to get on that plane to begin the journey".

In January 2019, Vanessa Rodel, one of the refugees who had housed Snowden in Hong Kong, and her 7-year-old daughter were granted asylum by Canada. In 2021, Supun Thilina Kellapatha, Nadeeka Dilrukshi Nonis and their children found refuge in Canada, leaving only one of Snowden's Hong Kong helpers waiting for asylum.

Ecuador embassy car at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow on June 23, 2013

On June 23, 2013, Snowden landed at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport. WikiLeaks said he was on a circuitous but safe route to asylum in Ecuador. Snowden had a seat reserved to continue to Cuba but did not board that onward flight, saying in a January 2014 interview that he intended to transit through Russia but was stopped en route. He said "a planeload of reporters documented the seat I was supposed to be in" when he was ticketed for Havana, but the U.S. canceled his passport. He said the U.S. wanted him to stay in Moscow so "they could say, 'He's a Russian spy.'" Greenwald's account differed on the point of Snowden being already ticketed. According to Greenwald, Snowden's passport was valid when he departed Hong Kong but was revoked during the hours he was in transit to Moscow, preventing him from obtaining a ticket to leave Russia. Greenwald said Snowden was thus forced to stay in Moscow and seek asylum.

According to one Russian report, Snowden planned to fly from Moscow through Havana to Latin America; however, Cuba told Moscow it would not allow the Aeroflot plane carrying Snowden to land. The Russian newspaper Kommersant reported that Cuba had a change of heart after receiving pressure from U.S. officials, leaving him stuck in the transit zone because at the last minute Havana told officials in Moscow not to allow him on the flight. The Washington Post contrasted this version with what it called "widespread speculation" that Russia never intended to let Snowden proceed. Fidel Castro called claims that Cuba would have blocked Snowden's entry a "lie" and a "libel". Describing Snowden's arrival in Moscow as a surprise and likening it to "an unwanted Christmas gift", Russian president Putin said that Snowden remained in the transit area of Sheremetyevo Airport, had committed no crime in Russia, was free to leave and should do so.

Following Snowden's arrival in Moscow, the White House expressed disappointment at Hong Kong's decision to allow him to leave. An anonymous U.S. official not authorized to discuss the matter told the Associated Press Snowden's passport had been revoked before he left Hong Kong, but that a senior official in a country or airline could order subordinates to overlook the withdrawn passport. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said that Snowden's passport was canceled "within two hours" of the charges against Snowden being made public which was Friday, June 21. In a July 1 statement, Snowden said, "Although I am convicted of nothing, [the U.S. government] has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person. Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that belongs to everybody. The right to seek asylum."

Four countries offered Snowden permanent asylum: Ecuador, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Venezuela. No direct flights between Moscow and Venezuela, Bolivia, or Nicaragua existed, however, and the U.S. pressured countries along his route to hand him over. Snowden said in July 2013 that he decided to bid for asylum in Russia because he felt there was no safe way to reach Latin America. Snowden said he remained in Russia because "when we were talking about possibilities for asylum in Latin America, the United States forced down the Bolivian president's plane", citing the Morales plane incident. According to Snowden, "the CIA has a very powerful presence [in Latin America] and the governments and the security services there are relatively much less capable than, say, Russia.... they could have basically snatched me...." On the issue, he said "some governments in Western European and North American states have demonstrated a willingness to act outside the law, and this behavior persists today. This unlawful threat makes it impossible for me to travel to Latin America and enjoy the asylum granted there in accordance with our shared rights." Snowden said that he would travel from Russia if there was no interference from the U.S. government.

Four months after Snowden received asylum in Russia, Julian Assange commented: "While Venezuela and Ecuador could protect him in the short term, over the long term there could be a change in government. In Russia, he's safe, he's well-regarded, and that is not likely to change. That was my advice to Snowden, that he would be physically safest in Russia."

In an October 2014 interview with magazine, Snowden reiterated that he had originally intended to travel to Latin America: "A lot of people are still unaware that I never intended to end up in Russia." According to Snowden, the U.S. government "waited until I departed Hong Kong to cancel my passport in order to trap me in Russia." Snowden added, "If they really wanted to capture me, they would've allowed me to travel to Latin America because the CIA can operate with impunity down there. They did not want that; they chose to keep me in Russia."

Spain, France, and Italy (red) denied Bolivian president Evo Morales permission to cross their airspace. Morales's plane landed in Austria (yellow).

On July 1, 2013, president Evo Morales of Bolivia, who had been attending a conference in Russia, suggested during an interview with RT (formerly Russia Today) that he would consider a request by Snowden for asylum. The following day, Morales's plane, en route to La Paz, was rerouted to Austria and landed there, after France, Spain, and Italy denied access to their airspace. While the plane was parked in Vienna, the Spanish ambassador to Austria arrived with two embassy personnel and asked to search the plane but they were denied permission by Morales himself. U.S. officials had raised suspicions that Snowden may have been on board. Morales blamed the U.S. for putting pressure on European countries and said that the grounding of his plane was a violation of international law.

In April 2015, Bolivia's ambassador to Russia, María Luisa Ramos Urzagaste, accused Julian Assange of inadvertently putting Morales's life at risk by intentionally providing to the U.S. false rumors that Snowden was on Morales's plane. Assange responded that "we weren't expecting this outcome. The result was caused by the United States' intervention. We can only regret what happened."

Snowden applied for political asylum to 21 countries. A statement attributed to him contended that the U.S. administration, and specifically then-Vice President Joe Biden, had pressured the governments to refuse his asylum petitions. Biden had telephoned President Rafael Correa days prior to Snowden's remarks, asking the Ecuadorian leader not to grant Snowden asylum. Ecuador had initially offered Snowden a temporary travel document but later withdrew it, and Correa later called the offer a mistake.

On July 1, 2013, Snowden accused the U.S. government of "using citizenship as a weapon" and using what he described as "old, bad tools of political aggression." Citing Obama's promise to not allow "wheeling and dealing" over the case, Snowden commented, "This kind of deception from a world leader is not justice, and neither is the extralegal penalty of exile." Several days later, WikiLeaks announced that Snowden had applied for asylum in six additional countries, but declined to name them, alleging attempted U.S. interference.

After evaluating the law and Snowden's situation, the French interior ministry rejected his request for asylum. Poland refused to process his application because it did not conform to legal procedure. Brazil's Foreign Ministry said the government planned no response to Snowden's asylum request. Germany and India rejected Snowden's application outright, while Austria, Ecuador, Finland, Norway, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain said he must be on their territory to apply. In November 2014, Germany announced that Snowden had not renewed his previously denied request and was not being considered for asylum. Glenn Greenwald later reported that Sigmar Gabriel, Vice-Chancellor of Germany, told him the U.S. government had threatened to stop sharing intelligence if Germany offered Snowden asylum or arranged for his travel there.

Putin said on July 1, 2013, that if Snowden wanted to be granted asylum in Russia, he would be required to "stop his work aimed at harming our American partners." A spokesman for Putin subsequently said that Snowden had withdrawn his asylum application upon learning of the conditions.

In a July 12 meeting at Sheremetyevo Airport with representatives of human rights organizations and lawyers, organized in part by the Russian government, Snowden said he was accepting all offers of asylum that he had already received or would receive. He added that Venezuela's grant of asylum formalized his asylee status, removing any basis for state interference with his right to asylum. He also said he would request asylum in Russia until he resolved his travel problems. Slovenian correspondent Polonca Frelih, the only journalist, who presented at the July 12 meeting with Snowden, reported that he "looked like someone without daylight for long time but strong enough psychologically" while expressing worries about his medical condition. Russian Federal Migration Service officials confirmed on July 16 that Snowden had submitted an application for temporary asylum. On July 24, Kucherena said his client wanted to find work in Russia, travel and create a life for himself, and had already begun learning Russian.

Amid media reports in early July 2013 attributed to U.S. administration sources that Obama's one-on-one meeting with Putin, ahead of a G20 meeting in St Petersburg scheduled for September, was in doubt due to Snowden's protracted sojourn in Russia, top U.S. officials repeatedly made it clear to Moscow that Snowden should immediately be returned to the United States to face charges for the unauthorized leaking of classified information. His Russian lawyer said Snowden needed asylum because he faced persecution by the U.S. government and feared "that he could be subjected to torture and capital punishment."

On April 16, 2020, CNN reported that Edward Snowden had requested a three-year extension of his Russian residency permit.

On September 26, 2022, Putin granted Snowden Russian citizenship, making it impossible to extradite him to any country.

In a letter to Russian Minister of Justice Aleksandr Konovalov dated July 23, 2013, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder repudiated Snowden's claim to refugee status and offered a limited validity passport good for direct return to the U.S. He stated that Snowden would not be subject to torture or the death penalty, and would receive a trial in a civilian court with proper legal counsel. The same day, the Russian president's spokesman reiterated that his government would not hand over Snowden, commenting that Putin was not personally involved in the matter and that it was being handled through talks between the FBI and Russia's FSB.

On June 14, 2013, United States federal prosecutors filed a criminal complaint against Snowden, charging him with three felonies: theft of government property and two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 (18 U. S. C. Sect. 792 et. seq.; Publ. L. 65-24) through unauthorized communication of national defense information and willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person.

Specifically, the charges filed in the Criminal Complaint were:

18 U.S.C. 641 Theft of Government Property

18 U.S.C. 793(d) Unauthorized Communication of National Defense Information

18 U.S.C. 798(a)(3) Willful Communication of Classified Intelligence Information to an Unauthorized Person

Each of the three charges carries a maximum possible prison term of ten years. The criminal complaint was initially secret but was unsealed a week later.

Stephen P. Mulligan and Jennifer K. Elsea, Legislative attorneys for the Congressional Research Service, provide a 2017 analysis of the uses of the Espionage Act to prosecute unauthorized disclosures of classified information, based on what was disclosed, to whom, and how; the burden of proof requirements e.g. degrees of Mens Rea (guilty mind), and the relationship of such considerations to the First Amendment framework of protections of free speech are also analyzed. The analysis includes the charges against Snowden, among several other cases. The discussion also covers gaps in the legal framework used to prosecute such cases.

Snowden was asked in a January 2014 interview about returning to the U.S. to face the charges in court, as Obama had suggested a few days prior. Snowden explained why he rejected the request:

What he doesn't say are that the crimes that he's charged me with are crimes that don't allow me to make my case. They don't allow me to defend myself in an open court to the public and convince a jury that what I did was to their benefit. ... So it's, I would say, illustrative that the president would choose to say someone should face the music when he knows the music is a show trial.

Snowden's legal representative, Jesselyn Radack, wrote that "the Espionage Act effectively hinders a person from defending himself before a jury in an open court." She said that the "arcane World War I law" was never meant to prosecute whistleblowers, but rather spies who betrayed their trust by selling secrets to enemies for profit. Non-profit betrayals were not considered.

On September 17, 2019, the United States filed a lawsuit, Civil Action No. 1:19-cv-1197-LO-TCB, against Snowden for alleged violations of non-disclosure agreements with the CIA and NSA. The two-count civil complaint alleged that Snowden had violated prepublication obligations related to the publication of his memoir Permanent Record. The complaint listed the publishers Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC d.b.a. Henry Holt and Company and Holtzbrink, as relief-defendants. The Hon. Liam O'Grady, a judge in the Alexandria Division of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia found for the United States (Plaintiff) by summary judgement, on both counts of the action. The judgment also found that Snowden had been paid speaker honorariums totaling $1.03 million for a series of 56 speeches delivered by video link. The effect of the ruling was that the US government can collect the proceeds from his book and speeches and means that Snowden has to relinquish more than $5.2 million earned to a "constructive trust", created to transfer the money to the government.

On June 23, 2013, Snowden landed at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport aboard a commercial Aeroflot flight from Hong Kong. After 39 days in the transit section, he left the airport on August 1 and was granted temporary asylum in Russia for one year by the Federal Migration Service.

Snowden had the choice to apply for renewal of his temporary refugee status for 12 months or requesting a permit for temporary stay for three years. A year later, his temporary refugee status having expired, Snowden received a three-year temporary residency permit allowing him to travel freely within Russia and to go abroad for up to three months. He was not granted permanent political asylum. In 2017, his temporary residency permit was extended for another three years.

In December 2013, Snowden told journalist Barton Gellman that supporters in Silicon Valley had donated enough bitcoin for him to live on. (A single bitcoin was then worth about $1,000.) In 2017, Snowden secretly married Lindsay Mills. By 2019, he no longer felt the need to be disguised in public and lived what was described by The Guardian as a "more or less normal life." He was able to travel around Russia and make a living from speaking arrangements, locally and over the internet.

Snowden's memoir Permanent Record was released internationally on September 17, 2019, and while U.S. royalties were expected to be seized, he was able to receive an advance of $4.2 million. The memoir reached the top position on Amazon's bestseller list that day. Snowden said his work for the NSA and CIA showed him that the United States Intelligence Community (IC) had "hacked the Constitution", and that he had concluded there was no option for him but to expose his revelations via the press. In the memoir he wrote, "I realized that I was crazy to have imagined that the Supreme Court, or Congress, or President Obama, seeking to distance his administration from President George W. Bush's, would ever hold the IC legally responsible-for anything". Of Russia he said, "One of the things that is lost in all the problematic politics of the Russian government is the fact this is one of the most beautiful countries in the world" with "friendly" and "warm" people.

Snowden has also used the pseudonym John Dobbertin (after cryptographer Hans Dobbertin). In 2016, from Russia, Snowden participated in the creation ceremony of the zcash cryptocurrency as John Dobbertin, by briefly holding a part of the private cryptographic key for the zcash genesis block, before destroying it.

On November 1, 2019, new amendments took effect introducing a permanent residence permit for the first time and removing the requirement to renew the pre-2019 so-called "permanent" residence permit every five years. The new permanent residence permit must be replaced three times in a lifetime like an ordinary internal passport for Russian citizens. In accordance with that law, Snowden was in October 2020 granted permanent residence in Russia instead of another extension.

In April 2020, an amendment to Russian nationality law allowing foreigners to obtain Russian citizenship without renouncing a foreign citizenship came into force. In November 2020, Snowden announced that he and his wife, Lindsay, who was expecting their son in late December, were applying for dual U.S.-Russian citizenship in order not to be separated from him "in this era of pandemics and closed borders." On September 26, 2022, President Vladimir Putin granted Snowden Russian citizenship. The couple by then had two young sons born in Russia. On December 1, Snowden swore an oath of allegiance to Russia and received a Russian passport, according to his lawyer.

Snowden has said that, in the 2008 United States presidential election, he voted for a third-party candidate; he also said that he "believed in Obama's promises". Following the election, he believed that Barack Obama was continuing policies espoused by George W. Bush.

In accounts published in June 2013, interviewers noted that Snowden's laptop displayed stickers supporting Internet freedom organizations including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Tor Project. A week after publication of his leaks began, Ars Technica confirmed that Snowden had been an active participant at the site's online forum from 2001 through May 2012, discussing a variety of topics under the pseudonym "TheTrueHOOHA". In an online discussion about racism in 2009, Snowden said: ''I went to London just last year it's where all of your Muslims live I didn't want to get out of the car. I thought I had gotten off of the plane in the wrong country... It was terrifying.'' In a January 2009 entry, TheTrueHOOHA exhibited strong support for the U.S. security state apparatus and said leakers of classified information "should be shot in the balls". Snowden disliked Obama's CIA director appointment of Leon Panetta, saying: "Obama just named a fucking politician to run the CIA." Snowden was also offended by a possible ban on assault weapons, writing: "Me and all my lunatic, gun-toting NRA compatriots would be on the steps of Congress before the C-Span feed finished." Snowden disliked Obama's economic policies, was against Social Security, and favored Ron Paul's call for a return to the gold standard. In 2014, Snowden supported a universal basic income. In 2019, Snowden said that U.S. Senator and then-presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is "the most fundamentally decent man in politics".

In response to outrage by European leaders, President Barack Obama said in early July 2013 that all nations collect intelligence, including those expressing outrage. His remarks came in response to an article in the German magazine Der Spiegel.

In 2014, Obama stated, "our nation's defense depends in part on the fidelity of those entrusted with our nation's secrets. If any individual who objects to government policy can take it into their own hands to publicly disclose classified information, then we will not be able to keep our people safe, or conduct foreign policy." He objected to the "sensational" way the leaks were reported, saying the reporting often "shed more heat than light." He said that the disclosures had revealed "methods to our adversaries that could impact our operations."

During a November 2016 interview with the German broadcaster ARD and the German paper Der Spiegel, then-outgoing President Obama said he "can't" pardon Edward Snowden unless he is physically submitted to US authorities on US soil.

In 2013, Donald Trump made a series of tweets in which he referred to Snowden as a "traitor", saying he gave "serious information to China and Russia" and "should be executed". Later that year he added a caveat, tweeting "if it and he could reveal Obama's [birth] records, I might become a major fan".

In August 2020, Trump said during a press conference that he would "take a look" at pardoning Snowden, and added that he was "not that aware of the Snowden situation". He stated, "There are many, many people-it seems to be a split decision that many people think that he should be somehow treated differently, and other people think he did very bad things, and I'm going to take a very good look at it."

described Trump's willingness to consider a pardon as "leagues away" from his 2013 views. Snowden responded to the announcement saying, "the last time we heard a White House considering a pardon was 2016, when the very same Attorney General who once charged me conceded that, on balance, my work in exposing the NSA's unconstitutional system of mass surveillance had been 'a public service'." Top members of the House Armed Services Committee immediately voiced strong opposition to a pardon, saying Snowden's actions resulted in "tremendous harm" to national security, and that he needed to stand trial. Liz Cheney called the idea of a pardon "unconscionable". A week prior to the announcement, Trump also said he had been thinking of letting Snowden return to the U.S. without facing any time in jail.

Days later, Attorney General William Barr told the AP he was "vehemently opposed" to the idea of a pardon, saying "[Snowden] was a traitor and the information he provided our adversaries greatly hurt the safety of the American people, he was peddling it around like a commercial merchant. We can't tolerate that."

Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg called Snowden's release of NSA material the most significant leak in U.S. history. Shortly before the September 2016 release of his biographical thriller film a semi-fictionalized drama based on the life of Edward Snowden with a short appearance by Snowden himself, Oliver Stone said that Snowden should be pardoned, calling him a "patriot above all" and suggesting that he should run the NSA himself.

In a December 18, 2013, CNN editorial, former NSA whistleblower J. Kirk Wiebe, known for his involvement in the NSA's Trailblazer Project, noted that a federal judge for the District of Columbia, the Hon. Richard J. Leon, had ruled in a contemporaneous case before him that the NSA warrantless surveillance program was likely unconstitutional; Wiebe then proposed that Snowden should be granted amnesty and allowed to return to the United States.

Numerous high-ranking current or former U.S. government officials reacted publicly to Snowden's disclosures.

2013

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper condemned the leaks as doing "huge, grave damage" to U.S. intelligence capabilities. Ex-CIA director James Woolsey said that if Snowden were convicted of treason, he should be hanged.

FBI director Robert Mueller said that the U.S. government is "taking all necessary steps to hold Edward Snowden responsible for these disclosures."

2014

House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers and ranking member Dutch Ruppersberger said a classified Pentagon report written by military intelligence officials contended that Snowden's leaks had put U.S. troops at risk and prompted terrorists to change their tactics and that most files copied were related to current U.S. military operations.

Former congressman Ron Paul began a petition urging the Obama Administration to grant Snowden clemency. Paul released a video on his website saying, "Edward Snowden sacrificed his livelihood, citizenship, and freedom by exposing the disturbing scope of the NSA's worldwide spying program. Thanks to one man's courageous actions, Americans know about the truly egregious ways their government is spying on them."

Mike McConnell-former NSA director and current vice chairman at Booz Allen Hamilton-said that Snowden was motivated by revenge when the NSA did not offer him the job he wanted. "At this point," said McConnell, "he being narcissistic and having failed at most everything he did, he decides now I'm going to turn on them."

Former President Jimmy Carter said that if he were still president today he would "certainly consider" giving Snowden a pardon were he to be found guilty and imprisoned for his leaks.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, "[W]e have all these protections for whistleblowers. If [Snowden] were concerned and wanted to be part of the American debate...it struck me as...sort of odd that he would flee to China because Hong Kong is controlled by China, and that he would then go to Russia-two countries with which we have very difficult cyberrelationships." As Clinton saw it, "turning over a lot of that material-intentionally or unintentionally-drained, gave all kinds of information, not only to big countries but to networks and terrorist groups and the like. So I have a hard time thinking that somebody who is a champion of privacy and liberty has taken refuge in Russia, under Putin's authority." Clinton later said that if Snowden wished to return to the U.S., "knowing he would be held accountable," he would have the right "to launch both a legal defense and a public defense, which can, of course, affect the legal defense."

Secretary of State John Kerry said Snowden had "damaged his country very significantly" and "hurt operational security" by telling terrorists how to evade detection. "The bottom line," Kerry added, "is this man has betrayed his country, sitting in Russia where he has taken refuge. You know, he should man up and come back to the United States."

Former Vice President Al Gore said Snowden "clearly violated the law so you can't say OK, what he did is all right. It's not. But what he revealed in the course of violating important laws included violations of the U.S. Constitution that were way more serious than the crimes he committed. In the course of violating important law, he also provided an important service. ... Because we did need to know how far this has gone."

In 2014, deputy defense secretary and later defense secretary Ashton Carter said, "We had a cyber Pearl Harbor. His name was Edward Snowden." Carter charged that U.S. security officials "screwed up spectacularly in the case of Snowden. And this knucklehead had access to destructive power that was much more than any individual person should have access to."

In the U.S., Snowden's actions precipitated an intense debate on privacy and warrantless domestic surveillance. President Obama was initially dismissive of Snowden, saying "I'm not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker." In August 2013, Obama rejected the suggestion that Snowden was a patriot, and in November said that "the benefit of the debate he generated was not worth the damage done, because there was another way of doing it."

In June 2013, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont shared a "must-read" news story on his blog by Ron Fournier, stating "Love him or hate him, we all owe Snowden our thanks for forcing upon the nation an important debate. But the debate shouldn't be about him. It should be about the gnawing questions his actions raised from the shadows." In 2015, Sanders stated that "Snowden played a very important role in educating the American public" and that although Snowden should not go unpunished for breaking the law, "that education should be taken into consideration before the sentencing."

Snowden said in December 2013 that he was "inspired by the global debate" ignited by the leaks and that NSA's "culture of indiscriminate global espionage ... is collapsing."

At the end of 2013, The Washington Post said that the public debate and its offshoots had produced no meaningful change in policy, with the status quo continuing.

In 2016, on The Axe Files podcast, former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said that Snowden "performed a public service by raising the debate that we engaged in and by the changes that we made." Holder nevertheless said that Snowden's actions were inappropriate and illegal.

In September 2016, the bipartisan U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence completed a review of the Snowden disclosures and said that the federal government would have to spend millions of dollars responding to the fallout from Snowden's disclosures. The report also said that "the public narrative popularized by Snowden and his allies is rife with falsehoods, exaggerations, and crucial omissions." The report was denounced by Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman, who, in an opinion piece for The Century Foundation, called it "aggressively dishonest" and "contemptuous of fact."

In August 2013, President Obama said that he had called for a review of U.S. surveillance activities before Snowden had begun revealing details of the NSA's operations, and announced that he was directing DNI James Clapper "to establish a review group on intelligence and communications technologies." In December, the task force issued 46 recommendations that, if adopted, would subject the NSA to additional scrutiny by the courts, Congress, and the president, and would strip the NSA of the authority to infiltrate American computer systems using backdoors in hardware or software. Panel member Geoffrey R. Stone said there was no evidence that the bulk collection of phone data had stopped any terror attacks.

Court rulings (United States)

On June 6, 2013, in the wake of Snowden's leaks, conservative public interest lawyer and Judicial Watch founder Larry Klayman filed a lawsuit claiming that the federal government had unlawfully collected metadata for his telephone calls and was harassing him. In Klayman v. Obama, Judge Richard J. Leon referred to the NSA's "almost-Orwellian technology" and ruled the bulk telephone metadata program to be likely unconstitutional. Leon's ruling was stayed pending an appeal by the government. Snowden later described Judge Leon's decision as vindication.

On June 11, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, alleging that the NSA's phone records program was unconstitutional. In December 2013, ten days after Judge Leon's ruling, Judge William H. Pauley III came to the opposite conclusion. In ACLU v. Clapper, although acknowledging that privacy concerns are not trivial, Pauley found that the potential benefits of surveillance outweigh these considerations and ruled that the NSA's collection of phone data is legal.

Gary Schmitt, former staff director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, wrote that "The two decisions have generated public confusion over the constitutionality of the NSA's data collection program-a kind of judicial 'he-said, she-said' standoff."

On May 7, 2015, in the case of ACLU v. Clapper, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit said that Section 215 of the Patriot Act did not authorize the NSA to collect Americans' calling records in bulk, as exposed by Snowden in 2013. The decision voided U.S. District Judge William Pauley's December 2013 finding that the NSA program was lawful, and remanded the case to him for further review. The appeals court did not rule on the constitutionality of the bulk surveillance and declined to enjoin the program, noting the pending expiration of relevant parts of the Patriot Act. Circuit Judge Gerard E. Lynch wrote that, given the national security interests at stake, it was prudent to give Congress an opportunity to debate and decide the matter.

On September 2, 2020, a US federal court ruled that the US intelligence's mass surveillance program, exposed by Edward Snowden, was illegal and possibly unconstitutional. They also stated that the US intelligence leaders, who publicly defended it, were not telling the truth.

On June 2, 2015, the U.S. Senate passed, and President Obama signed, the USA Freedom Act which restored in modified form several provisions of the Patriot Act that had expired the day before, while for the first time imposing some limits on the bulk collection of telecommunication data on U.S. citizens by American intelligence agencies. The new restrictions were widely seen as stemming from Snowden's revelations.

In an official report published in October 2015, the United Nations special rapporteur for the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of speech, Professor David Kaye, criticized the U.S. government's harsh treatment of, and bringing criminal charges against, whistleblowers, including Edward Snowden. The report found that Snowden's revelations were important for people everywhere and made "a deep and lasting impact on law, policy, and politics." The European Parliament invited Snowden to make a pre-recorded video appearance to aid their NSA investigation. Snowden gave written testimony in which he said that he was seeking asylum in the EU, but that he was told by European Parliamentarians that the U.S. would not allow EU partners to make such an offer. He told the Parliament that the NSA was working with the security agencies of EU states to "get access to as much data of EU citizens as possible." He said that the NSA's Foreign Affairs Division lobbies the EU and other countries to change their laws, allowing for "everyone in the country" to be spied on legally.

Austria, Italy and Switzerland

Snowden applied for asylum in Austria, Italy and Switzerland. Snowden, speaking to a Geneva, Switzerland audience via video link from Moscow, said he would love to return to Geneva, where he had previously worked undercover for the CIA. Swiss media said that the Swiss Attorney General had determined that Switzerland would not extradite Snowden if the US request were considered "politically motivated". Switzerland would grant Snowden asylum if he revealed the extent of espionage activities by the United States government. According to the paper Sonntags Zeitung, Snowden would be granted safe entry and residency in Switzerland, in return for his knowledge of American intelligence activities. Swiss paper Le Matin reported that Snowden's activity could be part of criminal proceedings or part of a parliamentary inquiry.

On September 16, 2019, it was reported that Snowden had said he "would love" to get political asylum in France. Snowden first applied unsuccessfully for asylum in France in 2013, under then French President François Hollande. His second request, under President Emmanuel Macron, was favorably received by Justice Minister Nicole Belloubet. However, no other members of the French government were known to express support for Snowden's asylum request, possibly due to the potential adverse diplomatic consequences.

Hans-Georg Maaßen, head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany's domestic security agency, speculated that Snowden could have been working for the Russian government. Snowden rejected this insinuation, speculating on Twitter in German that "it cannot be proven if Maaßen is an agent of the SVR or FSB." On October 31, 2013, Snowden met with German Green Party lawmaker Hans-Christian Ströbele in Moscow to discuss the possibility of Snowden giving testimony in Germany. At the meeting, Snowden gave Ströbele a letter to the German government, parliament, and federal Attorney-General, the details of which were to later be made public. Germany later blocked Snowden from testifying in person in an NSA inquiry, citing a potential grave strain on US-German relations.

The FBI demanded that Nordic countries arrest Snowden should he visit their countries. Snowden made asylum requests to Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark. All requests were ultimately denied, with varying degrees of severity in the response. According to Finnish foreign ministry spokeswoman Tytti Pylkkö, Snowden made an asylum request to Finland by sending an application to the Finnish embassy in Moscow while he was confined to the transit area of the Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow, but was told that Finnish law required him to be on Finnish soil. According to SVT News, Snowden met with three Swedish MP's; Matthias Sundin (L), Jakop Dalunde (MP) and Cecilia Magnusson (M), in Moscow, to discuss his views on mass surveillance. The meeting was organized by the Right Livelihood Award Foundation, which awarded Snowden the Right Livelihood Honorary Award, often called Sweden's "Alternative Nobel Prize". According to the foundation, the prize was for Snowden's work on press freedom. Sweden ultimately rejected Snowden's asylum, however, so the award was accepted by his father, Lon Snowden, on his behalf.

Snowden was granted a freedom of speech award by the Oslo branch of the writer's group PEN International. He applied for asylum in Norway but Norwegian Justice Secretary Pål Lønseth insisted that the application be made on Norwegian soil and further expressed doubt that Snowden met the criteria for gaining asylum - being "important for foreign political reasons". Snowden then filed a lawsuit for free passage through Norway in order to receive his freedom of speech award, through Oslo's District Court, followed by an appeals court, and finally Norway's Supreme Court. The lawsuit was ultimately rejected by the Norwegian Supreme Court. Snowden also applied for asylum in Denmark, but this was rejected by the center-right Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, who said he could see no reason to grant Snowden asylum, calling him a "criminal". Apparently, under an agreement with the Danish government, a US government jet lay in wait on standby in Copenhagen, to transfer Snowden back to the United States from any Scandinavian country.

Support for Snowden came from Latin and South American leaders including the Argentinian President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, Bolivian President Evo Morales, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.

A demonstration at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin during Barack Obama's visit on June 18, 2013

Crediting the Snowden leaks, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted Resolution 68/167 in December 2013. The non-binding resolution denounced unwarranted digital surveillance and included a symbolic declaration of the right of all individuals to online privacy.

In July 2014, Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, told a news conference in Geneva that the U.S. should abandon its efforts to prosecute Snowden, since his leaks were in the public interest.

A rally in Germany in support of Snowden on August 30, 2014

Surveys conducted by news outlets and professional polling organizations found that American public opinion was divided on Snowden's disclosures and that those polled in Canada and Europe were more supportive of Snowden than respondents in the U.S., although more Americans have grown more supportive of Snowden's disclosure. In Germany, Italy, France, the Netherlands, and Spain, more than 80% of people familiar with Snowden view him positively.

For his global surveillance disclosures, Snowden has been honored by publications and organizations based in Europe and the United States. He was voted as The Guardian's person of the year 2013, garnering four times the number of votes as any other candidate.

In March 2014, Snowden spoke at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive technology conference in Austin, Texas, in front of 3,500 attendees. He participated by teleconference carried over multiple routers running the Google Hangouts platform. On-stage moderators were Christopher Soghoian and Snowden's legal counsel Wizner, both from the ACLU. Snowden said that the NSA was "setting fire to the future of the internet," and that the SXSW audience was "the firefighters". Attendees could use Twitter to send questions to Snowden, who answered one by saying that information gathered by corporations was much less dangerous than that gathered by a government agency, because "governments have the power to deprive you of your rights." Then-Representative Mike Pompeo (R-KS) of the House Intelligence Committee, later director of the CIA and secretary of state, had tried unsuccessfully to get the SXSW management to cancel Snowden's appearance; instead, SXSW director Hugh Forrest said that the NSA was welcome to respond to Snowden at the 2015 conference.

Snowden addressing a TED conference from Russia via telepresence robot

Later that month, Snowden appeared by teleconference at the TED conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. Represented on stage by a robot with a video screen, video camera, microphones, and speakers, Snowden conversed with TED curator Chris Anderson and told the attendees that online businesses should act quickly to encrypt their websites. He described the NSA's PRISM program as the U.S. government using businesses to collect data for them, and that the NSA "intentionally misleads corporate partners" using, as an example, the Bullrun decryption program to create backdoor access. Snowden said he would gladly return to the U.S. if given immunity from prosecution, but that he was more concerned about alerting the public about abuses of government authority. Anderson invited Internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee on stage to converse with Snowden, who said that he would support Berners-Lee's concept of an "internet Magna Carta" to "encode our values in the structure of the internet."

On September 15, 2014, Snowden appeared via remote video link, along with Julian Assange, on Kim Dotcom's Moment of Truth town hall meeting held in Auckland. He made a similar video link appearance on February 2, 2015, along with Greenwald, as the keynote speaker at the World Affairs Conference at Upper Canada College in Toronto.

In March 2015, while speaking at the FIFDH (international human rights film festival) he made a public appeal for Switzerland to grant him asylum, saying he would like to return to live in Geneva, where he once worked undercover for the Central Intelligence Agency.

In April 2015, John Oliver, the host of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, flew to Moscow to interview Edward Snowden.

On November 10, 2015, Snowden appeared at the Newseum, via remote video link, for PEN American Center's "Secret Sources: Whistleblowers, National Security and Free Expression," event.

In 2015, Snowden earned over $200,000 from digital speaking engagements in the U.S.

Edward Snowden speaking at LibrePlanet 2016

On March 19, 2016, Snowden delivered the opening keynote address of the LibrePlanet conference, a meeting of international free software activists and developers presented by the Free Software Foundation. The conference was held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was the first such time Snowden spoke via teleconference using a full free software stack, end-to-end.[jargon ]

On July 21, 2016, Snowden and hardware hacker Bunnie Huang, in a talk at MIT Media Lab's Forbidden Research event, published research for a smartphone case, the so-called Introspection Engine, that would monitor signals received and sent by that phone to provide an alert to the user if his or her phone is transmitting or receiving information when it shouldn't be (for example when it's turned off or in airplane mode), a feature described by Snowden to be useful for journalists or activists operating under hostile governments that would otherwise track their activities through their phones.

In August 2020, a court filing by the Department of Justice indicated that Snowden had collected a total of over $1.2 million in speaking fees in addition to advances on books since 2013. In September 2021, Yahoo! Finance reported that for 67 speaking appearances by video link from September 2015-May 2020, Snowden had earned more than $1.2 million. In March 2021, Iowa State University paid him $35,000 for one such speech, his first at a public U.S. college since February 2017, when the University of Pittsburgh paid him $15,000.

The "Snowden effect"

In July 2013, media critic Jay Rosen defined the "Snowden effect" as "Direct and indirect gains in public knowledge from the cascade of events and further reporting that followed Edward Snowden's leaks of classified information about the surveillance state in the U.S." In December 2013, The Nation wrote that Snowden had sparked an overdue debate about national security and individual privacy. In , the effect was seen to have nearly united the U.S. Congress in opposition to the massive post-9/11 domestic intelligence gathering system. In its Spring 2014 Global Attitudes Survey, the Pew Research Center found that Snowden's disclosures had tarnished the image of the United States, especially in Europe and Latin America.

Snowden gave Channel 4's Alternative Christmas message in December 2013.

The film , based on Snowden's leaking of classified US government material, directed by Oliver Stone and written by Stone and Kieran Fitzgerald, was released in 2016. Snowden grossed a total of $37,357,216 at the box office worldwide. The documentary Citizenfour directed by Laura Poitras won Best Documentary Feature at the 87th Academy Awards.

In 2016, Snowden's vocals were featured on a song called "Exit" on the album Electronica 2: The Heart of Noise by French electronic music artist Jean-Michel Jarre.

1. ^ Snowden, Edward [@Snowden] (May 18, 2022). "With two kids under two, it feels like [...] for them" (Tweet) - via Twitter.

2. Kelley, Michael B. (September 30, 2021). "Snowden flouts court ruling with paid speeches, Substack: 'He's above the law'". Yahoo! Finance.

3. Ackerman, Spencer (June 10, 2013). "Edward Snowden was not successful in joining the US Army's elite special forces unit". The Guardian. London. The army did confirm Snowden's date of birth: 21 June 1983.

4. ^ "Report: Snowden has document to enter Russia". WVEC. Associated Press. July 24, 2013. Archived from the original on August 22, 2013. Edward Snowden, who was born in Elizabeth City, NC, is wanted in the U.S. for espionage" by the FBI et al.

5. ^ "NSA leaker Edward Snowden has ties to North Carolina". The News & Observer. August 1, 2013. Archived from the original on October 19, 2014.

6. ^ "In Declassified Edward Snowden Report, Committee Walks Back Claims About 'Intentional Lying'". U.S. News & World Report. December 22, 2016.

7. ^ Finn, Peter; Miller, Greg; Nakashima, Ellen (June 10, 2013). "Investigators looking into how Snowden gained access at NSA". The Washington Post. University spokesman Brian Ullmann confirmed that in 2005, Snowden worked for less than a year as a 'security specialist' for the school's Center for Advanced Study of Language. The university-affiliated center, founded in 2003, is not a classified facility.

8. Snowden, Edward (January 23, 2014). "Live Q&A with Edward Snowden". Courage Foundation. Archived from the original on January 11, 2015.

9. ^ Mistry, Kaeten; Gurman, Hannah, eds. (2020). Whistleblowing Nation: The History of National Security Disclosures and the Cult of State Secrecy (Paperback). New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 9780231194174.

10. ^ Pozen, David E. (2020). "CODA: Edward Snowden, National Security Whistleblowing, and Civil Disobedience". In Mistry, Kaeten; Gurman, Hannah (eds.). Whistleblowing Nation: The History of National Security Disclosures and the Cult of State Secrecy (Paperback). New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 327-338. doi:10.7312/mist19416. ISBN 9780231194174. JSTOR 10.7312/mist19416.16. S2CID 242288301. SSRN 3487552.

11. ^ Rawlinson, Kevin (May 26, 2015). "Snowden leaks: undermining security or defending privacy?". Channel 4.

12. ^ The Mastermind Episode 3: He Always Had a Dark Side The Atavist Magazine

13. Poitras, Laura; Greenwald, Glenn (June 9, 2013). NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things' (video). The Guardian. London.

14. ^ Isikoff, Michael; Arkin, Daniel (October 27, 2014). "Report: US spied on millions of phone calls in Spain over one month". NBC News.

15. ^ Cole, David (May 12, 2014). "'No Place to Hide' by Glenn Greenwald, on the NSA's sweeping efforts to 'Know it All'". The Washington Post.

16. ^ Lam, Lana (June 12, 2013). "Whistle-blower Edward Snowden tells SCMP: 'Let Hong Kong people decide my fate'". South China Morning Post. Hong Kong.

17. ^ Lam, Lana (June 13, 2013). "Whistleblower Edward Snowden talks to South China Morning Post". South China Morning Post. He vowed to fight any extradition attempt by the U.S. government, saying: 'My intention is to ask the courts and people of Hong Kong to decide my fate. I have been given no reason to doubt your system.'

18. ^ Epstein, Edward Jay (March 21, 2017). "The Compromising of America". Lawfare. Putin revealed in a televised press conference on September 2, 2013, that Snowden had met in Hong Kong with what he called Russian "diplomats" before being offered sanctuary in Russia on June 11, 2013.

19. ^ "Hong Kong did not assist Snowden's departure". Global Post. Agence France-Presse. June 25, 2013. Archived from the original on July 12, 2013. Yuen also said there were discrepancies and missing information in documents used to identify Snowden. 'On the diplomatic documents, James was used as the middle name, on the record upon entering the border, Joseph was used as the middle name, on the American court documents sent to us by the American Justice Department, it only said Edward J Snowden,' he said. Hong Kong authorities also noticed that documents produced by the U.S. did not show Snowden's American passport number.

20. "Путин признал: Сноуден - в Москве. И посоветовал США не "стричь поросенка"". NEWSru. June 25, 2013.

21. ^ "Teeven: geen asiel voor Snowden" (in Dutch). Novum Nieuws. July 2, 2013. Archived from the original on August 22, 2013.

22. ^ "Edward Snowden's statement to human rights groups in full". The Daily Telegraph. London. July 12, 2013. Archived from the original on January 10, 2022.

23. ^ Snowden, Edward [@Snowden] (October 2, 2019). "I am neither Democrat nor Republican, but Sanders is in my opinion the most fundamentally decent man in politics. His life-long struggle for a more equitable society is a reminder of how far we have come-and a challenge to complete the journey. #GetWellBernie" (Tweet) - via Twitter.

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Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is a United States and naturalized Russian citizen who was a computer intelligence consultant and whistleblower who leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013 when he was an employee and subcontractor.

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According to Mediabiasfactcheck, this is a questionable source because it is strongly right-bias, has many failed fact checks by reporters/pundits, isn’t always very good with sourcing information, and they publish misleading reports and spread conspiracy theories that end up needing to be taken down. However, the reason it is rated as being ‘mixed’ for factual reporting is because it’s ‘straight news’ reporting is generally reliable.

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23) Edward Snowden: Whistleblower or double agent?

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23) Edward Snowden: Whistleblower or double agent?

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While some initially championed Edward Snowden, the 21st century mole holed up in Hong Kong, as a martyr, there also appears to be a growing backlash against the former NSA contractor. And as the story slowly unfolds, one key question stands out: is Snowden the heroic whistleblower he claims to be or something more sinister?

During one of his first newspaper interviews, when he spilled national security secrets, Snowden called himself "just another guy who sits there day to day in the office." But now some are questioning his motives and wondering whether claims that he wanted to right a perceived wrong are true -- or whether he could be a modern-day double agent, cleverly hiding his actions and painting himself as a victim of the U.S. government while working as an agent for the Chinese.

Gordon Chang, author of "The Coming Collapse of China," thinks there's a strong possibility Snowden could be playing for both sides.

"The first clue is that he goes to Hong Kong and they have an extradition agreement with the U.S. and a tradition of close cooperation of law enforcement," Chang told Fox. "That means, the only thing that stands between him and a lifetime in a super-max prison is Beijing."

Chang also says the timing of Snowden's disclosures are suspect.

"He changed the global narrative of China hacking into the U.S. to the American government going after one of its own," Chang said.

The first of Snowden's disclosures came right before President Obama met with new Chinese President Xi Jinping.

"That really derailed Obama's whole talk about cyber security," he said, adding, "the most rrecent revelations have been about operational details of the NSA spying on Hong Kong and China. This only helps Beijing."

Chang says it's likely Snowden went public with his claims because he was tipped off that the NSA was on to him.

Snowden's most recent claims to the South China Morning Post are that the NSA has more than 61,000 hacking operations globally, the NSA has been hacking computers in Hong Kong and China since 2009 and that the Chinese targets included universities, public officials, businesses and students.

Chang said that if Snowden flees to China ""basically that puts him in a place where U.S. authorities can't get to him and that's important because it lets him pretty much do what he wants. And perhaps the issue is that he wasn't on his own. That he did this with the help of someone else."

Chang believes that it would be very difficult for Snowden to get the amount of data he got in such a short period of time and from a position where most people didn't think it would be possible.
Chang also says the time Snowden spent in Hawaii could provide clues as to his true intentions.

"There are a lot of federal agencies in Hawaii where he was and this is a very critical place because this is where we do our surveillance of China," he said.

For now, what is clear is that there are many more questions that need to be asked and answered.

Here's what we do know: Snowden was a contractor who allegedly looked at documents he wasn't supposed to see, took them, fled to another country and is now claiming he did so because he was trying to bring an injustice to light.

On Friday, Attorney General Eric Holder called the NSA leaks "extremely damaging."

"The national security of the United States has been damaged as a result those leaks," he said.. "The safety of the American people and the safety of people who reside in allied nations have been put at risk as a result of these leaks," Holder said. "We are presently in the process of that investigation, and I'm confident the person who is responsible will be held accountable."

The attorney general made the comment in Dublin, Ireland, when asked by reporters why the U.S. hasn't taken steps to arrest Snowden.

Snowden's background isn't squeaky clean. During the eight years that he worked as a contractor for the Central Intelligence Agency and NSA, he routinely went online and ranted against corporations and citizen surveillance.

Records show that Snowden was employed by an unidentified classified agency in Washington from 2005 to mid-2006, by the CIA from 2006 to 2009, when he primarily worked overseas, and by Dell Inc from 2009 to 2013, when he worked in the U.S. and Japan as an NSA contractor. During those years, he posted hundreds of messages on a public Internet forum under a pseudonym.

"I can't hope to change the way things are going by overtly complaining, writing letters, or blowing things up," Snowden wrote in 2003 in response to a discussion about corporate greed on the Ars Technica online forum.

The new information released by Reuters and Time Magazine about Snowden's employment record, online postings and education come during a time when U.S. lawmakers are demanding answers from intelligence officials on how Snowden, a high-school dropout, got his hands on the country's top secret programs.

Snowden, 29, fled to Hong Kong with a batch of classified material he allegedly stole from the NSA. The former Booz Allen Hamilton contractor initially said it was his conscience that drove him to expose the "massive surveillance machine the U.S. government is secretly building."

On Friday, The Global Times, a Communist Party-backed newspaper in China, ran an editorial in both its Chinese and English-language editions that argued Snowden should not be sent back to the U.S. because his revelations about American surveillance programs concern China's national interest. The paper also cited Beijing's rocky relations with the U.S. and says the Chinese would be unhappy if Snowden were sent back.

The editorial also argued that Snowden could provide Chinese officials with once-classified U.S. intelligence, which would help the country update its understanding of cyberspace.

Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations recently tweeted, "Why is the media using sympathetic word 'whistleblower' for Edward #Snowden, who leaked secret #NSA program? He broke the law & made us less safe."

He added, "A 'whistleblower' is person who reveals wrongdoing, corruption, illegal activity. None of this applies here even if you oppose US (government) policy."

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Edward Snowden: Whistleblower or double agent?

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While some initially championed Edward Snowden, the 21st century mole holed up in Hong Kong, as a martyr, there also appears to be a growing backlash against the former NSA contractor. And as the story slowly unfolds, one key question stands out: is Snowden the heroic whistleblower he claims to be or something more sinister?

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- Snowden is a self-styled whistleblower. He says he was motivated by his constitutional qualms about an NSA bulk-data-collection program and his disgust with official deceptions about the program.
- If Snowden wanted to be a genuine whistleblower, he could have pursued concerns about the NSA program through lawful avenues, instead of fleeing the country and purloining so many documents that authorities still can’t be sure how much he stole.
- why did Snowden’s devotion to the Constitution require him to disclose details of how we spy on other countries, how we cooperate with Sweden and Norway to spy on Russia, or an NSA program called MasterMind to respond to cyberattacks?

None of these programs or actions raises any constitutional issues whatsoever. Exposing them makes sense only as sheer nihilism (i.e., Snowden was in a position to steal the information, so why not take it and disclose it?) or as a calculated act of hostility to US national-security policy as such.

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- PRISM is a system the NSA uses to gain access to the private communications of users of nine popular Internet services. Access is governed by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was enacted in 2008.
-  A classified PowerPoint presentation leaked by Edward Snowden states that PRISM enables "collection directly from the servers" of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and other online companies.
- Tech companies have angrily denied that they had given the NSA "direct" or "unfettered" access to their servers.
- FISA orders are not search warrants under the Fourth Amendment, and the FISA Amendments Act doesn't require the government to show probable cause to believe that the target of surveillance has committed a crime.
- The surveillance may not "intentionally target" an American, but the NSA can obtain the private communications of Americans as part of a request that officially "targets" a foreigner.

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20) Here’s everything we know about PRISM to date

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20) Here’s everything we know about PRISM to date

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(Relates to article 19)

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- Foreigners are the NSA's 'targets', not Americans, but their programs touch nearly every American home in one way or another.
- Obama administration officials and career intelligence officers say Americans should take comfort that privacy protections are built into the design and oversight, but they are not prepared to discuss the details.
- Two of the four collection programs, one each for telephony and the Internet, process trillions of “metadata” records for storage and analysis in systems called MAINWAY and MARINA.
- The other two types of collection, which operate on a much smaller scale, are aimed at content. One of them intercepts telephone calls and routes the spoken words to a system called NUCLEON.

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19) U.S. surveillance architecture includes collection of revealing Internet, phone metadata

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19) U.S. surveillance architecture includes collection of revealing Internet, phone metadata

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On March 12, 2004, acting attorney general James B. Comey and the Justice Department's top leadership reached the brink of resignation over electronic surveillance orders that they believed to be illegal.

President George W. Bush backed down, halting secret foreign-
intelligence-gathering operations that had crossed into domestic terrain. That morning marked the beginning of the end of STELLARWIND, the cover name for a set of four surveillance programs that brought Americans and American territory within the domain of the National Security Agency for the first time in decades. It was also a prelude to new legal structures that allowed Bush and then President Obama to reproduce each of those programs and expand their reach.

What exactly STELLARWIND did has never been disclosed in an unclassified form. Which parts of it did Comey approve? Which did he shut down? What became of the programs when the crisis passed and Comey, now Obama's expected nominee for FBI director, returned to private life?

Authoritative new answers to those questions, drawing upon a classified NSA history of STELLARWIND and interviews with high-ranking intelligence officials, offer the clearest map yet of the Bush-era programs and the NSA's contemporary U.S. operations.

STELLARWIND was succeeded by four major lines of intelligence collection in the territorial United States, together capable of spanning the full range of modern telecommunications, according to the interviews and documents.

Timeline of surveillance

A timeline of surveillance in the United States from 2001 to 2013: from the Patriot Act to the PRISM program.

Foreigners, not Americans, are the NSA's "targets," as the law defines that term. But the programs are structured broadly enough that they touch nearly every American household in some way. Obama administration officials and career intelligence officers say Americans should take comfort that privacy protections are built into the design and oversight, but they are not prepared to discuss the details.

The White House, the NSA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment on the record for this article. A senior intelligence official agreed to answer questions if not identified.

"We have rich oversight across three branches of government. I've got an [inspector general] here, a fairly robust legal staff here . . . and there's the Justice Department's national security division," the official said. "For those things done under court jurisdiction, the courts are intrusive in my business, appropriately so, and there are two congressional committees. It's a belts-and-suspenders-and-Velcro approach, and inside there's rich auditing."

But privacy advocates, such as Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), said the intelligence committee on which he serves needs "straight answers" to do vigorous oversight.

He added: "The typical person says, 'If I am law-abiding and the government is out there collecting lots of information about me - who I call, when I call, where I call from' . . . I think the typical person is going to say, 'That sure sounds like it could have some effect on my privacy.' "

Two of the four collection programs, one each for telephony and the Internet, process trillions of "metadata" records for storage and analysis in systems called MAINWAY and MARINA, respectively. Metadata includes highly revealing information about the times, places, devices and participants in electronic communication, but not its contents. The bulk collection of telephone call records from Verizon Business Services, disclosed this month by the British newspaper the Guardian, is one source of raw intelligence for MAINWAY.

The other two types of collection, which operate on a much smaller scale, are aimed at content. One of them intercepts telephone calls and routes the spoken words to a system called NUCLEON.

For Internet content, the most important source collection is the PRISM project reported on June 6 by The Washington Post and the Guardian. It draws from data held by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other Silicon Valley giants, collectively the richest depositories of personal information in history.

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, 29, who unmasked himself as the source behind the PRISM and Verizon revelations, said he hoped for a systematic debate about the " danger to our freedom and way of life " posed by a surveillance apparatus "kept in check by nothing more than policy."

For well over a week, he has had his wish. Startling disclosures have poured out of the nation's largest and arguably tightest-lipped spy agency at an unprecedented pace. Snowden's disclosures have opened a national conversation about the limits of secret surveillance in a free society and an outcry overseas against U.S. espionage.

The debate has focused on two of the four U.S.-based collection programs: PRISM, for Internet content, and the comprehensive collection of telephone call records, foreign and domestic, that the Guardian revealed by posting a classified order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to Verizon Business Services.

The Post has learned that similar orders have been renewed every three months for other large U.S. phone companies, including Bell South and AT&T, since May 24, 2006. On that day, the surveillance court made a fundamental shift in its approach to Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which permits the FBI to compel production of "business records" that are relevant to a particular terrorism investigation and to share those in some circumstances with the NSA. Henceforth, the court ruled, it would define the relevant business records as the entirety of a telephone company's call database.

The Bush administration, by then, had been taking "bulk metadata" from the phone companies under voluntary agreements for more than four years. The volume of information overwhelmed the MAINWAY database, according to a classified report from the NSA inspector general in 2009. The agency spent $146 million in supplemental counterterrorism funds to buy new hardware and contract support - and to make unspecified payments to the phone companies for "collaborative partnerships."

When the New York Times revealed the warrantless surveillance of voice calls, in December 2005, the telephone companies got nervous. One of them, unnamed in the report, approached the NSA with a request. Rather than volunteer the data, at a price, the "provider preferred to be compelled to do so by a court order," the report said. Other companies followed suit. The surveillance court order that recast the meaning of business records "essentially gave NSA the same authority to collect bulk telephony metadata from business records that it had" under Bush's asserted authority alone.

Telephone metadata was not the issue that sparked a rebellion at the Justice Department, first by Jack Goldsmith of the Office of Legal Counsel and then by Comey, who was acting attorney general because John D. Ashcroft was in intensive care with acute gallstone pancreatitis. It was Internet metadata.

At Bush's direction, in orders prepared by David Addington, the counsel to Vice President Richard B. Cheney, the NSA had been siphoning e-mail metadata and technical records of Skype calls from data links owned by AT&T, Sprint and MCI, which later merged with Verizon.

For reasons unspecified in the report, Goldsmith and Comey became convinced that Bush had no lawful authority to do that.

MARINA and the collection tools that feed it are probably the least known of the NSA's domestic operations, even among experts who follow the subject closely. Yet they probably capture information about more American citizens than any other, because the volume of e-mail, chats and other Internet communications far exceeds the volume of standard telephone calls.

The NSA calls Internet metadata "digital network information." Sophisticated analysis of those records can reveal unknown associates of known terrorism suspects. Depending on the methods applied, it can also expose medical conditions, political or religious affiliations, confidential business negotiations and extramarital affairs.

What permits the former and prevents the latter is a complex set of policies that the public is not permitted to see. "You could do analyses that give you more information, but the law and procedures don't allow that," a senior U.S. intelligence lawyer said.

In the urgent aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, with more attacks thought to be imminent, analysts wanted to use "contact chaining" techniques to build what the NSA describes as network graphs of people who represented potential threats.

The legal challenge for the NSA was that its practice of collecting high volumes of data from digital links did not seem to meet even the relatively low requirements of Bush's authorization, which allowed collection of Internet metadata "for communications with at least one communicant outside the United States or for which no communicant was known to be a citizen of the United States," the NSA inspector general's report said.

Lawyers for the agency came up with an interpretation that said the NSA did not "acquire" the communications, a term with formal meaning in surveillance law, until analysts ran searches against it. The NSA could "obtain" metadata in bulk, they argued, without meeting the required standards for acquisition.

Goldsmith and Comey did not buy that argument, and a high-ranking U.S. intelligence official said the NSA does not rely on it today.

As soon as surveillance data "touches us, we've got it, whatever verbs you choose to use," the official said in an interview. "We're not saying there's a magic formula that lets us have it without having it."

When Comey finally ordered a stop to the program, Bush signed an order renewing it anyway. Comey, Goldsmith, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and most of the senior Bush appointees in the Justice Department began drafting letters of resignation.

Then-NSA Director Michael V. Hayden was not among them. According to the inspector general's classified report, Cheney's lawyer, Addington, placed a phone call and "General Hayden had to decide whether NSA would execute the Authorization without the Attorney General's signature." He decided to go along.

The following morning, when Mueller told Bush that he and Comey intended to resign, the president reversed himself.

Three months later, on July 15, the secret surveillance court allowed the NSA to resume bulk collection under the court's own authority. The opinion, which remains highly classified, was based on a provision of electronic surveillance law, known as "pen register, trap and trace," that was written to allow law enforcement officers to obtain the phone numbers of incoming and outgoing calls from a single telephone line.

When the NSA aims for foreign targets whose communications cross U.S. infrastructure, it expects to sweep in some American content "incidentally" or "inadvertently," which are terms of art in regulations governing the NSA. Contact chaining, because it extends to the contacts of contacts of targets, inevitably collects even more American data.

Current NSA director Keith B. Alexander and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. have resolutely refused to offer an estimate of the number of Americans whose calls or e-mails have thus made their way into content databases such as NUCLEON.

The agency and its advocates maintain that its protection of that data is subject to rigorous controls and oversight by Congress and courts. For the public, it comes down to a question of unverifiable trust.

"The constraints that I operate under are much more remarkable than the powers that I enjoy," said the senior intelligence official who declined to be named.

When asked why the NSA could not release an unclassified copy of its "minimization procedures," which are supposed to strip accidentally collected records of their identifying details, the official suggested a reporter submit a freedom-of-information request.

As for bulk collection of Internet metadata, the question that triggered the crisis of 2004, another official said the NSA is no longer doing it. When pressed on that question, he said he was speaking only of collections under authority of the surveillance court.

"I'm not going to say we're not collecting any Internet metadata," he added. "We're not using this program and these kinds of accesses to collect Internet metadata in bulk."

Julie Tate and Ellen Nakashima contributed to this report.

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U.S. surveillance architecture includes collection of revealing Internet, phone metadata

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On March 12, 2004, acting attorney general James B. Comey and the Justice Department's top leadership reached the brink of resignation over electronic surveillance orders that they believed to be illegal. President George W. Bush backed down, halting secret foreign-intelligence-gathering operations that had crossed into domestic terrain.

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- Snowden was charged with theft, “unauthorized communication of national defense information” and “willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person. The last two charges were brought under the 1917 Espionage Act.
- Officials from President Obama on down have said they welcome the opportunity to explain the importance of the programs and the safeguards they say are built into them.
- Skeptics, including some in Congress, have said the NSA has assumed the power to soak up data about Americans that was never intended under the law.

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- Americans today – after a series of terrorist events at home and abroad – are more concerned that anti-terrorist programs don’t go far enough than they are about restrictions on civil liberties.
- Americans’ awareness and concerns over issues of privacy also extend beyond the kinds of surveillance programs revealed by Snowden and include how their information is treated by companies with which they do business.
- 52% of Americans described themselves as “very concerned” or “somewhat concerned” about government surveillance of Americans’ data and electronic communications, compared with 46% who described themselves as “not very concerned” or “not at all concerned” about the surveillance.
- hose who followed the news about the Snowden leaks and the ensuing debates were more anxious about privacy policy and their own privacy than those who did not.

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- Their aversion for a Snowden pardon comes from the Espionage Act and the dynamic between the government and media over the boundaries concerning the public’s “right to know.”
- Do all parties share responsibility that transcend legal interpretations to safeguard the nation’s security?

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- I would say the breaking point was seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress.  There’s no saving an intelligence community that believes it can lie to the public and the legislators who need to be able to trust it and regulate its actions.  Seeing that really meant for me that there was no going back.  Beyond that, it was the creeping realization that no one else was going to do this.  The public had a right to know about these programs.  The public had a right to know that which the government is doing in its name, and that which the government is doing against the public.

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- Trump has been far more libertarian and done more on foreign policy and civil liberties than has any recent president.
- The Patriot Act has been used to spy on Americans since 2001, and many parts of it should never have been passed and should not be allowed to continue.
- This past year, when some of the worst parts of the Patriot Act were up for renewal, President Trump stopped its renewal with a veto threat.
- He should pardon Edward Snowden for revealing the unconstitutional spying that was going on, even beyond what was envisioned from the Patriot Act.
- Snowden leaked information about unconstitutional spying and was motivated to do so after watching Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lie about it under oath. Clapper lied to Congress multiple times, along with participating in many unconstitutional endeavors, including spying on Americans and participating in the Russia Hoax.  He lied in 2013, and he lied again during the Russia probe.
- Contrary to the media narrative, Snowden was attempting to expose this type of anti-American behavior from the Deep State, not damage our security.

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- Allows law enforcement to use surveillance against more crimes of terror
- Allows federal agents to follow sophisticated terrorists trained to evade detection.
- Allows law enforcement to conduct investigations without tipping off terrorists.
- Allows federal agents to ask a court for an order to obtain business records in national security terrorism cases
-  The Patriot Act facilitated information sharing and cooperation among government agencies so that they can better "connect the dots."

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- Seven years after Snowden blew the whistle on the mass surveillance of Americans’ telephone records, an appeals court has found the program was unlawful – and that the US intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth.
- the US court of appeals for the ninth circuit said the warrantless telephone dragnet that secretly collected millions of Americans’ telephone records violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and may well have been unconstitutional.
- “I never imagined that I would live to see our courts condemn the NSA’s activities as unlawful and in the same ruling credit me for exposing them,” Snowden said in a message posted to Twitter.
- Up until when Snowden leaked the information, top intelligence officials publicly insisted the NSA never knowingly collected information on Americans at all. After the program’s exposure, US officials fell back on the argument that the spying had played a crucial role in fighting domestic extremism, citing in particular the case of four San Diego residents who were accused of providing aid to religious fanatics in Somalia.

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- To Snowden, the classified information he shared with the journalists exposed privacy abuses by government intelligence agencies. He saw himself as a whistleblower. But the U.S. government considered him a traitor in violation of the Espionage Act.
- "People look at me now and they think I'm this crazy guy, I'm this extremist or whatever. Some people have a misconception that [I] set out to burn down the NSA," but that's not what this was about. In many ways, 2013 wasn't about surveillance at all. What it was about was a violation of the Constitution."
- Snowden's 2013 revelations led to changes in the laws and standards governing American intelligence agencies and the practices of U.S. technology companies, which now encrypt much of their Web traffic for security.

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3) NSA surveillance exposed by Snowden was illegal, court rules seven years on

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3) NSA surveillance exposed by Snowden was illegal, court rules seven years on

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Seven years after the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the mass surveillance of Americans' telephone records, an appeals court has found the program was unlawful - and that the US intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth.

In a ruling handed down on Wednesday, the US court of appeals for the ninth circuit said the warrantless telephone dragnet that secretly collected millions of Americans' telephone records violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and may well have been unconstitutional.

Snowden, who fled to Russia in the aftermath of the 2013 disclosures and still faces US espionage charges, said on Twitter that the ruling was a vindication of his decision to go public with evidence of the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping operation.

"I never imagined that I would live to see our courts condemn the NSA's activities as unlawful and in the same ruling credit me for exposing them," Snowden said in a message posted to Twitter.

Evidence that the NSA was secretly building a vast database of US telephone records - the who, the how, the when and the where of millions of mobile calls - was the first and arguably the most explosive of the Snowden revelations published by the Guardian in 2013.

Up until that moment, top intelligence officials publicly insisted the NSA never knowingly collected information on Americans at all. After the program's exposure, US officials fell back on the argument that the spying had played a crucial role in fighting domestic extremism, citing in particular the case of four San Diego residents who were accused of providing aid to religious fanatics in Somalia.

US officials insisted that the four - Basaaly Saeed Moalin, Ahmed Nasir Taalil Mohamud, Mohamed Mohamud and Issa Doreh - were convicted in 2013 thanks to the NSA's telephone record spying, but the ninth circuit ruled on Wednesday that those claims were "inconsistent with the contents of the classified record".

The ruling will not affect the convictions of Moalin and his fellow defendants; the court ruled the illegal surveillance did not taint the evidence introduced at their trial. Nevertheless, watchdog groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, which helped bring the case to appeal, welcomed the judges' verdict on the NSA's spy program.

"Today's ruling is a victory for our privacy rights," the ACLU said in a statement, saying it "makes plain that the NSA's bulk collection of Americans' phone records violated the constitution".

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NSA surveillance exposed by Snowden was illegal, court rules seven years on

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Appeals court says intelligence leaders who defended dragnet - which was revealed by Snowden to the Guardian - were not telling the truth

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- Snowden was granted permanent residency in Russia on October 22nd
- He has been living in Russia since 2013 to escape prosecution in the US.
- Snowden said last year that he was willing to return to the US if he was guaranteed a fair trial.

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4) Edward Snowden granted permanent residency in Russia

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4) Edward Snowden granted permanent residency in Russia

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The former US security contractor Edward Snowden has been granted permanent residency in Russia, his lawyer said on Thursday.

Snowden, a former contractor with the National Security Agency, has been living in Russia since 2013 to escape prosecution in the US after leaking classified documents detailing government surveillance programs.

"Today, Snowden was handed a residency permit for an unlimited period of time," his Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena told Russia's state Tass news agency.

Kucherena told the Interfax news agency that the application was submitted in April, but because of the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown restrictions, it took immigration authorities more time to consider it.

Snowden was able to obtain permanent residency rights because of the changes in Russia's immigration laws made in 2019, the lawyer said.

Kucherena added that Snowden is not considering applying for Russian citizenship at the moment.

Snowden, who has kept a low profile in Russia and occasionally criticised Russian government policies on social media, said last year that he was willing to return to the US if he was guaranteed a fair trial.

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Edward Snowden granted permanent residency in Russia

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The former US security contractor Edward Snowden has been granted permanent residency in Russia, his lawyer said on Thursday. Snowden, a former contractor with the National Security Agency, has been living in Russia since 2013 to escape prosecution in the US after leaking classified documents detailing government surveillance programs. "Today, Snowden was handed a residency permit for an unlimited period of time," his Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena told Russia's state Tass news agency.

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- Computer programmer who worked as a subcontractor for the National Security Agency (NSA)
- Snowden collected top-secret documents regarding NSA domestic surveillance practices that he found disturbing and leaked them.
- Newspapers began printing the documents that he had leaked, many of them detailing the monitoring of American citizens.
- The U.S. has charged Snowden with violations of the Espionage Act, while many groups call him a hero.

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- When key provisions of the Patriot Act were up for reauthorization earlier this year, progressive Democrats led the charge to strip the law of language used to justify mass surveillance programs uncovered by Snowden.
- The federal government has charged Snowden with three felonies: one count of theft and two violations of the 1917 Espionage Act.
- Only one Democratic member of Congress has pushed Trump to pardon Snowden.
- Three Republican members of Congress and one Republican-turned-independent encouraged Trump on Dec. 12 to pardon Snowden.
- The absence of Democratic participation in the push to pardon Snowden is notable because it runs counter to the Democratic Party’s historic commitments.
- Glenn Greenwald accused Democrats of being more protective of national security leakers like Daniel Ellsberg who reveal classified information during Republican administrations than of Snowden, who acted while Barack Obama was president.

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Pew Research Center is a reliable source because it is non-partisan, and gets its data from surveys and studies that it conducts. In all of its articles, it provides the statistics as well as graphs and charts to better demonstrate the various trends or information. It also updates a lot of its surveys every few years to keep their data as accurate as possible. For instance it conducted a test to see how people from different political parties (democrats, republicans, and independents) feel towards civil liberties concerns over anti-terrorism programs in October of 2010, however, it conducted a second survey in 2013 and compared the results between the two. Pew Research is a good source because it is meant to be more of a fact-tank than anything else so it is unbiased.

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- A majority of Americans (56%) say that federal courts fail to provide adequate limits on the telephone and internet data the government is collecting as part of its anti-terrorism efforts.
- 70% believes that the government uses this data for purposes other than investigating terrorism.
- Despite the insistence by the president and other senior officials that only “metadata,” such as phone numbers and email addresses, is being collected, 63% think the government is also gathering information about the content of communications – with 27% believing the government has listened to or read their phone calls and emails.
- The national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted July 17-21 among 1,480 adults, finds that 50% approve of the government’s collection of telephone and internet data as part of anti-terrorism efforts, while 44% disapprove. These views are little changed from a month ago when 48% approved and 47% disapproved.
- Nationwide, there is more support for the government’s data-collection program among Democrats (57% approve) than among Republicans (44%), but both parties face significant internal divisions: 36% of Democrats disapprove of the program as do 50% of Republicans.
- Nearly identical percentages in both parties (45% of Democrats, 43% of Republicans) say that the news media should report information it obtains about the secret methods the government uses to fight terrorism, while 51% in each party say it should not.

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16) Few See Adequate Limits on NSA Surveillance Program

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16) Few See Adequate Limits on NSA Surveillance Program

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Pew Research Center - U.S. Politics & Policy

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Overview

A majority of Americans - 56% - say that federal courts fail to provide adequate limits on the telephone and internet data the government is collecting as part of its anti-terrorism efforts. An even larger percentage (70%) believes that the government uses this data for purposes other than investigating terrorism.

And despite the insistence by the president and other senior officials that only "metadata," such as phone numbers and email addresses, is being collected, 63% think the government is also gathering information about the content of communications - with 27% believing the government has listened to or read their phone calls and emails.

Nonetheless, the public's bottom line on government anti-terrorism surveillance is narrowly positive. The national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted July 17-21 among 1,480 adults, finds that 50% approve of the government's collection of telephone and internet data as part of anti-terrorism efforts, while 44% disapprove. These views are little changed from a month ago, when 48% approved and 47% disapproved.

The divisions in public opinion about the government's data-collection program were mirrored in a congressional vote this week on the issue. On July 24, the House of Representatives narrowly defeated an amendment to scale back the NSA's telephone data collection.

Nationwide, there is more support for the government's data-collection program among Democrats (57% approve) than among Republicans (44%), but both parties face significant internal divisions: 36% of Democrats disapprove of the program as do 50% of Republicans.

While views of the program itself are mixed, the debate has raised public concern about whether anti-terror programs are restricting civil liberties.

Overall, 47% say their greater concern about government anti-terrorism policies is that they have gone too far in restricting the average person's civil liberties, while 35% say they are more concerned that policies have not gone far enough to protect the country. This is the first time in Pew Research polling that more have expressed concern over civil liberties than protection from terrorism since the question was first asked in 2004.

As concern about civil liberties has grown, the issue now divides members of both parties. Roughly four-in-ten Republicans (43%) and Democrats (42%) say their greater concern over anti-terror policies is that they have gone too far in restricting civil liberties, up sharply from three years ago (25% and 33% in 2010, respectively).

Republicans and Democrats also express similar opinions about news coverage of secret government anti-terrorism programs: Nearly identical percentages in both parties (45% of Democrats, 43% of Republicans) say that the news media should report information it obtains about the secret methods the government uses to fight terrorism, while 51% in each party say it should not.

This marks a change in opinion among both parties since 2006, when Bush administration anti-terror surveillance programs faced scrutiny. In May 2006, a Gallup/USA Today poll found that most Democrats supported news reporting on secret anti-terror programs, while most Republicans said the press should not divulge this information.

Many Who Think Gov't Has Accessed Their Data Support the Program

The public's views of the government's anti-terrorism efforts are complex, and many who believe the reach of the government's data collection program is expansive still approve of the effort overall. In every case, however, those who view the government's data collection as far-reaching are less likely to approve of the program than those who do not.

People who believe the government is collecting what is actually being said in emails and phone calls are divided over the overall program: About as many approve (47%) as d isapprove (50%) of the government's collection of phone and internet data as part of anti-terrorism efforts despite the impression that it is not limited to metadata.

Even among those who believe their own communications have been read or listened to, 40% approve of the program, while 58% disapprove.

Of those who say the government is using data for purposes other than to investigate terrorism, 43% approve of the government's data collection; 53% disapprove. Among the small minority (22% of the public) that says the data is only being used to investigate terrorism, 71% approve while just 23% disapprove.

And those who say federal courts do not place adequate limits on the information the government can collect disapprove of the program by a 62%-36% margin. Conversely, those who say there are adequate limits approve of it, 75%-21%.

Some Suspect Political Motives in Use of Data

A broad majority of the public (70%) believes that the government also is using the data it collects through the NSA program for purposes other than to investigate terrorism. When those who express this view are asked an open-ended question about what other purposes the data is being used for, a range of responses are given, with many focusing on general concerns about government monitoring and spying.

About two-in-ten (19%) say the government is using this data to spy or "be nosy," and another 14% say it is being used for general purposes or monitoring.

But some say the government is collecting this data for political purposes: 13% say the government has a political agenda, while another 5% say it is being used for general profiling or targeting, to target interest and religious groups or for tax purposes.

Rising Concern over Civil Liberties

Nearly half of Americans (47%) say their greater concern about government anti-terrorism policies is that they have gone too far in restricting the average person's civil liberties; 35% say their greater concern is that they have not gone far enough to adequately protect the country. There has been a 15-point rise in the percentage saying their greater concern is civil liberties since Pew Research last asked the question in October 2010. This is the first time a plurality has expressed greater concern about civil liberties than security since the question was first asked in 2004.

The increase in concern about civil liberties has taken place across the board, with double-digit shifts in opinion among nearly all partisan and demographic groups. Republicans prioritized security over civil liberties by a 58%-25% margin in 2010. Today, Republicans are as likely to say their bigger concern is civil liberties (43%) as security (38%), a balance of opinion nearly identical to that among Democrats (42% civil liberties, 38% security).

While this change has been broad-based, the transformation among Tea Party Republicans stands out. Today, most Republican and Republican-leaning independent voters who agree with the Tea Party are more concerned that government programs are going too far in restricting civil liberties (55%). In October 2010, Tea Party Republican voters by about three-to-one (63% to 20%) said the programs did not go far enough in protecting the country.

Among Democrats and independents, increasing percentages also say their greater concern is that anti-terror policies have curbed civil liberties. About four-in-ten Democrats (42%) express this view, up from 33% three years ago. And the share of independents expressing greater concern over civil liberties has risen 17 points since 2010.

Those under the age of 30 stand out for their broad concern over civil liberties. By about two-to-one (60%-29%) young people say their bigger concern about the government's anti-ter rorism policies is that they have gone too far in restricting the average person's civil liberties rather than not going far enough to protect the country.

There is also a substantial gender gap: by a 51% to 29% margin men are more concerned that government policies have gone too far in restricting civil liberties. Women are divided, with 42% more worried about civil liberties and 40% more concerned that government policies haven't gone far enough to protect the country.

Modest Partisan Differences in Perceptions of Data Collection

Overall, Democrats approve of the government's data collection program by a 57%-36% margin, while Republicans (44% approve, 50% disapprove) and independents (47% approve, 48% disapprove) are more divided.

Republicans and independents also perceive the program as more far-reaching in scope and less limited. For example, 64% of Republicans and 67% of independents believe the government is collecting not only metadata but also what is being said in phone calls and emails; slightly fewer (58%) Democrats share this view.

However, these gaps in opinion are relatively modest, as half or more Democrats believe the program is not sufficiently limited by courts (51%), collects the content of communications (58%) and uses the data for purposes other than terrorism investigations (60%).

Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who agree with the Tea Party strongly disapprove of the NSA program. Overall, 62% of Tea Party Republicans disapprove of the government's data collection program, while just 34% approve. By contrast, Republicans and Republican leaners who do not agree with the Tea Party are divided in their views of the program (51% approve, 45% disapprove).

Tea Party Republicans also express far more concern about the scope of the program. For example, fully 87% of Tea Party Republicans believe the government uses the data it collects for purposes other than terrorism investigations. When asked what other purposes the data is used for, the top answer among Tea Party Republicans - volunteered by 32% - is that the data is used to pursue political objectives or to target political opponents.

The public is divided over whether the news media should report on information it obtains about the secret methods the government is using to fight terrorism. About half (47%) say that the media should report on the government's secret methods, while the same percentage says they should not; overall opinion on this question is little changed from May 2006.

Both Republicans and Democrats are split on this issue - 43% of Republicans and 45% of Democrats say the media should report on secret methods to fight terrorism, while 51% of both parties say that they should not.

In 2006, there were large partisan differences on this question. At that time, Democrats thought the media should report this information by a 59%-38% margin. Most Republicans (68%) thought the news media should not report on government anti-terrorism methods, while just 26% thought that they should.

The public's division of opinion on whether or not the media should report the government's anti-terror methods is informed by the fact that majorities agree both with two separate statements: that the government is too secretive and that media reports can harm anti-terror programs.

When asked if the media reports too much information that can harm the government's anti-terrorism programs, 53% of the public agrees with this statement, while 43% disagree. At the same time, most (56%) also agree that the government keeps too much information about its anti-terrorism programs secret from the public.

Comparable majorities of both Republicans and Democrats express concerns that the media reports too much information that can harm government anti-terrorism programs and that the government keeps too much information about anti-terrorism programs secret from the public.

Overall, 28% of respondents agree with both statements. Among this group slightly more (55%) say the media should not report on the government's secret anti-terrorism methods, while 41% say that they should.

Age and Views of Civil Liberties, Gov't Surveillance

As noted, young people are more likely than older people to express concern that the government's anti-terrorism policies go too far in restricting civil liberties.

And majorities of those under 30 (55%), as well those 30 to 49 (53%), say the news media should report on secret methods the government uses to fight terrorism. Older Americans are more opposed to the media covering secret anti-terror tactics.

Yet the large age differences about civil liberties, security and secrecy don't translate into an equally sizeable divide over the NSA surveillance program itself. About as many young people approve (46%) as disapprove (49%) of the government's data collection program. The age differences in overall opinions about the program are modest, with about half in older age groups approving of the program.

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Few See Adequate Limits on NSA Surveillance Program

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A majority of Americans - 56% - say that federal courts fail to provide adequate limits on the telephone and internet data the government is collecting as part of its anti-terrorism efforts. An even larger percentage (70%) believes that the government uses this data for purposes other than investigating terrorism.

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- A majority of Americans (56%) say the National Security Agency’s (NSA) program tracking the telephone records of millions of Americans is an acceptable way for the government to investigate terrorism, though a substantial minority (41%) say it is unacceptable.
- While the public is more evenly divided over the government’s monitoring of email and other online activities to prevent possible terrorism, these views are largely unchanged since 2002, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
- The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center and The Washington Post, conducted June 6-9 among 1,004 adults, finds no indications that last week’s revelations of the government’s collection of phone records and internet data have altered fundamental public views about the tradeoff between investigating possible terrorism and protecting personal privacy
- Currently 62% say it is more important for the federal government to investigate possible terrorist threats, even if that intrudes on personal privacy. Just 34% say it is more important for the government not to intrude on personal privacy, even if that limits its ability to investigate possible terrorist threats.

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15) Majority Views NSA Phone Tracking as Acceptable Anti-terror Tactic

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15) Majority Views NSA Phone Tracking as Acceptable Anti-terror Tactic

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Pew Research Center - U.S. Politics & Policy

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Overview

A majority of Americans - 56% - say the National Security Agency's (NSA) program tracking the telephone records of millions of Americans is an acceptable way for the government to investigate terrorism, though a substantial minority - 41% - say it is unacceptable. And while the public is more evenly divided over the government's monitoring of email and other online activities to prevent possible terrorism, these views are largely unchanged since 2002, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center and The Washington Post, conducted June 6-9 among 1,004 adults, finds no indications that last week's revelations of the government's collection of phone records and internet data have altered fundamental public views about the tradeoff between investigating possible terrorism and protecting personal privacy.

Currently 62% say it is more important for the federal government to investigate possible terrorist threats, even if that intrudes on personal privacy. Just 34% say it is more important for the government not to intrude on personal privacy, even if that limits its ability to investigate possible terrorist threats.

These opinions have changed little since an ABC News/Washington Post survey in January 2006. Currently, there are only modest partisan differences in these opinions: 69% of Democrats say it is more important for the government to investigate terrorist threats, even at the expense of personal privacy, as do 62% of Republicans and 59% of independents.

However, while six-in-ten or more in older age groups say it is more important to investigate terrorism even if it intrudes on privacy, young people are divided: 51% say investigating terrorism is more important while 45% say it is more important for the government not to intrude on personal privacy, even if that limits its ability to investigate possible threats.

The survey finds that while there are apparent differences between the NSA surveillance programs under the Bush and Obama administrations, overall public reactions to both incidents are similar. Currently, 56% say it is acceptable that the NSA "has been getting secret court orders to track telephone calls of millions of Americans in an effort to investigate terrorism."

In January 2006, a few weeks after initial new reports of the Bush administration's surveillance program, 51% said it was acceptable for the NSA to investigate "people suspected of involvement with terrorism by secretly listening in on telephone calls and reading e-mails between some people in the United States and other countries, without first getting court approval to do so."

However, Republicans and Democrats have had very different views of the two operations. Today, only about half of Republicans (52%) say it is acceptable for the NSA to obtain court orders to track phone call records of millions of Americans to investigate terrorism. In January 2006, fully 75% of Republicans said it was acceptable for the NSA to investigate suspected terrorists by listening in on phone calls and reading emails without court approval.

Democrats now view the NSA's phone surveillance as acceptable by 64% to 34%. In January 2006, by a similar margin (61% to 36%), Democrats said it was unacceptable for the NSA to scrutinize phone calls and emails of suspected terrorists.

Public Divided Over Internet Monitoring

The public is divided over the government's monitoring of internet activity in order to prevent possible terrorism: 45% say the government should be able to "monitor everyone's email and other online activities if officials say this might prevent future terrorist attacks." About as many (52%) say the government should not able to do this.

These views are little changed from a July 2002 Pew Research Center survey. At that time, 45% said the government should be able to monitor everyone's internet activity if the government said it would prevent future attacks; 47% said it should not.

Young Differ on Principle, but Less on Practice

Younger Americans are more likely than older age groups to prioritize protecting personal privacy over terrorism investigations. Among people ages 18-29, 45% say it is more important for the federal government NOT to intrude on personal privacy, even if that limits its ability to investigate possible terrorist threats. That view falls to 35% among those ages 30-49 and just 27% among those ages 50 and older.

There are smaller age differences when it comes to the specific policies in the news this week. When it comes to whether the NSA tracking of phone records is acceptable, nearly the same share of 18-to-29 year-olds (55%) say the program is acceptable as those ages 65 and older (61%). Younger Americans are as divided as the nation overall about whether the government should or should not monitor email and online activities in the interest of preventing terrorism.

One-in-Four Following NSA News 'Very Closely'

Roughly a quarter (27%) of Americans say they are following news about the government collecting Verizon phone records very closely. This is a relatively modest level of public interest. Only another 21% say they are following this fairly closely, while about half say they are following not too (17%) or not at all (35%) closely.

Interest in reports about the government tracking of e-mail and online activities is almost identical: 26% say they are following this story very closely, 33% not closely at all.

As with most news stories, interest is far higher among older Americans than the young: one-in-three (33%) Americans ages 50-and- older are following news about the government tracking phone records very closely. Among those ages 18-29, just 12% are following very closely, while 56% say they are not following closely at all.

Attention to these stories is higher among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents: 32% are following reports about the government tracking phone records very closely, compared with 24% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. The partisan gap in interest is almost identical when it comes to reports about government collecting email and other online information: 30% of Republicans and Republican-leaners are following very closely compared with 20% of Democrats and Democratic-leaners.

Overall, those who disagree with the government's data monitoring are following the reports somewhat more closely than those who support them. Among those who find the government's tracking of phone records to be unacceptable, 31% are following the story very closely, compared with 21% among those who say it is acceptable. Similarly with respect to reports about government monitoring of email and online activities, 28% of those who say this should not be done are following the news very closely, compared with 23% of those who approve of the practice.

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Majority Views NSA Phone Tracking as Acceptable Anti-terror Tactic

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A majority of Americans - 56% - say the National Security Agency's (NSA) program tracking the telephone records of millions of Americans is an acceptable way for the government to investigate terrorism, though a substantial minority - 41% - say it is unacceptable.

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- A majority of the public says that Edward Snowden should be criminally prosecuted.
- The new national survey, conducted June 12-16 by the Pew Research Center and USA TODAY among 1,512 adults, finds that 44% think that the release of classified information about the NSA program harms the public interest, while 49% say it serves the public interest.
- 54% of the public – including identical majorities of Republicans and Democrats (59% each) say the government should pursue a criminal case against the person responsible for leaking the classified information about the program.
- In December 2010, just 29% said the Wikileaks disclosures served the public interest while 53% said they harmed it. Today, about as many say the leak about the NSA surveillance program serves the public interest (49%) as harms it (44%).
- Young people, by 60% to 34%, think that the NSA leak serves the public interest. Americans 30 and older are divided (46% serves vs. 47% harms).

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13) Public Split over Impact of NSA Leak, But Most Want Snowden Prosecuted

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13) Public Split over Impact of NSA Leak, But Most Want Snowden Prosecuted

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Pew Research Center - U.S. Politics & Policy

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Overview

The public is divided over whether the leak of classified information about NSA phone and internet surveillance serves the public interest. But a majority says that former government contractor Edward Snowden should be criminally prosecuted.

The new national survey, conducted June 12-16 by the Pew Research Center and USA TODAY among 1,512 adults, finds that 44% think that the release of classified information about the NSA program harms the public interest, while 49% say it serves the public interest.

However, 54% of the public - including identical majorities of Republicans and Democrats (59% each) - say the government should pursue a criminal case against the person responsible for leaking the classified information about the program.

Young people, by 60% to 34%, think that the NSA leak serves the public interest. Americans 30 and older are divided (46% serves vs. 47% harms). And while those younger than 30 are divided over whether Snowden should be prosecuted, majorities in older age groups favor the government pursuing a criminal case against him. The survey finds that the public has a more positive opinion about the impact of the revelations of NSA communications surveillance on the public interest than it did about the release of a massive trove of classified material about U.S. diplomatic relations by the Wikileaks website two-and-half years ago.

In December 2010, just 29% said the Wikileaks disclosures served the public interest while 53% said they harmed it. Today, about as many say the leak about the NSA surveillance program serves the public interest (49%) as harms it (44%).

In terms of the impact of the NSA surveillance on personal privacy, about half of Americans (54%) say the U.S. government probably has collected data about their personal phone calls, emails and other online communications. More (63%) say that if they knew that the government had collected such information, they would feel like their privacy would have been violated.

Mixed Approval of NSA Program, But Most Say It Helped Prevent Terrorism

The public is divided over the NSA surveillance program itself. About as many approve (48%) as disapprove (47%) of the "government's collection of telephone and internet data as part of anti-terrorism efforts."

Yet a majority of Americans (53%) think the government's collection of telephone and internet data has helped prevent terrorist attacks, while 41% say it has not.

There are wider partisan differences in views of the program than about whether the leak of NSA surveillance serves the public interest, or whether Snowden should be criminally prosecuted. Nearly six-in-ten Democrats (58%) approve of the government's data collection efforts, compared with 45% of Republicans and 42% of independents. Democrats are also more likely than Republicans or independents to say the program has helped prevent terrorist attacks.

In a Pew Research Center/Washington Post survey released a week ago, more Democrats (64%) than Republicans (52%) said it was acceptable for the NSA to get "secret court orders to track telephone call records of millions of Americans in an effort to investigate terrorism." In that survey overall, 56% of the public said they considered the NSA phone tracking program acceptable.

Young People More Likely to Say NSA Leak Serves Public Interest

People under 30 are the only age group in which a clear majority (60%) says that the release of classified information about the NSA phone and email data collection program serves the public interest.

Those 30 to 64 are divided while people 65 and older think that the NSA disclosures harm the public interest (by 53% to 36%).

Young people are also the only age group that is divided over whether Snowden should be criminally prosecuted: 44% say he should be prosecuted while 50% say he should not. Among older age groups, more favor than oppose criminal prosecution.

People under 30 also are somewhat more skeptical about the NSA program's effectiveness. Just 43% of young people say the program has helped prevent attacks, compared with about half or more in older age groups.

Tea Party Republicans, Liberals Say NSA Leak Is in Public Interest

Tea Party Republicans are paying a great deal of attention to news about the NSA surveillance program and are highly critical of it. By more than two-to-one (65% to 29%) Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who agree with the Tea Party disapprove of the government collecting data as part of anti-terrorism efforts. By comparison, Republicans who do not express agreement with the Tea Party are divided (50% approve, 46% disapprove).

On the question of whether the leaked information serves the public interest, there are significant divides within both parties' political bases. In the GOP, Tea Party Republicans are more likely than their more moderate counterparts to see the release of the classified information as serving the public interest. Within the Democratic Party, more liberals than moderates and conservatives view the leaks as a good thing.

The same gaps exist when it comes to whether to prosecute Edward Snowden. There is substantially less support for pursuing a case against the leaker among Tea Party Republicans and liberal Democrats than there is among moderate segments of the party bases.

Most Think Gov't Has Probably Collected Their Data

A majority of Americans (54%) think the U.S. government has collected data about their phone or online communications; 39% say it has probably not.

When asked how they would feel if they knew that the federal government had collected data about their phone and internet activity, 63% say they would feel that their personal privacy has been violated.

Men are more likely than women to think the government has collected their personal data (58% vs. 49%). Two-thirds of blacks (66%) believe this, compared to about half of whites (51%) and Hispanics (50%).

However, there are only modest age and partisan differences in people's opinions about whether the government has probably accessed their personal data. About half (52%) of Republicans and Democrats say the government has probably collected their own data, as do 54% of independents.

Yet there are sharper partisan divisions about how people would feel if they knew the U.S. government had collected data about their personal phone and internet activity. Fully 69% of independents and 68% of Republicans would consider this a violation of their personal privacy, compared with 53% of Democrats.

Nearly two-thirds (65%) of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who agree with the Tea Party say the government probably has collected data about their own personal calls and online communications; just 49% of non-Tea Party Republicans say the government has probably accessed their personal information. Tea Party Republicans (78%) also are more likely than non-Tea Party Republicans (64%) to say they would feel their privacy had been violated if they knew the government had collected their personal information.

Overall, the share of the public who say they would feel their personal privacy had been violated is little changed from 2006, when a similar Gallup/USA Today question asked about telephone companies providing people's records to the federal government (63% today vs. 57% then).

But there has been a large partisan shift in these opinions. When asked about the Bush-era program in 2006, 77% of Democrats said they would feel their privacy had been violated, compared with just 28% of Republicans. Today, only about half of Democrats (53%) say they would feel their privacy has been violated if they knew the government had collected their personal data. By contrast, the percentage of Republicans who feel their privacy would be violated has more than doubled (from 28% to 68%).

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Public Split over Impact of NSA Leak, But Most Want Snowden Prosecuted

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The public is divided over whether the leak of classified information about NSA phone and internet surveillance serves the public interest. But a majority says that former government contractor Edward Snowden should be criminally prosecuted.

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- Was Edward Snowden a hero, whistleblower, or traitor?
- How much surveillance does the government have on U.S. citizens and how much should it be allowed to have?

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The pew research center conducted a new national survey that found that overall approval of the program had declined since the story first broke based on Edward Snowden’s leaked information.
Post-Snowden 40% approve of the government’s collection of telephone and internet data as part of anti-terrorism efforts, while 53% disapprove. Pre-Snowden more Americans approved (50%) than disapproved (44%) of the program.
- 45% say it has served the public interest while 43% say it harmed it.
- 56% majority wants to see the government pursue a criminal case against Snowden, while 32% oppose this.

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14) Obama’s NSA Speech Has Little Impact on Skeptical Public

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14) Obama’s NSA Speech Has Little Impact on Skeptical Public

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Pew Research Center - U.S. Politics & Policy

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President Obama's speech on Friday outlining changes to the National Security Agency's collection of telephone and internet data did not register widely with the public. Half say they have heard nothing at all about his proposed changes to the NSA, and another 41% say they heard only a little bit. Even among those heard about Obama's speech, few think the changes will improve privacy protections, or make it more difficult for the government to fight terrorism.

The new national survey by the Pew Research Center and USA TODAY, conducted Jan. 15-19 among 1,504 adults, finds that overall approval of the program has declined since last summer, when the story first broke based on Edward Snowden's leaked information.

Today, 40% approve of the government's collection of telephone and internet data as part of anti-terrorism efforts, while 53% disapprove. In July, more Americans approved (50%) than disapproved (44%) of the program.

In addition, nearly half (48%) say there are not adequate limits on what telephone and internet data the government can collect; fewer (41%) say there are adequate limits on the government's data collection. About four-in-ten Republicans (39%) and independents (38%) - and about half of Democrats (48%) - think there are adequate limits on the information that the government can collect.

Reflecting the limited impact of Obama's address, overall approval of the program and opinions about whether adequate safeguards are in place were no different in three nights of interviewing conducted after the speech (Jan. 17-19) than during the two nights of interviewing conducted prior to the address (Jan. 15-16).

Overall, the public is divided about whether Edward Snowden's leak of classified information, which brought the program to light, has served or harmed the public interest: 45% say it has served the public interest while 43% say it harmed it. Nonetheless, a 56% majority wants to see the government pursue a criminal case against Snowden, while 32% oppose this. This is little changed from June, shortly after Snowden's first leaks of information about the program.

Democrats Divided over Surveillance Program

Democrats remain more supportive of the NSA surveillance program than Republicans, though support is down across party lines. Today, Democrats are divided (46% approve, 48% disapprove) in their view of the program. Last June, they approved by a 20-point margin (58% vs. 38%).

Republicans now disapprove of the program by a 56% to 37% margin. Approval is down eight points among Republicans from 45% last June. There continues to be a substantial divide within the Republican base: Republicans and Republican leaners who agree with the Tea Party are overwhelmingly opposed to the NSA program, while those who do not identify with the Tea Party are more divided.

The decline in approval of the NSA surveillance program spans most demographic groups, though the drop in support is particularly evident among minority groups. Last June, 60% of both blacks and Hispanics approved of the government's surveillance program. That has fallen to 43% among blacks and 40% among Hispanics today. Among whites, 39% approve of the program today, little changed from 44% in June.

NSA Changes Have Little Impact

Obama's proposed changes to the NSA's data collection program did not register widely with the public. Just 49% say they heard about the proposed changes, with little difference across partisan groups.

Among those that did hear about the proposals, large majorities of Republicans (86%) and independents (78%) say these changes will not make much difference when it comes to protecting people's privacy. Among Democrats who have heard of the changes, 56% say they won't make much difference.

There is little concern that the changes to the NSA's surveillance activities will hurt the government's ability to fight terrorism. Overall, 79% of those who have heard about the proposals say they won't make much difference in the government's ability to fight terrorism; this view is shared by 85% of independents, 77% of Democrats and 75% of Republicans.

Prosecute Snowden, But Public Split on Impact of Leak

The public is split on whether Edward Snowden's leaks served the public interest, with 45% saying they did and 43% saying the leaks harmed public interest. But by 56% to 32%, most think that the government should pursue a criminal case against Snowden. These opinions are largely unchanged from last June, when Snowden first disclosed classified information to news organizations.

There is a large age gap when it comes to views of the NSA revelations and the public interest. More adults ages 50 and older believe that the leaks harmed the public interest (49%) than served the public interest (37%). Among adults 18-29, sentiment is reversed, with 57% saying Snowden served the public interest and 35% saying he harmed it.

There are no significant differences on this issue by party, as both Republicans and Democrats are divided.

Those who attended college are more likely than those who didn't to see the leaks as serving the public interest. About half of college graduates (49%) and those with some college experience (51%) say this, compared with 38% of those with no more than a high school degree.

While most of the public wants the government to pursue a criminal case against Snowden, young people offer the least support for his prosecution.

Those younger than 30 are divided, with 42% wanting a criminal case against Snowden and 42% saying the government should not pursue one. Support for prosecution is much higher among those 50 and older, who think the government should pursue a case by more than two-to-one.

Both Democrats (62%-27%) and Republicans (54%-28%) think the government should pursue a criminal case. About half of independents (51%) want a criminal case against Snowden, while four-in-ten (39%) say the government should not pursue one.

Fully 70% of those who approve of the government's surveillance program favor Snowden's prosecution. Those who disapprove of the program are divided: 45% say the government should pursue a criminal case against Snowden while 43% are opposed.

Obama Job Rating

Barack Obama's job approval rating has shown little change from last month. In the current survey, 49% disapprove of how he is handling his job and 43% approve. Obama's ratings had steadily declined from May to November of last year, before he regained some ground in December.

In the last month, there have been no significant changes in partisan approval. About three-quarters of Democrats (77%) approve and 17% disapprove; among Republicans, 12% approve and 84% disapprove. Independents, on balance, continue to view his job performance negatively - 37% approve and 53% disapprove.

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Obama's NSA Speech Has Little Impact on Skeptical Public

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President Obama's speech on Friday outlining changes to the National Security Agency's collection of telephone and internet data did not register widely with the public. Half say they have heard nothing at all about his proposed changes to the NSA, and another 41% say they heard only a little bit.

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17) The state of privacy in post-Snowden America

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17) The state of privacy in post-Snowden America

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After the June 2013 leaks by government contractor Edward Snowden about National Security Agency surveillance of Americans' online and phone communications, Pew Research Center began an in-depth exploration of people's views and behaviors related to privacy. Our report earlier this year about how Americans think about privacy and sharing personal information was a capstone of this two-and-a-half-year effort that examined how people viewed not only government surveillance but also commercial transactions involving the capture of personal information.

Soon after the Snowden leaks surfaced, Americans were almost equally divided in a 2014 survey over whether the leaks had served or harmed the public interest. And, at that time, a majority of Americans believed Snowden should be prosecuted. (A campaign, led by the American Civil Liberties Union, has since been organized to seek a pardon for him.)

However much the Snowden revelations may have contributed to the debate over privacy versus anti-terrorism efforts, Americans today - after a series of terrorist events at home and abroad - are more concerned that anti-terrorist programs don't go far enough than they are about restrictions on civil liberties. An August-September survey found that Americans held that view by a 49% to 33% margin.

In this digital age, Americans' awareness and concerns over issues of privacy also extend beyond the kinds of surveillance programs revealed by Snowden and include how their information is treated by companies with which they do business. Our research also has explored that subject in depth. Here are some of the important findings that emerged from this work:

1 Overall, Americans are divided when it comes to their level of concern about surveillance programs. In a survey conducted November 2014-January 2015, 52% described themselves as "very concerned" or "somewhat concerned" about government surveillance of Americans' data and electronic communications, compared with 46% who described themselves as "not very concerned" or "not at all concerned" about the surveillance. Those who followed the news about the Snowden leaks and the ensuing debates were more anxious about privacy policy and their own privacy than those who did not.

The public generally believes it is acceptable for the government to monitor many others, including foreign citizens, foreign leaders and American leaders. Yet 57% said it was unacceptable for the government to monitor the communications of U.S. citizens. At the same time, majorities supported monitoring of those particular individuals who use words like "explosives" and "automatic weapons" in their search engine queries (65% said that) and those who visit anti-American websites (67% said that).

2 Some 86% of internet users have taken steps online to remove or mask their digital footprints, but many say they would like to do more or are unaware of tools they could use. The actions that users have taken range from clearing cookies to encrypting their email, from avoiding using their name to using virtual networks that mask their internet protocol (IP) address. And 55% of internet users have taken steps to avoid observation by specific people, organizations or the government. Many say the purpose of their attempted anonymity is to avoid "social surveillance" by friends and colleagues, rather than the government or law enforcement.

At the same time, many express a desire to take additional steps to protect their data online. When asked if they feel as though their own efforts to protect the privacy of their personal information online are sufficient, 61% say they feel they "would like to do more," while 37% say they "already do enough." Even after news broke about the NSA surveillance programs, few Americans took sophisticated steps to protect their data, and many were unaware of robust actions they could take to hide their online activities. Some 34% of those who said they were aware of the NSA surveillance programs in a July 2013 survey (30% of all adults) had taken at least one step to hide or shield their information from the government. But most of those actions were simple steps, such as changing their privacy settings on social media or avoiding certain apps, rather than tools like email encryption programs, "don't track" plug-ins for browsers or anonymity software.

3 Americans express a consistent lack of confidence about the security of everyday communication channels and the organizations that control them - particularly when it comes to the use of online tools. And they exhibited a deep lack of faith in organizations of all kinds, public or private, in protecting the personal information they collect. Only tiny minorities say they are "very confident" that the records maintained by these organizations will remain private and secure.

4 Some 74% say it is "very important" to them that they be in control of who can get information about them, and 65% say it is "very important" to them to control what information is collected about them. Personal control matters a lot to people. If the traditional American view of privacy is the "right to be left alone," the 21st-century refinement of that idea is the right to control their identity and information. They understand that modern life won't allow them to be "left alone" and untracked, but they do want to have a say in how their personal information is used.

5 Many Americans struggle to understand the nature and scope of data collected about them. When it comes to their own role in managing their personal information, most adults are not sure what information is being collected or how it is being used.

While half of those surveyed said they felt confident they understood how their information would be used, 47% said they were not, and many of these people felt confused, discouraged or impatient when trying to make decisions about sharing their personal information with companies.

6 Fully 91% of adults agree or strongly agree that consumers have lost control of how personal information is collected and used by companies. Half of internet users said they worry about the amount of information available about them online, and most said they knew about key pieces of their personal information that could be found on the internet. Only 9% say they feel they have "a lot" of control over how much information is collected about them and how it is used. Indeed, experts we canvassed about the future of privacy argued that privacy was no longer a "condition" of American life. Rather, they asserted that it was becoming a commodity to be purchased.

7 For most Americans who are making decisions about sharing their information in return for a product, service or other benefit, the context and conditions of the transactions matter. When considering this basic digital era trade-off, many are in an "It depends" frame of mind. Risk-benefit calculations that enter people's minds during the decision process include the terms of the deal; the circumstances of their lives; whether they consider the company or organization involved to be trustworthy; what happens to their data after they are collected, especially if the data are made available to third parties; and how long the data will be retained.

For instance, 54% of Americans consider it an acceptable trade-off to have surveillance cameras in the office in order to improve workplace security and help reduce thefts. But a scenario involving the use of a "smart thermostat" in people's homes that might save energy costs in return for insight about people's comings and goings was deemed "acceptable" by only 27% of adults. It was seen as "not acceptable" by 55%.

Indeed, most Americans assign different degrees of value to different pieces of information. Social Security numbers are ranked as the most sensitive information, while people's purchasing habits ranked lowest as something they felt was very sensitive.

8 Young adults generally are more focused than their elders when it comes to online privacy. Younger adults are more likely to know that personal information about them is available online and to have experienced privacy problems. By the same token, our surveys have found that those ages 18 to 29 are more likely than older adults to say they have paid attention to privacy issues, tried to protect their privacy and reported some kind of harm because of privacy problems. They are more likely to have limited the amount of personal information available about them online, changed privacy settings, deleted unwanted comments on social media, removed their name from photos in which they were tagged, and taken steps to mask their identities while online. It is also true that younger adults are more likely to have shared personal information online.

9 A majority of the U.S. public believes changes in law could make a difference in protecting privacy - especially when it comes to policies on retention of their data. In the midst of all this uncertainty and angst about privacy, Americans are generally in favor of additional legal protections against abuses of their data. Some 68% of internet users believe current laws are not good enough in protecting people's privacy online; and 64% believe the government should do more to regulate advertisers. Most expect at least some limits on retention policies by data collections. And a majority (64%) support more regulation of advertisers and the way they handle personal information. When asked about the data the government collects as part of anti-terrorism efforts, 65% of Americans say there are not adequate limits on "what telephone and internet data the government can collect."

10Many technology experts predict that few individuals will have the energy or resources to protect themselves from "dataveillance" in the coming years and that privacy protection will likely become a luxury good. Another prediction from 2,511 experts we canvassed was that the prospect of achieving bygone notions of privacy will become more remote as the Internet of Things takes hold and people's homes, workplaces and the objects around them will "tattle" on them. A more hopeful theme about privacy's future was sounded by experts who argued that new technology tools would become available that would give consumers power to negotiate on equal footing with corporations about information sharing and also allow them to work around governments trying to collect data.
Note: This is an update of a post originally published Jan. 20, 2016.

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After the June 2013 leaks by government contractor Edward Snowden about National Security Agency surveillance of Americans' online and phone communications, Pew Research Center began an in-depth exploration of people's views and behaviors related to privacy.

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- Bush signed a presidential order in 2002 allowing the National Security Agency to monitor without a warrant the international (and sometimes domestic) telephone calls and e-mail messages of hundreds or thousands of citizens and legal residents inside the United States.
- President Bush admitted that he had authorized it, but argued that he had the authority to do so.

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Click here for more on NSA Surveillance
What if it emerged that the President of the United States was flagrantly violating the Constitution and a law passed by the Congress to protect Americans against abuses by a super-secret spy agency? What if, instead of apologizing, he said, in essence, "I have the power to do that, because I say I can." That frightening scenario is exactly what we are now witnessing in the case of the warrantless NSA spying ordered by President Bush that was reported December 16, 2005 by the New York Times.

According to the Times, Bush signed a presidential order in 2002 allowing the National Security Agency to monitor without a warrant the international (and sometimes domestic) telephone calls and e-mail messages of hundreds or thousands of citizens and legal residents inside the United States. The program eventually came to include some purely internal controls - but no requirement that warrants be obtained from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as the 4th Amendment to the Constitution and the foreign intelligence surveillance laws require.

In other words, no independent review or judicial oversight.

That kind of surveillance is illegal. Period.

The day after this shocking abuse of power became public, President Bush admitted that he had authorized it, but argued that he had the authority to do so. But the law governing government eavesdropping on American citizens is well-established and crystal clear. President Bush's claim that he is not bound by that law is simply astounding. It is a Presidential power grab that poses a challenge in the deepest sense to the integrity of the American system of government - the separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches, the concept of checks and balances on executive power, the notion that the president is subject to the law like everyone else, and the general respect for the "rule of law" on which our democratic system depends.
The ACLU ran the following advertisement in the December 29, 2005 edition of The New York Times:
Flouting a long history

The tensions between the need for intelligence agencies to protect the nation and the danger that they would become a domestic spy agency have been explicitly and repeatedly fought out in American history. The National Security Act of 1947 contained a specific ban on intelligence operatives from operating domestically. In the 1970s, America learned about the extensive domestic political spying carried out by the FBI, the military, the CIA, and the NSA, and Congress passed new laws to prevent a repeat of those abuses. Surveillance laws were debated and modified under presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr. and Clinton.

But, President Bush would sweep aside this entire body of democratically debated and painstakingly crafted restrictions on domestic surveillance by the executive branch with his extraordinary assertion that he can simply ignore this law because he is the Commander-in-Chief. In a December 17 radio address, for example, Bush asserted that the spying was "fully consistent with my constitutional responsibilities and authorities." But his constitutional duty is to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed" (Article II, Section 3); the law here clearly establishes well-defined procedures for eavesdropping on U.S. persons, and the fact is, Bush ordered that those procedures not be followed.

Government eavesdropping on Americans is an extremely serious matter; the ability to intrude on the private realm is a tremendous power that can be used to monitor, embarass, control, disgrace, or ruin an individual. Because it is so invasive, the technology of wiretapping has been subject to carefully crafted statutory controls almost since it was invented. Ignoring those controls and wiretapping without a court order is a crime that carries a significant prison sentence (in fact, criminal violations of the wiretap statute were among the articles of impeachment that were drafted against President Nixon shortly before his resignation).

Clearly Illegal

Unfortunately, although the law in this matter is crystal clear, many Americans, faced with President Bush's bold assertions of "inherent" authority for these actions, will not know what to believe. There are only 5 points they need to understand:

Point #1: Electronic surveillance by the Government is strictly limited by the Constitution and Federal Law

The law on surveillance begins with the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which states clearly that Americans' privacy may not be invaded without a warrant based on probable cause.

United States Constitution
Fourth Amendment

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. (emphasis added)

The US Supreme Court (US v. Katz 389 US 347) has made it clear that this core privacy protection does cover government eavesdropping. As a result, all electronic surveillance by the government in the United States is illegal, unless it falls under one of a small number of precise exceptions specifically carved out in the law.

United States Code Title 50, Chapter 36, Subchapter 1
Section 1809. Criminal sanctions

(a) Prohibited activities
A person is guilty of an offense if he intentionally-

(1) engages in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute

In other words, the NSA can only spy where it is explicitly granted permission to do so by statute. Citizens concerned about surveillance do not have to answer the question, "what law restricts the NSA's spying?" Rather, the government is required to supply an answer to the question "what law permits the NSA to spy?"

Point #2: There are only three laws that permit the government to spy

There are only three laws that authorize any exceptions to the ban on electronic eavesdropping by the government. Congress has explicitly stated that these three laws are the exclusive means by which domestic electronic surveillance can be carried out (18 USC, Section 2511(2)(f)). They are:

Title III and ECPA. Title III and the Electronic Commnunications Privacy Act make up the statutes that govern criminal wiretaps in the United States.

FISA. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is the law that governs eavesdropping on agents of "foreign powers" within the United States, including suspected foreign terrorists.

Point #3: The Bush-NSA spying was not authorized by any of these laws

Title III and ECPA govern domestic criminal wiretaps and are not relevant to the NSA's spying. FISA is the law under which the NSA should have operated. It authorizes the government to conduct surveillance in certain situations without meeting all of the requirements of the Fourth Amendment that apply under criminal law, but requires that an independent Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court oversee that surveillance to make sure that Americans who have no ties to foreign terrorist organizations or other "foreign powers" are not spied upon.

FISA was significantly loosened by the Patriot Act (which, for example, allowed it to be used for some criminal investigations), and parts of it now stand in clear violation of the Constitution's Fourth Amendment in the view of the ACLU and many others. However, even the post-Patriot Act version of FISA does not authorize the president to conduct warrantless eavesdropping on U.S. citizens or permanent legal residents in the U.S. without an order from the FISA Court. Yet it is that very court order requirement - imposed to protect innocent Americans - that the President has ignored.

In fact, one member of the FISA Court, Judge James Roberston, has apparently resigned from the court in protest of President Bush's secret authorization of this program. And the New York Times reported that the court's chief judge complained about the program when she was (belatedly) notified of it, and refused to allow information gathered under the program to be used as the basis for FISA wiretap orders.

Point #4: Congress's post-9/11 use-of-force resolution does not legitimize the Bush-NSA spying

Congress after 9/11 approved an Authorization to Use Military Force against those responsible for the attacks in order to authorize the president to conduct foreign military operations such as the invasion of Afghanistan.

But that resolution contains no language changing, overriding or repealing any laws passed by Congress. Congress does not repeal legislation through hints and innuendos, and the Authorization to Use Military Force does not authorize the president to violate the law against surveillance without a warrant any more than it authorizes him to carry out an armed robbery or seize control of Citibank in order to pay for operations against terrorists. In fact, when President Truman tried to seize control of steel mills that were gripped by strikes in 1952, the Supreme Court decisively rejected his authority to make such a seizure, even in the face of arguments that the strike would interfere with the supply of weapons and ammunition to American troops then under fire on the battlefields of the Korean War.

U.S. Supreme Court
YOUNGSTOWN CO. v. SAWYER, 343 U.S. 579 (1952)

"The order cannot properly be sustained as an exercise of the President's military power as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. . . .

"Nor can the seizure order be sustained because of the several constitutional provisions that grant executive power to the President. . . . The Constitution limits his functions in the lawmaking process to the recommending of laws he thinks wise and the vetoing of laws he thinks bad. And the Constitution is neither silent nor equivocal about who shall make laws which the President is to execute. . . .

"The Founders of this Nation entrusted the lawmaking power to the Congress alone in both good and bad times."

The Supreme Court also rejected similar assertions of inherent executive power by Richard Nixon.

In fact, FISA contains explicit language describing the president's powers "during time of war" and provides that "the President, through the Attorney General, may authorize electronic surveillance without a court order under this title to acquire foreign intelligence information for a period not to exceed fifteen days following a declaration of war by the Congress." 50 U.S.C. § 1811 (emphasis added). So even if we accept the argument that the use-of-force resolution places us on a war footing, warrantless surveillance would have been legal for only 15 days after the resolution was passed on September 18, 2001.

Point #5: The need for quick action does not justify an end-run around the courts
The FISA law takes account of the need for emergency surveillance, and the need for quick action cannot be used as a rationale for going outside the law. FISA allows wiretapping without a court order in an emergency; the court must simply be notified within 72 hours. The government is aware of this emergency power and has used it repeatedly. In addition, the Foreign Intelligence court is physically located in the Justice Department building, and the FISA law requires that at least two of the FISA judges reside in the Washington, DC area, for precisely the reason that rapid action is sometimes needed.

If President Bush still for some reason finds these provisions to be inadequate, he must take his case to Congress and ask for the law to be changed, not simply ignore it.

The president is bound by the rule of law

President Bush's claim that he has "inherent authority" as Commander-in-Chief to use our spy agencies to eavesdrop on Americans is astonishing, and such spying is clearly illegal. It must be halted immediately, and its origins must be thoroughly investigated by Congress and by a special counsel. (See letter from the ACLU to Attorney General Gonzales calling for a special counsel).

Given the extensive (indeed, excessive) surveillance powers that the government already possesses, the Administration's blatantly illegal use of warrantless surveillance raises an important question: why? One possibility, raised by the New York Times in a Dec. 24, 2005 story (" Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report"), is that the NSA is relying on assistance from several unnamed telecommunications companies to "trace and analyze large volumes of communications" and is "much larger than the White House has acknowledged."

This, as security expert Bruce Schneier has noted, suggests the Bush Administration has developed a "a whole new surveillance paradigm" - exploiting the NSA's well known capabilities to spy on individuals not one at a time, as FISA permits, but to run communications en masse through computers in the search for suspicious individuals or patterns. This "new paradigm" may well be connected to the NSA program sometimes known as "Echelon," which carries out just that kind of mass collection of communications (see www.nsawatch.org). This "wholesale" surveillance, as Schneier calls it, would constitute an illegal invasion of Americans' privacy on a scale that has never before been seen. (See Schneier, " NSA and Bush's Illegal Eavesdropping," Salon.com)

According to the Times, several telecommunications companies provided the NSA with direct access to streams of communications over their networks. In other words, the NSA appears to have direct access to a large volume of Americans' communications - with not simply the assent, but the cooperation of the companies handling those communications.

We do not know from the report which companies are involved or precisely how or what the NSA can access. But this revelation raises questions about both the legal authority of the NSA to request and receive this data, and whether these companies may have violated either the Federal laws protecting these communications or their own stated privacy polices (which may, for example, provide that they will only turn over their customers' data with their consent or in response to a proper order).

Regardless of the scale of this spying, we are facing a historic moment: the President of the United States has claimed a sweeping wartime power to brush aside the clear limits on his power set by our Constitution and laws - a chilling assertion of presidential power that has not been seen since Richard Nixon.

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Click here for more on NSA SurveillanceWhat if it emerged that the President of the United States was flagrantly violating the Constitution and a law passed by the Congress to protect Americans against abuses by a super-secret spy agency? What if, instead of apologizing, he said, in essence, "I have the power to do that, because I say I can."

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Federal prosecutors have filed a criminal complaint against Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked a trove of documents about top-secret surveillance programs, and the United States has asked Hong Kong to detain him on a provisional arrest warrant, according to U.S. officials.

Snowden was charged with theft, "unauthorized communication of national defense information" and "willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person," according to the complaint. The last two charges were brought under the 1917 Espionage Act.

The complaint, which initially was sealed, was filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, a jurisdiction where Snowden's former employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, is headquartered and a district with a long track record of prosecuting cases with national security implications. After The Washington Post reported the charges, senior administration officials said late Friday that the Justice Department was barraged with calls from lawmakers and reporters and decided to unseal the criminal complaint.

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.

Snowden flew to Hong Kong last month after leaving his job at an NSA facility in Hawaii with a collection of highly classified documents that he acquired while working at the agency as a systems analyst.

The documents, some of which have been published in The Post and Britain's Guardian newspaper, detailed some of the most-
secret surveillance operations undertaken by the United States and Britain, as well as classified legal memos and court orders underpinning the programs in the United States.

The 30-year-old intelligence analyst revealed himself June 9 as the leaker in an interview with the Guardian and said he went to Hong Kong because it provided the "cultural and legal framework to allow me to work without being immediately detained."

Snowden subsequently disappeared from public view; it is thought that he is still in the Chinese territory. Hong Kong has its own legislative and legal systems but ultimately answers to Beijing, under the "one country, two systems" arrangement.

The leaks have sparked national and international debates about the secret powers of the NSA to infringe on the privacy of Americans and foreigners. Officials from President Obama on down have said they welcome the opportunity to explain the importance of the programs and the safeguards they say are built into them. Skeptics, including some in Congress, have said the NSA has assumed the power to soak up data about Americans that was never intended under the law.

There was never any doubt that the Justice Department would seek to prosecute Snowden for one of the most significant national security leaks in the country's history. The Obama administration has shown a particular propensity to go after leakers and has launched more investigations than any previous administration. This White House is responsible for bringing six of the nine total indictments ever brought under the 1917 Espionage Act. Snowden will be the seventh individual when he is formally indicted.

Justice Department officials had already said that a criminal investigation of Snowden was underway and was being run out of the FBI's Washington field office in conjunction with lawyers from the department's National Security Division.

By filing a criminal complaint, prosecutors have a legal basis to make the detention request of the authorities in Hong Kong. Prosecutors now have 60 days to file an indictment, probably under seal, and can then move to have Snowden extradited from Hong Kong for trial in the United States.

Snowden, however, can fight the extradition effort in the courts in Hong Kong. Any battle is likely to reach Hong Kong's highest court and could last many months, lawyers in the United States and Hong Kong said.

The United States has an extradition treaty with Hong Kong, and U.S. officials said cooperation with the Chinese territory, which enjoys some autonomy from Beijing, has been good in previous cases.

The treaty, however, has an exception for political offenses, and espionage has traditionally been treated as a political offense. Snowden's defense team in Hong Kong is likely to invoke part of the extradition treaty with the United States, which states that suspects will not be turned over to face criminal trial for offenses of a "political character."

Typically in such cases, Hong Kong's chief executive must first decide whether to issue a warrant for the accused's arrest. But the extradition treaty also says that in exceptional cases a provisional warrant can be issued by a Hong Kong judge without the chief executive's approval. The judge must give the chief executive notice, however, that he has issued the warrant.

A spokesperson at the office of Hong Kong chief executive Leung Chun-ying said there was no information on Snowden's case. The police department did not respond to calls or e-mails. At the police station for Central District in Hong Kong Island, police officers on duty said they had not heard anything about Snowden.

If Snowden is arrested, he would appear before a judge. Bail would be unlikely and, instead, Snowden would be sent to the Lai Chi Kok maximum-security facility in Kowloon, a short drive from the high-end Mira Hotel, where he is last known to have stayed in Hong Kong.

Snowden could also remain in Hong Kong if the Chinese government decides that it is not in the defense or foreign policy interests of the government in Beijing to have him sent back to the United States for trial.

Another option would be for Snowden to apply for asylum with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, which handles most asylum requests in Hong Kong. The UNHCR was closed Saturday morning and did not immediately respond to requests for comment via e-mail and phone. The asylum application process can take months or even years because Hong Kong has a severe backlog. The Hong Kong government cannot formally surrender individuals until their asylum applications have been processed.

Snowden also could attempt to reach another jurisdiction and seek asylum there before the authorities in Hong Kong act.

Jia Lynn Yang in Hong Kong contributed to this report.

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Federal prosecutors have filed a criminal complaint against Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked a trove of documents about top-secret surveillance programs, and the United States has asked Hong Kong to detain him on a provisional arrest warrant, according to U.S. officials.

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As this term ends, and I look back on the record of Donald Trump as president, one thing stands out: he has been far more libertarian and done more on foreign policy and civil liberties than has any recent president.

First, as in my previous profession as a physician, my first yardstick for a politician is to "do no harm." President Trump has started no new wars, has kept us out of conflicts like Syria, and has been actively attempting to wind down the wars he inherited in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He also inherited another reaction to the war on terror - the so-called Patriot Act. The Patriot Act has been used to spy on Americans since 2001, and many parts of it should never have been passed and should not be allowed to continue. This past year, when some of the worst parts of the Patriot Act were up for renewal, President Trump stopped its renewal with a veto threat.

The Deep State and the War Caucus were in a frenzy when that happened - "How will we survive? The terrorists will surely overrun us!" When I filibustered the renewal of the Patriot Act, a senior Republican senator warned me, "We'll have no way to fight the terrorists!" I replied, "We could try something novel and simply follow the Constitution!"

Well, we've done that for months now, and all is well. We should keep doing that in the new administration.

Lovers of liberty have President Trump to thank for his foreign policy and opposition to Patriot Act renewal - but there is one more important symbolic step he needs to take now. He should pardon Edward Snowden for revealing the unconstitutional spying that was going on, even beyond what was envisioned from the Patriot Act.

Itis important to remember that Snowden leaked information about unconstitutional spying and was motivated to do so after watching Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lie about it under oath. Clapper lied to Congress multiple times, along with participating in many unconstitutional endeavors, including spying on Americans and participating in the Russia Hoax. He lied in 2013, and he lied again during the Russia probe.

He and others like him in the Deep State abused power and shredded the Constitution. And Snowden exposed them.

Contrary to the media narrative, Snowden was attempting to expose this type of anti-American behavior from the Deep State, not damage our security. In his own words, he said,

I would say the breaking point was seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress. There's no saving an intelligence community that believes it can lie to the public and the legislators who need to be able to trust it and regulate its actions. Seeing that really meant for me that there was no going back. Beyond that, it was the creeping realization that no one else was going to do this. The public had a right to know about these programs. The public had a right to know that which the government is doing in its name, and that which the government is doing against the public.

Barack Obama, trying to protect the Deep State liars, tried to imprison Snowden for being a "traitor." Joe Biden - an ally of the Deep State and self-proclaimed author of parts of the Patriot Act - would continue the wrongful prosecution.

But Snowden is no traitor. He is a true whistleblower who was trying to expose those like Clapper who used Deep State powers in secret to go after Americans. Snowden should be pardoned. And this president, who distinguished himself as an opponent of the Deep State on issues of war and spying on Americans, should be the one to do it.

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Rand Paul: President Trump Should Pardon Edward Snowden

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As this term ends, and I look back on the record of Donald Trump as president, one thing stands out: he has been far more libertarian and done more on foreign policy and civil liberties than has any recent president. First, as in my previous profession as a physician, my first yardstick for a politician is to "do no harm."

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For context of article

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Delayed Notice Search Warrants: A Vital and Time-Honored Tool for Fighting Crime

Field Report on the PATRIOT Act

The Department of Justice's first priority is to prevent future terrorist attacks. Since its passage following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Patriot Act has played a key part - and often the leading role - in a number of successful operations to protect innocent Americans from the deadly plans of terrorists dedicated to destroying America and our way of life. While the results have been important, in passing the Patriot Act, Congress provided for only modest, incremental changes in the law. Congress simply took existing legal principles and retrofitted them to preserve the lives and liberty of the American people from the challenges posed by a global terrorist network.

The USA PATRIOT Act: Preserving Life and Liberty
(Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism)

Congress enacted the Patriot Act by overwhelming, bipartisan margins, arming law enforcement with new tools to detect and prevent terrorism: The USA Patriot Act was passed nearly unanimously by the Senate 98-1, and 357-66 in the House, with the support of members from across the political spectrum.

The Act Improves Our Counter-Terrorism Efforts in Several Significant Ways:

1. The Patriot Act allows investigators to use the tools that were already available to investigate organized crime and drug trafficking. Many of the tools the Act provides to law enforcement to fight terrorism have been used for decades to fight organized crime and drug dealers, and have been reviewed and approved by the courts. As Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) explained during the floor debate about the Act, "the FBI could get a wiretap to investigate the mafia, but they could not get one to investigate terrorists. To put it bluntly, that was crazy! What's good for the mob should be good for terrorists." (Cong. Rec., 10/25/01)

Allows law enforcement to use surveillance against more crimes of terror.Before the Patriot Act, courts could permit law enforcement to conduct electronic surveillance to investigate many ordinary, non-terrorism crimes, such as drug crimes, mail fraud, and passport fraud. Agents also could obtain wiretaps to investigate some, but not all, of the crimes that terrorists often commit. The Act enabled investigators to gather information when looking into the full range of terrorism-related crimes, including: chemical-weapons offenses, the use of weapons of mass destruction, killing Americans abroad, and terrorism financing.

Allows federal agents to follow sophisticated terrorists trained to evade detection. For years, law enforcement has been able to use "roving wiretaps" to investigate ordinary crimes, including drug offenses and racketeering. A roving wiretap can be authorized by a federal judge to apply to a particular suspect, rather than a particular phone or communications device. Because international terrorists are sophisticated and trained to thwart surveillance by rapidly changing locations and communication devices such as cell phones, the Act authorized agents to seek court permission to use the same techniques in national security investigations to track terrorists.

Allows federal agents to ask a court for an order to obtain business records in national security terrorism cases. Examining business records often provides the key that investigators are looking for to solve a wide range of crimes. Investigators might seek select records from hardware stores or chemical plants, for example, to find out who bought materials to make a bomb, or bank records to see who's sending money to terrorists. Law enforcement authorities have always been able to obtain business records in criminal cases through grand jury subpoenas, and continue to do so in national security cases where appropriate. These records were sought in criminal cases such as the investigation of the Zodiac gunman, where police suspected the gunman was inspired by a Scottish occult poet, and wanted to learn who had checked the poet's books out of the library. In national security cases where use of the grand jury process was not appropriate, investigators previously had limited tools at their disposal to obtain certain business records. Under the Patriot Act, the government can now ask a federal court (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court), if needed to aid an investigation, to order production of the same type of records available through grand jury subpoenas. This federal court, however, can issue these orders only after the government demonstrates the records concerned are sought for an authorized investigation to obtain foreign intelligence information not concerning a U.S. person or to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, provided that such investigation of a U.S. person is not conducted solely on the basis of activities protected by the First Amendment.

2. The Patriot Act facilitated information sharing and cooperation among government agencies so that they can better "connect the dots." The Act removed the major legal barriers that prevented the law enforcement, intelligence, and national defense communities from talking and coordinating their work to protect the American people and our national security. The government's prevention efforts should not be restricted by boxes on an organizational chart. Now police officers, FBI agents, federal prosecutors and intelligence officials can protect our communities by "connecting the dots" to uncover terrorist plots before they are completed. As Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) said about the Patriot Act, "we simply cannot prevail in the battle against terrorism if the right hand of our government has no idea what the left hand is doing" (Press release, 10/26/01)

Prosecutors and investigators used information shared pursuant to section 218 in investigating the defendants in the so-called "Virginia Jihad" case. This prosecution involved members of the Dar al-Arqam Islamic Center, who trained for jihad in Northern Virginia by participating in paintball and paramilitary training, including eight individuals who traveled to terrorist training camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan between 1999 and 2001. These individuals are associates of a violent Islamic extremist group known as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET), which operates in Pakistan and Kashmir, and that has ties to the al Qaeda terrorist network. As the result of an investigation that included the use of information obtained through FISA, prosecutors were able to bring charges against these individuals. Six of the defendants have pleaded guilty, and three were convicted in March 2004 of charges including conspiracy to levy war against the United States and conspiracy to provide material support to the Taliban. These nine defendants received sentences ranging from a prison term of four years to life imprisonment.

3. The Patriot Act updated the law to reflect new technologies and new threats. The Act brought the law up to date with current technology, so we no longer have to fight a digital-age battle with antique weapons-legal authorities leftover from the era of rotary telephones. When investigating the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, for example, law enforcement used one of the Act's new authorities to use high-tech means to identify and locate some of the killers.

Allows victims of computer hacking to request law enforcement assistance in monitoring the "trespassers" on their computers. This change made the law technology-neutral; it placed electronic trespassers on the same footing as physical trespassers. Now, hacking victims can seek law enforcement assistance to combat hackers, just as burglary victims have been able to invite officers into their homes to catch burglars.

4. The Patriot Act increased the penalties for those who commit terrorist crimes. Americans are threatened as much by the terrorist who pays for a bomb as by the one who pushes the button. That's why the Patriot Act imposed tough new penalties on those who commit and support terrorist operations, both at home and abroad. In particular, the Act:

Eliminates the statutes of limitations for certain terrorism crimes and lengthens them for other terrorist crimes.

The government's success in preventing another catastrophic attack on the American homeland since September 11, 2001, would have been much more difficult, if not impossible, without the USA Patriot Act. The authorities Congress provided have substantially enhanced our ability to prevent, investigate, and prosecute acts of terror.

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Delayed Notice Search Warrants: A Vital and Time-Honored Tool for Fighting Crime Field Report on the PATRIOT Act The Department of Justice's first priority is to prevent future terrorist attacks.

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- Despite support from some Democrats and high-profile human rights groups, it is unlikely that the Biden Administration will pardon Snowden
- "Snowden is no traitor. He is a true whistleblower who was trying to expose those like (former Director of National Intelligence James) Clapper who used Deep State powers in secret to go after Americans. Snowden should be pardoned," argued Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky
-  Paul said Trump should pardon Snowden for "revealing the unconstitutional spying that was going on, even beyond what was envisioned from the Patriot Act."

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- Several Republican lawmakers have been encouraging the president to offer clemency to Snowden
- Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Matt Gaetz have talked to Trump about a Snowden pardon
- The just-pardoned Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser, also made a public appeal for Snowden’s clemency.
- Their pitch: Snowden has been unfairly persecuted after revealing the mendacity of people like James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence.
- The argument may play well with Trump, who also sees himself as a victim of the American intelligence services and despises Clapper.
- “So I think what Snowden did was a service to the American people and he ought to be pardoned.” - Sen Rand Paul

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- President Trump granted clemency to 20 people
- two people who were convicted of crimes as part of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
- four military contractors convicted of killing 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007
- shows how the president is using the power of his office to undo the work of the Russia probe that shadowed much of his term, undercut major cases that took on political corruption and wave away the crimes of Americans convicted of participating in the massacre during the Iraq War.

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- Who is Edward Snowden?
- What did he do?
- What happened to him because of it?
- How did people react?
- Who agrees with his actions/who disagrees?
- Is he a whistleblower or a traitor?
- How much surveillance does the government have on U.S. citizens and how much should it be allowed to have?
- What is the current law on how much the government can hide from us?
- Who are the people Trump is granting clemency?
- Have they done worse things?
- If they are being pardoned, why isn't Snowden?
- Why do people want him to be pardoned/why don't people want him to be pardoned?

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10) Trump grants clemency to war criminals and people involved in Russian probe

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10) Trump grants clemency to war criminals and people involved in Russian probe

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President Trump on Dec. 22 granted clemency to 20 people, including some convicted of crimes during the 2016 Russian election interference investigation. (Reuters)

President Trump granted clemency on Tuesday to 20 people, including three former Republican members of Congress and two people who were convicted of crimes as part of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

He also pardoned four military contractors convicted of killing 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007, and extended clemency to several people convicted of drug offenses, including some who had already benefited from initial commutations.

The pre-Christmas pardons and commutations came as the president has been exploring how to reward friends and allies in his waning days in the White House, with more acts of clemency expected to come.

Trump has told advisers he wants to be liberal with pardons and plans to sign more before leaving office on Jan. 20, according to people familiar with his views. The White House has been flooded with requests from dozens of members of Congress, one senior administration official said, as well as lawyers, lobbyists, allies and other supporters of the president.

At the end of most presidencies, one of the last things a president does is issue pardons. Will President Trump attempt to pardon himself and his family? (The Washington Post)

The first batch released Tuesday night shows how the president is using the power of his office to undo the work of the Russia probe that shadowed much of his term, undercut major cases that took on political corruption and wave away the crimes of Americans convicted of participating in a massacre during the Iraq War.

Democrats accused Trump of abusing his pardon power to reward allies and undermine the rule of law.

"If you lie to cover up for the President, you get a pardon," House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) said in a statement. "If you are a corrupt politician who endorsed Trump, you get a pardon. If you murder civilians while at war, you get a pardon."

Trump gave a full pardon to George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to his 2016 campaign who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI during its Russia investigation.

Papadopoulos in 2017 agreed he had misled the FBI about his interactions with a London-based professor who claimed Russia had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton, Trump's Democratic rival, in the form of thousands of emails. In 2018, Papadopoulos served his 14-day prison sentence.

But the onetime energy adviser, 33, later actively sought a pardon to expunge his record and bolster his post-conviction claims that he had been unfairly targeted by the U.S. authorities, including special counsel Robert S. Mueller III - allegations that echoed Trump's own grievances against the Mueller probe.

Shortly after the pardon was announced, Papadopoulos tweeted, "Thank you, Mr. President!!! This means the world to me and my family!"

Trump also pardoned Alex van der Zwaan, a Dutch lawyer who had worked with Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort in work related to Ukraine and pleaded guilty in 2018 to lying to Mueller's team. He served 30 days in prison before returning to his home in London.

The president has now used his powers to personally intervene and grant clemency in multiple cases that Mueller brought against his former advisers. In November, he pardoned former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his dealings with a Russian diplomat, though he later sought to withdraw that plea. In July, the president commuted the sentence of his longtime friend, Roger Stone, who was convicted of seeking to impede a congressional investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and sentenced to 40 months in prison.

The Papadopoulos pardon serves as a particularly pointed jab by the president at the Russia investigation, which shadowed the first half of his term in office. It was a July 2016 tip about the young campaign volunteer that first led the FBI to open an investigation into whether members of the Trump campaign were conspiring with the Kremlin.

"Today's pardon helps correct the wrong that Mueller's team inflicted on so many people," the White House said in a statement Tuesday night.

There are approximately 14,000 people in line for pardons and commutations. For years, criminal justice advocates have criticized Republican and Democratic administrations alike for backlogs that left thousands of rehabilitated people seeking mercy to languish in prison.

Trump has moved even more slowly than his predecessors, who acted on hundreds or thousands of petitions by the end of four years in office. And rather than consult with the Justice Department's pardon attorney for recommendations, Trump has routinely subverted the process and largely favored political allies and those who are well-connected for clemency.

The White House statement about Trump's actions Tuesday noted who had recommended each pardon and commutation, a group that included Republican members of Congress and other Trump allies. Of the 20 people who received clemency, only seven had active petitions for pardons or clemency listed in online Justice Department records.

Trump's decision to pardon elected officials who had admitted wrongdoing - as well as prominent business executives who had engaged in fraud and other white-collar crimes - flies in the face of his onetime campaign promise to "drain the swamp" in American political and corporate life.

Among those pardoned were three former Republican congressmen, each of them convicted of federal offenses during the Trump administration. Two had been early and avid supporters of Trump's campaign.

Former congressman Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.) - who prosecutors alleged used hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign funds to pay for family vacations and theater tickets, and even to facilitate extramarital affairs - had been facing an 11-month federal prison sentence. He pleaded guilty in 2019 to misusing campaign funds. Hunter notably won reelection while under federal indictment, only to later admit wrongdoing and resign.

Former congressman Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) had been serving a 26-month sentence for an insider-trading scheme and lying to the FBI. He, too, had pleaded guilty in the case.

Collins and Hunter were among Trump's first congressional supporters and the investigations into their activities had long rankled the president, who would castigate his attorney general at the time, Jeff Sessions, for allowing the cases to move forward, according to White House officials and Trump advisers. Trump used to speak regularly to Collins.

Former congressman Steve Stockman (R-Tex.) was about two years into a 10-year sentence, having been convicted in 2018 of conspiring to take hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations that were meant for charity and voter education.

Among those who had signed a petition seeking mercy for Stockman was attorney Sidney Powell, who has been pushing Trump's false allegations that his election loss came as a result of fraud.

Trump also pardoned a Republican member of the Utah House of Representatives, Phil Lyman. Lyman was sentenced to spend 10 days in jail for his role in a 2014 all-terrain vehicle demonstration that was intended to protest federal land management practices. He has insisted he was the victim of selective prosecution, and his case had been championed by other Utah Republicans.

The four private security contractors Trump pardoned - Nicholas Slatten, Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard - all worked for the now infamous Blackwater Worldwide security company, founded by Trump supporter Erik Prince.

Trump has long viewed Prince as an ally, and mused about giving him more government contracts during his presidency, according to White House officials and Trump advisers.

The September 2007 shooting in which the Blackwater contractors were involved left 14 dead and 17 wounded and set off a diplomatic crisis on oversight of American security contractors during one of the deadliest periods in the Iraq War.

Slatten had been sentenced to life in prison; Slough and Liberty to 15 years; and Heard to 12 years and seven months.

Trump also granted pardons to two former Border Patrol agents whose sentences for shooting a suspected drug smuggler fleeing their custody had been previously commuted.

According to the White House and news accounts from the time, the agents - Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean - were working near El Paso when they shot the suspected smuggler, Osvaldo Aldrete Dávila, as he tried to get away from them.

Compean was sentenced to 12 years in prison and Ramos to 11 years. President George W. Bush had commuted their sentences.

Trump extended pardons and commutations to several people who have been active in criminal justice reform or whose causes were championed by others in that field.

But most of the drug offenders who received executive mercy had already benefited from having their sentences lifted. In February, Trump had commuted the sentences of Crystal Munoz, Tynice Nichole Hall and Judith Negron; on Tuesday he wiped away their terms of supervised release. Weldon Angelos was released early after federal court action; Trump gave him a full pardon.

A statement from the White House indicated that four men and women who received clemency had been recommended by Alice Johnson, the woman whose own prison sentence after a drug conviction was commuted by Trump in 2018 following lobbying by the celebrity Kim Kardashian.

Johnson later received a full pardon after speaking at the 2020 Republican National Convention and has been speaking with Trump and senior White House advisers in recent weeks, aides said.

In recent months, Johnson has given the president and senior White House advisers names of people to consider for clemency, eschewing the traditional process.

In a statement Tuesday night, Johnson called Angelos "an incredible advocate for criminal justice reform."

"We worked together tirelessly to help others gain their freedom," she said. "Now to see his life fully restored is truly a blessing - just in time for Christmas! I'm so happy for him and thankful for this act of mercy."

Beth Reinhard contributed to this report.

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Trump grants clemency to 20 people, including three former GOP members of Congress and two men convicted in the Russia probe

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President Trump granted clemency on Tuesday to 20 people, including three former Republican members of Congress and two people who were convicted of crimes as part of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

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21) Edward Snowden doesn't deserve clemency

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21) Edward Snowden doesn't deserve clemency

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No one will ever accuse President Trump of being overly careful in his exercise of his pardon power.

So it makes sense that advocates of Edward Snowden, the man responsible for the most damaging classified leak in US history, are mounting a last-minute push to get the president who pardoned Sheriff Joe and Roger Stone to issue his most outrageous and indefensible pardon yet.

It's a transpartisan alliance. Glenn Greenwald, Snowden's journalistic partner and foremost advocate, has, of course, been banging the drum. Rose McGowan has urged Trump to be "punk as f - - -" and pardon Snowden in defiance of "DC Cult Leaders a k a politicians" who "hate the truth."

Renegade Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard is on board, as are libertarian Trump loyalists Rand Paul and Matt Gaetz.

As Trump's presidency winds down and his clout on Capitol Hill diminishes, his sweeping power to grant clemency will be even more alluring to him, and he said over the summer that he's considering a Snowden pardon.

If the pardon can be sold to Trump as a way to stick it to the Deep State on his way out the door, anything is possible. Why go to the trouble of firing CIA Director Gina Haspel or FBI Director Christopher Wray if he can signal his contempt for their ilk by bringing a bête noire of the US national-security apparatus in from the cold with a stroke of his pen?

Working for a National Security Agency contractor, Snowden stole massive amounts of classified material and began sharing it with journalists in 2013. When the Justice Department filed criminal charges, he fled to Russia, which kindly provided him asylum and then permanent residency.

Snowden is a self-styled whistleblower. He says he was motivated by his constitutional qualms about an NSA bulk-data-collection program and his disgust with official deceptions about the program.

None of this holds up. If Snowden wanted to be a genuine whistleblower, he could have pursued concerns about the NSA program through lawful avenues, instead of fleeing the country and purloining so many documents that authorities still can't be sure how much he stole.

The Snowden disclosures were much more wide-ranging than the NSA program, in fact so wide-ranging that it's almost impossible to keep track.

As Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith has asked, why did Snowden's devotion to the Constitution require him to disclose details of how we spy on other countries, how we cooperate with Sweden and Norway to spy on Russia, or an NSA program called MasterMind to respond to cyberattacks?

None of these programs or actions raises any constitutional issues whatsoever. Exposing them makes sense only as sheer nihilism (i.e., Snowden was in a position to steal the information, so why not take it and disclose it?) or as a calculated act of hostility to US national-security policy as such.

Snowden's defenders say not to worry, Snowden and the journalists reporting on his documents have been careful not to disclose anything needlessly damaging to America and its allies.

But there is no reason that the responsibility for protecting sensitive information involving no crimes or government misconduct should, via Snowden's theft, have been transferred from US officials to assorted reporters and editors.

It's also naive to believe that Snowden was allowed to make a home in Vladimir Putin's Russia without the government exploiting his trove of secrets.

The president's pardon power is plenary, but that doesn't mean it should be wielded with no standards whatsoever. Traditionally, the Justice Department looks for contrition when reviewing possible exercises of clemency.

Not only does Snowden exhibit none, we don't even know the full scope of his offense, and he remains a fugitive through the good offices of an enemy of the United States.

Surely, Trump will be bombarded with bad ideas in the final days of his presidency, but pardoning Edward Snowden has to rank among the worst.
Twitter: @RichLowry

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No, Edward Snowden doesn't remotely deserve a pardon from President Trump

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No one will ever accuse President Trump of being overly careful in his exercise of his pardon power. So it makes sense that advocates of Edward Snowden, the man responsible for the most damaging classified leak in US history, are mounting a last-minute push to get the president who pardoned Sheriff Joe and Roger Stone to issue his most outrageous and indefensible pardon yet.

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As his Trump's presidency winds down and his clout on Capitol Hill diminishes, his sweeping power to grant clemency will be even more alluring to him, and he said over the summer that he's considering a Snowden pardon. "There are a lot of people," per Trump, "that think he's not being treated unfairly."

If pardoning Snowden can be sold to Trump as a way to stick it to the Deep State on his way out the door, anything is possible. Why go to the trouble of firing CIA Director Gina Haspel or FBI Director Christopher Wray if he can signal his contempt for their ilk by bringing a bête noir of the U.S. national-security apparatus in from the cold with a stroke of his pen?

Working for a National Security Agency contractor, Snowden stole massive amounts of classified material and began sharing it with journalists in 2013. When the Justice Department filed criminal charges, he fled to Hong Kong (he was there after leaving Hawaii, where he'd been doing his NSA work) for Russia, which kindly provided him asylum and then permanent residency.

Snowden is a self-styled whistleblower. He says he was motivated by his constitutional qualms about an NSA bulk data collection program and his disgust with official deceptions about the program (rather than dancing around a question about the program in congressional testimony, then-National Intelligence Director James Clapper frankly lied about it).

None of this holds up under scrutiny. If Snowden wanted to be a genuine whistleblower, he could have pursued concerns about the NSA program through lawful avenues, instead of fleeing the country and purloining so many documents that authorities still can't be sure how much he stole.

The stream of leaks has been seemingly unending. In 2018, five years after the Snowden disclosures began, one U.S. intelligence official said that in the past year there had been "more international, Snowden-related documents and breaches than ever."

The Snowden disclosures were much more wide-ranging than the NSA program, in fact so wide-ranging that it's almost impossible to keep track. As Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith asked, in a piece at the website Lawfare opposing a Snowden pardon by Barack Obama, why did Snowden's devotion to the Constitution require him to disclose details of how we spy on other countries, how we cooperate with Sweden and Norway to spy on Russia, or an NSA program called MasterMind to respond to cyberattacks?

None of these programs or actions raise any constitutional issues whatsoever. Exposing them makes sense only as sheer nihilism-i.e., Snowden was in a position to steal the information, so why not take it and disclose it?-or as a calculated act of hostility to U.S. national security policy as such.

Snowden's defenders say not to worry, Snowden and the journalists reporting on his documents have been careful not to disclose anything needlessly damaging to the U.S. and its allies. But there is no reason that the responsibility for protecting sensitive information involving no crimes or government misconduct should, via Snowden's theft, have effectively been transferred from U.S. officials to assorted reporters and editors.

It's also naive to believe that Snowden, with his treasure trove of secrets, was allowed to make a home in Vladimir Putin's Russia without the government exploiting his information. Indeed, a Russian official has said as much.

It was Snowden alone, his recklessness and his decision to run from the law, that put him in this compromising position.

The president's pardon power is plenary, but that doesn't mean it should be wielded with no standards whatsoever. Traditionally, the Justice Department looks for contrition when reviewing possible exercises of clemency.

Not only does Snowden exhibit none, we don't even know the full scope of his offense, and he remains a fugitive through the good offices of an enemy of the United States.

Surely, Trump will be bombarded with bad ideas as his presidency counts down, but pardoning Edward Snowden has to rank among the worst.

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Opinion | Mr. President, Don't Pardon Edward Snowden

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As his Trump's presidency winds down and his clout on Capitol Hill diminishes, his sweeping power to grant clemency will be even more alluring to him, and he said over the summer that he's considering a Snowden pardon. "There are a lot of people," per Trump, "that think he's not being treated unfairly."

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As a retired 34-year intelligence professional who made a career recruiting foreign spies and stealing secrets, my aversion to a pardon for Edward Snowden goes beyond the damage he wrought and is unrelated to hurt pride. It's rooted in the Espionage Act and the dynamic between the government and media over the boundaries concerning the public's "right to know." That is, do all parties share responsibility that transcend legal interpretations to safeguard the nation's security?

I'm hardly a legal scholar, but my work required judgment concerning risk versus gain against a gray and dynamic landscape in which the consequences routinely were life and death. I was charged with determining whether or not the value in any lawfully executed intelligence activity was worth the risk to our sources and the continuity of ongoing collection. Until retirement, my insight into the media was limited to failed efforts at monitoring my teenagers' social media activity while personally staying well clear of journalists. Still, I expected that reputable journalists calculated the public's right to know and First Amendment freedoms against the cost of exposure to the very people they intended to protect and inform.

Having read any number of compelling narratives, those arguing for unrestricted freedom to publish anything and everything that might come their way - such as the voluminous, unedited, original documents that Snowden stole - are undermined by their black-and-white take on the rather opaque world in which I long dwelled. Personally, while I do not condone the exposure of classified information, even under circumstances intended to highlight a wrong and hold our leaders accountable, I acknowledge it's likewise not a black-and-white matter and demands a two-way street with the media.

We live in an open society that requires confidence in a system of checks and balances through congressional oversight and the transparency legislated by the 2004 Intelligence Reform Act as a means to correct the systemic problems that contributed to 9/11's intelligence failure. Moreover, we trust that national security agencies support robust internal dissent and whistleblower channels with empowered inspectors general.

Over the past four years, though, it's hard to argue that elected representatives had the necessary insight and authority to hold the White House and the intelligence community accountable. Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell John Ratcliffe John Lee Ratcliffe Edward Snowden, the media, and the Espionage Act Overnight Defense: Top US general meets with Taliban | House panel launches probe into cyberattack | Army to issue face masks for soldiers in 2021 President Trump Donald Trump Trump acknowledges end of presidency after Congress certifies Biden win Congress affirms Biden win after rioters terrorize Capitol Third House lawmaker tests positive for COVID-19 this week MORE 's purge undermined the reliability of House panels launch probe into massive cyberattack that breached federal agencies MORE , hardly have Richard Grenell Edward Snowden, the media, and the Espionage Act Kentucky governor calls vandalism to McConnell's home 'unacceptable' Pelosi's, McConnell's homes vandalized as K stimulus check bill fails to pass MORE and his successor, facilitated transparency and confidence that the intelligence community was free from politicalization. And inspectors general and the faith of those prepared to come forward officially to report transgressions.

Only, Snowden was no whistleblower. In fact, according to the timeline offered in the 33-page House Permanent Select Committee (HPSCI)'s September 2016 damage assessment, there's no evidence Snowden made any effort to use the protected channels enabling either whistleblowing or dissent. Rather, after being reprimanded for inappropriate workplace behavior that reflected his professional history, Snowden began a premeditated effort to download as many damaging files as he could access as part of a plan to travel to Hong Kong, from where he aspired to reap financial gain and exact revenge for his hurt pride.

Moreover, the HPSCI report affirmed that "the vast majority of the documents he [Snowden] stole have nothing to do with programs impacting individual privacy interests - they instead pertain to military, defense and intelligence programs of great interest to America's adversaries." The report further notes that this "resulted in the loss of intelligence streams that saved American lives," and he "handed over secrets that protect American troops overseas and secrets that provide vital defenses against terrorists and nation-states."

The report's most extensive redactions concern the details of "foreign influence" and "damage," which suggest there's far more reason to question Snowden's noble narrative concerning his motives, the reality of what capabilities he actually sought to expose, and for whose benefit. Indeed, the report makes a convincing case that Snowden, like any number of foreign agents I personally recruited, acted purely out of a thirst for revenge, money and the desire to weaken his country's security.

Was Snowden's approach to journalists newsworthy? Regardless of his means and motivation, did he reveal an issue concerning civil liberties in the monitoring of Americans worth publishing at the risk of national security? I suggest it's a matter of boundaries. Journalists who facilitated the wholesale exposure of that which Snowden stole went well beyond what might have been necessary in highlighting the privacy issues and making their point. The level of detail these documents provided hostile state actors and terrorist organizations ended vital collection streams, compromised sensitive operations, and killed agents, leaving Americans vulnerable. Was there some alternative, happy medium?

The current reality, unfortunately, allows for ample blame on all sides. In our toxic political environment, intelligence agencies are muzzled from responsibly engaging the media, and journalists eschew civil responsibilities so as to scoop their competitors and gain notoriety. Occasionally, such sensational stories are reported without the media adequately vetting their sources, as recently acknowledged by the New York Times, whose source for its "Caliphate" podcast fabricated the details.

Journalists should be expected to behave responsibly enough to provide national security agencies fair and timely opportunities to explain the bigger picture and consequences concerning that which they as reporters can't be expected to know, nor the second and third order consequences to their revelations. In turn, the government can acknowledge the practical value of damage control by finding areas in which to compromise concerning that which is ultimately published.

The world I speak of is hardly utopian. In the not too distant past, I prepared talking points concerning sensitive operational activity used by national security leaders to engage journalists - reporters who, in several cases, appreciating the full consequences of their impending stories, agreed not to publish, to delay, or withhold certain details in their final copy, premature exposure of which would otherwise inflict irreparable damage or loss of life.

Like the world of intelligence itself, where one's understanding is formulated from the incomplete mosaic of available information, there's no "one size fits all" solution. The public is best served by the government's and media's resumed embrace of a calculus in which both assesses the risk versus gain, case by case. All concerned would do well to put first those whom they serve in order to coexist in the reality of a rather unforgiving world.

As a retired spy, I can attest to the fact that we all interpret "truth" through the rather frosted and often fragile glass windows from which we see the world. The bottom line should be protecting the American people.
Douglas London retired from the CIA's Clandestine Service in 2019 after a 34-year career, during which he served as a chief of station and held executive positions concerning counterterrorism, the Near East, South Asia and Iran, and a role related to cybersecurity. He is an adjunct associate professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service's Center for Security Studies and a nonresident fellow at the Middle East Institute. Follow him @douglaslondon5.

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Edward Snowden, the media, and the Espionage Act

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As a retired 34-year intelligence professional who made a career recruiting foreign spies and stealing secrets, my aversion to a pardon for Edward Snowden goes beyond the damage he wrought and is unrelated to hurt pride. It's rooted in the Espionage Act and the dynamic between the government and media over the boundaries concerning the public's "right to know."

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Who Is Edward Snowden?

Edward Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is a computer programmer who worked as a subcontractor for the National Security Agency (NSA). Snowden collected top-secret documents regarding NSA domestic surveillance practices that he found disturbing and leaked them. After he fled to Hong Kong, he met with journalists from The Guardian and filmmaker Laura Poitras. Newspapers began printing the documents that he had leaked, many of them detailing the monitoring of American citizens. The U.S. has charged Snowden with violations of the Espionage Act, while many groups call him a hero. Snowden has found asylum in Russia and continues to speak about his work. Citizenfour, a documentary by Laura Poitras about his story, won an Oscar in 2015. He is also the subject of Snowden, a 2016 biopic directed by Oliver Stone and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and has published a memoir, Permanent Record.

Family & Early Life

Snowden was born in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, on June 21, 1983. His mother works for the federal court in Baltimore (the family moved to Maryland during Snowden's youth) as chief deputy clerk for administration and information technology. Snowden's father, a former Coast Guard officer, later relocated to Pennsylvania and remarried.

Edward Snowden's Education

Edward Snowden dropped out of high school and studied computers at Anne Arundel Community College in Arnold, Maryland (from 1999 to 2001, and again from 2004 to 2005).

Between his stints at community college, Snowden spent four months from May to September 2004 in special-forces training in the Army Reserves, but he did not complete his training. Snowden told The Guardian that he was discharged from the Army after he "broke both his legs in a training accident." However, an unclassified report published on September 15, 2016 by the House Intelligence Committee refuted his claim, stating: "He claimed to have left Army basic training because of broken legs when in fact he washed out because of shin splints."

Photo: The Guardian via Getty Images

NSA Subcontractor

Snowden eventually landed a job as a security guard at the University of Maryland's Center for Advanced Study of Language. The institution had ties to the National Security Agency, and, by 2006, Snowden had taken an information-technology job at the Central Intelligence Agency.

In 2009, after being suspected of trying to break into classified files, he left to work for private contractors, among them Dell and Booz Allen Hamilton, a tech consulting firm. While at Dell, he worked as a subcontractor in an NSA office in Japan before being transferred to an office in Hawaii. After a short time, he moved from Dell to Booz Allen, another NSA subcontractor, and remained with the company for only three months.

Snowden's Leaks

During his years of IT work, Snowden had noticed the far reach of the NSA's everyday surveillance. While working for Booz Allen, Snowden began copying top-secret NSA documents, building a dossier on practices that he found invasive and disturbing. The documents contained vast information on the NSA's domestic surveillance practices.

After he had compiled a large store of documents, Snowden told his NSA supervisor that he needed a leave of absence for medical reasons, stating he had been diagnosed with epilepsy. On May 20, 2013, Snowden took a flight to Hong Kong, China, where he remained as he orchestrated a clandestine meeting with journalists from the U.K. publication The Guardian as well as filmmaker Laura Poitras.

On June 5, The Guardian released secret documents obtained from Snowden. In these documents, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court implemented an order that required Verizon to release information to the NSA on an "ongoing, daily basis" culled from its American customers' phone activities.

The following day, The Guardian and The Washington Post released Snowden's leaked information on PRISM, an NSA program that allows real-time information collection electronically. A flood of information followed, and both domestic and international debate ensued.

"I'm willing to sacrifice [my former life] because I can't in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building," Snowden said in interviews given from his Hong Kong hotel room.

The fallout from his disclosures continued to unfold over the next months, including a legal battle over the collection of phone data by the NSA. President Obama sought to calm fears over government spying in January 2014, ordering U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to review the country's surveillance programs.

Charges Against Edward Snowden

The U.S. government soon responded to Snowden's disclosures legally. On June 14, 2013, federal prosecutors charged Snowden with "theft of government Property," "unauthorized communication of national defense information" and "willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person."

The last two charges fall under the Espionage Act. Before President Barack Obama took office, the act had only been used for prosecutorial purposes three times since 1917. Since President Obama took office, the act had been invoked seven times as of June 2013.

While some decried Snowden as a traitor, others supported his cause. More than 100,000 people signed an online petition asking President Obama to pardon Snowden by late June 2013.

Exile in Russia

Snowden remained in hiding for slightly more than a month. He initially planned to relocate to Ecuador for asylum, but, upon making a stopover, he became stranded in a Russian airport for a month when his passport was annulled by the American government. The Russian government denied U.S. requests to extradite Snowden.

In July 2013, Snowden made headlines again when it was announced that he had been offered asylum in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia. Snowden soon made up his mind, expressing an interest in staying in Russia. One of his lawyers, Anatoly Kucherena, stated that Snowden would seek temporary asylum in Russia and possibly apply for citizenship later. Snowden thanked Russia for giving him asylum and said that "in the end the law is winning."

That October, Snowden stated that he no longer possessed any of the NSA files that he leaked to the press. He gave the materials to the journalists he met with in Hong Kong, but he didn't keep copies for himself. Snowden explained that "it wouldn't serve the public interest" for him to have brought the files to Russia, according to The New York Times. Around this time, Snowden's father, Lon, visited his son in Moscow and continued to publicly express support.

In November 2013, Snowden's request to the U.S. government for clemency was rejected.

Critic of Government Surveillance

In exile, Snowden has remained a polarizing figure and a critic of government surveillance. He made an appearance at the popular South by Southwest festival via teleconference in March 2014. Around this time, the U.S. military revealed that the information Snowden leaked may have caused billions of dollars in damage to its security structures.

In May 2014, Snowden gave a revealing interview with NBC News. He told Brian Williams that he was a trained spy who worked undercover as an operative for the CIA and NSA, an assertion denied by National Security Adviser Susan Rice in a CNN interview. Snowden explained that he viewed himself as a patriot, believing his actions had beneficial results. He stated that his leaking of information led to "a robust public debate" and "new protections in the United States and abroad for our rights to make sure they're no longer violated." He also expressed an interest in returning home to America.

Snowden appeared with Poitras and Greenwald via video-conference in February 2015. Earlier that month, Snowden spoke with students at Upper Canada College via video-conference. He told them that "the problem with mass surveillance is when you collect everything, you understand nothing." He also stated that government spying "fundamentally changes the balance of power between the citizen and the state."

On September 29, 2015, Snowden joined the social media platform Twitter, tweeting "Can you hear me now?" He had almost two million followers in a little over 24 hours.

Just a few days later, Snowden spoke to the New Hampshire Liberty Forum via Skype and stated he would be willing to return to the U.S. if the government could guarantee a fair trial.

Edward Snowden Pardon Campaign

On September 13, 2016, Snowden said in an interview with The Guardianthat he would seek a pardon from President Obama. "Yes, there are laws on the books that say one thing, but that is perhaps why the pardon power exists - for the exceptions, for the things that may seem unlawful in letters on a page but when we look at them morally, when we look at them ethically, when we look at the results, it seems these were necessary things, these were vital things," he said in the interview.

The next day various human rights groups including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International launched a campaign requesting that Obama pardon Snowden.

Appearing via a telepresence robot, Snowden expressed gratitude for the support. "I love my country. I love my family," he said. "I don't know where we're going from here. I don't know what tomorrow looks like. But I'm glad for the decisions I've made. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined, three years ago, such an outpouring of solidarity."

He also emphasized that his case resonates beyond him. "This really isn't about me," he said. "It's about us. It's about our right to dissent. It's about the kind of country we want to have."

On September 15, the House Intelligence Committee released a three-page unclassified summary of a report about its two-year investigation into Snowden's case. In the summary, Snowden was characterized as a "disgruntled employee who had frequent conflicts with his managers," a "serial exaggerator and fabricator" and "not a whistle-blower."

"Snowden caused tremendous damage to national security, and the vast majority of the documents he stole have nothing to do with programs impacting individual privacy interests - they instead pertain to military, defense and intelligence programs of great interest to America's adversaries," the summary of the report stated.

Members of the committee also unanimously signed a letter to President Obama asking him not to pardon Snowden. "We urge you not to pardon Edward Snowden, who perpetrated the largest and most damaging public disclosure of classified information in our nation's history," the letter stated. "If Mr. Snowden returns from Russia, where he fled in 2013, the U.S. government must hold him accountable for his actions."

Snowden responded on Twitter saying: "Their report is so artlessly distorted that it would be amusing if it weren't such a serious act of bad faith." He followed with a series of tweets refuting the committee's claims and said: "I could go on. Bottom line: after 'two years of investigation,' the American people deserve better. This report diminishes the committee."

Snowden also tweeted that the release of the committee's summary was an effort to discourage people from watching the biopic Snowden, which was released in the United States on September 16, 2016.

Edward Snowden and Donald Trump

In April 2014, well before becoming president, Donald Trump tweeted that Edward Snowden should be executed for the damage his leaks had caused to the U.S.

Following President Trump's election, in November 2016, Snowden told viewers of a teleconference in Sweden that he wasn't worried about the government increasing efforts to arrest him.

"I don't care. The reality here is that yes, Donald Trump has appointed a new director of the Central Intelligence Agency who uses me as a specific example to say that, look, dissidents should be put to death. But if I get hit by a bus, or a drone, or dropped off an airplane tomorrow, you know what? It doesn't actually matter that much to me, because I believe in the decisions that I've already made," Snowden said.

In an open letter from May 2017, Snowden joined 600 activists urging President Trump to drop an investigation and any potential charges against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange for his role in classified intelligence leaks.

Where Is Edward Snowden Now?

As of 2019, Edward Snowden was still living in Moscow, Russia. However in February 2016 he said that he'd return to the U.S. in exchange for a fair trial. In February 2017, NBC News reported that the Russian government was considering handing him over to the U.S. to curry favor with President Donald Trump, although Snowden remains in Russia.

Movies on Edward Snowden

In 2014, Snowden was featured in Laura Poitras' highly acclaimed documentary Citizenfour. The director had recorded her meetings with Snowden and Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald. The film went on to win an Academy Award in 2015. "When the decisions that rule us are taken in secret, we lose the power to control and govern ourselves," said Poitras during her acceptance speech.

In September 2016, director Oliver Stone released a biopic, Snowden, with Edward Snowden's cooperation. The film stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the lead role and Shailene Woodley playing girlfriend Lindsay Mills.

Memoir: 'Permanent Record'

Snowden returned to the headlines in September 2019 with the publication of his memoir, Permanent Record. Within its pages, he describes his disappointment in President Obama's efforts to build on the wide-ranging surveillance programs enacted by his predecessor, George W. Bush, and provides his account of events leading to the fateful day in June 2013 when he unveiled the classified documents that rocked the intelligence community and changed his life forever.

On the same day his memoir was released, the Department of Justice filed a civil lawsuit alleging that Snowden had violated the nondisclosure agreements he signed with the federal government, entitling the DOJ to all profits from book sales. Additionally, the suit named the publisher, Macmillan, and asked the court to freeze the company's assets related to the book to "ensure that no funds are transferred to Snowden, or at his direction, while the court resolves the United States' claims."

Edward Snowden's Girlfriend

One of the people Snowden left behind when he moved to Hong Kong to leak secret NSA files was his girlfriend Lindsay Mills. The pair had been living together in Hawaii, and she reportedly had no idea that he was about to disclose classified information to the public.

Mills graduated from Laurel High School in Maryland in 2003 and the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2007. She began her career as a pole-dancing performance artist while living in Hawaii with Snowden.

In January 2015, Mills joined the Citizenfour documentary team onstage for their Oscars acceptance speech.

In September 2019 it was reported that Snowden and Mills had gotten married.

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Edward Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is a computer programmer who worked as a subcontractor for the National Security Agency (NSA). Snowden collected top-secret documents regarding NSA domestic surveillance practices that he found disturbing and leaked them. After he fled to Hong Kong, he met with journalists from The Guardian and filmmaker Laura Poitras.

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2) Edward Snowden Speaks Out: 'I Haven't And I Won't' Cooperate With Russia

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2) Edward Snowden Speaks Out: 'I Haven't And I Won't' Cooperate With Russia

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In 2013, Edward Snowden was an IT systems expert working under contract for the National Security Agency when he traveled to Hong Kong to provide three journalists with thousands of top-secret documents about U.S. intelligence agencies' surveillance of American citizens.

To Snowden, the classified information he shared with the journalists exposed privacy abuses by government intelligence agencies. He saw himself as a whistleblower. But the U.S. government considered him a traitor in violation of the Espionage Act.

After meeting with the journalists, Snowden intended to leave Hong Kong and travel - via Russia - to Ecuador, where he would seek asylum. But when his plane landed at Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport, things didn't go according to plan.

"What I wasn't expecting was that the United States government itself ... would cancel my passport," he says.

Snowden was directed to a room where Russian intelligence agents offered to assist him - in return for access to any secrets he harbored. Snowden says he refused.

"I didn't cooperate with the Russian intelligence services - I haven't and I won't," he says. "I destroyed my access to the archive. ... I had no material with me before I left Hong Kong, because I knew I was going to have to go through this complex multi-jurisdictional route."

Snowden spent 40 days in the Moscow airport, trying to negotiate asylum in various countries. After being denied asylum by 27 nations,he settled in Russia, where he remains today.

"People look at me now and they think I'm this crazy guy, I'm this extremist or whatever. Some people have a misconception that [I] set out to burn down the NSA," he says. "But that's not what this was about. In many ways, 2013 wasn't about surveillance at all. What it was about was a violation of the Constitution."

Snowden's 2013 revelations led to changes in the laws and standards governing American intelligence agencies and the practices of U.S. technology companies, which now encrypt much of their Web traffic for security. He reflects on his life and his experience in the intelligence community in the memoir Permanent Record.

On Sept. 17, the U.S. Justice Department filed suit to recover all proceeds from the book, alleging that Snowden violated nondisclosure agreements by not letting the government review the manuscript before publication; Snowden's attorney, Ben Wizner, said in a statement that the book contains no government secrets that have not been previously published by respected news organizations, and that the government's prepublication review system is under court challenge.

Interview Highlights

On how researching China's surveillance capabilities for a CIA presentation got him thinking about the potential for domestic surveillance within the U.S.
I'm invited to give a presentation about how China is hacking the United States intelligence services, defense contractors, anything that we have available in the network, which I know a little bit about but not that much about, because they have the person who is supposed to be giving the presentation drop out. So I go looking ... seeing what exactly is it that China is doing? What are their capabilities? Are they hacking? Are they doing domestic surveillance? Are they doing international surveillance? What is occurring?

And I'm just shocked by the extent of their capabilities. I'm appalled by the aggression with which they use them. But also, in a strange way, surprised by the openness with which they use them. They're not hiding it. They're just open and out there, saying, "Yeah, we're doing this. Yeah, we're hacking you. What are you going to do about it?"

And I think this is a distinction: I think, yes, theNSA is spying -of course they're spying - but we're only spying overseas, we're not spying on our guys at home. We wouldn't do that. We have firewalls, we have trip wires for people to hit. But surely these are only affecting terrorists, because we're not like China. But this plants the first seeds of doubt where I see if the capability is there.
On what he discovered about U.S. domestic surveillance
Over the final years of my career ... I see that we have the same capabilities as the Chinese government, and we are applying them domestically - just as they are. We have an internal strategy at the NSA, which was never publicly avowed, but it was all over their top-secret internal slides, that said the aspiration was to "collect it all." What this means was they were not just collecting and intercepting communications from criminals, spies, terrorists, people of intelligence value - they were collecting on everyone, everywhere, all of the time, just in case, because you never know what's going to be interesting. And if you miss it when it's passing by, you might not get another chance.

And so what happened was every time we wrote an email, every time you typed something into that Google search box, every time your phone moved, you sent a text message, you made a phone call ... the boundaries of the Fourth Amendment were being changed. This was without even the vast majority ofmembers of Congress knowing about it. And this is when I start to think about maybe we need to know about this, maybe if Congress knew about this, maybe if the courts knew about this, we would not have the same policies as the Chinese government.
On feeling like he was breaking an oath by keeping quiet about the extent of government surveillance

... when I realize we have been violating, in secret, the Fourth Amendment of that Constitution for the better part of a decade ... that we are committing felonies in the United States under a direct mandate from the White House billions of times a day - honestly, I fell into depression.

My very first day entering into duty for the CIA, I was required to pledge an oath of service. Now, a lot of people are confused, they think there's an oath of secrecy, but this is important to understand. There's a secrecy agreement. This is a civil agreement with the government, a nondisclosure agreement called Standard Form 312. ... It says you won't talk to journalists, you won't write books as I have now done, but when you give this oath of service it's something very different. It's a pledge of allegiance, not to the agency, not to a government, not to a president, but to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic.

And so when I realize we have been violating, in secret, the Fourth Amendment of that Constitution for the better part of a decade, the rate of violation is increasing, the scope of the violation is increasing with every day, that we are committing felonies in the United States under a direct mandate from the White House billions of times a day - honestly, I fell into depression. And I tried to think, how can I just get by? And this leads to a period where I resign from what would be considered direct mission-related work out in Japan, in the foreign field, as we call it, and I returned to ... a purely corporate position for Dell as a sales official at CIA headquarters.
On deciding to share classified material with journalists and setting conditions for the publication of the material
I tried to reconstruct the system of checks and balances by using myself to provide documents to the journalists, but never to publish them myself. People don't realize this, but I never made public a single document. I trusted that role to the journalists to decide whatthe public did and did not need to know. Before the journalists published these stories, they had to go to the government, and this was a condition that I required them to do, and tell the government, warn them they're about to run this story about this program and the government could argue against publication and say, "You've got it wrong," or "You've got it right." But if you publish this is going to hurt somebody. In every case I'm aware of, that process was followed, and that's why in 2019 we've never seen any evidence at all presented by the government that someone's been harmed as a result of these stories. (Editor's note: A 2016 report by the House intelligence committee cited more than 20 examples of which, it said, Snowden damaged national security. The details of those instances were redacted.)
On being detained in the Moscow airport for 40 days before being granted temporary asylum in Russia
Had I cooperated with the Russian government right - if you think I'm a Russian spy - I would have been in that airport for five minutes before they drove me out in a limo to the palace where I'd be living for the rest of my days, before they throw the parade where they call me a hero of Russia. Instead I was trapped in this airport for 40 days. ...

The U.S. government worked quite hard to make sure I didn't leave Russia. ... Why did the U.S. government work so hard to keep me in Russia? We don't have a clear answer, and we may never have that until more people in the Obama administration start writing memoirs, but it's either they panicked or they realized this would be an evergreen political attack where they could just use guilt by association, people's suspicion of the Russian government to try to taint me by proxy.
On his life in Russia and whether he receives any kind of financial support from the Russian government
I have my own apartment. I have my own income. I live a fully independent life. I have never and will never accept money or housing or any other assistance from the Russian government. ...

People ask how I make my living, and I give lectures. I speak publicly for the American Program Bureau and places book me to speak about the future of cybersecurity, what's happening with surveillance, and about conscience and whistleblowing. I've never been the nightclub type. I'm a little bit of an indoor cat. Whether I lived in Maryland or New York or Geneva or Tokyo or Moscow, I always spend the majority of my time looking into a screen, because I think the thing that's on the other side of it is beautiful. It has the promise of human connection. And although the Internet is very much a troubled place ... I think it is something worth fighting for, and something that they can improve.
On how he secures his personal cellphone
I try not to use one as much as possible, and when I do use one, I use a cellphone that I have myself modified. [I've] performed a kind of surgery on it. I open it up with special tools and I use a soldering iron to remove the microphone and I disconnect the camera so that the phone can't simply listen to me when it's sitting there. It physically has no microphone in it. And when I need to make a call I just connect an external microphone through the headphone jack. And this way the phone works for you rather than you working for the phone.

We need to be regulating the collection of data, because our phones, our devices, our laptops - even just driving down the street with all of these systems that surround us today - is producing records about our lives. It's the modern pollution.

You need to be careful about the software you put on your phone, you need to be careful about the connections it's making, because today most people have got a thousand apps on their phones; it's sitting there on your desk right now or in your hand and the screen can be off but it's connecting hundreds or thousands of times a second. ... And this is this core problem of the data issue that we're dealing with today. We're passing laws that are trying to regulate the use of data. We're trying to regulate the protection of data, but all of these things presume that the data has already been collected. ... We need to be regulating the collection of data, because our phones, our devices, our laptops - even just driving down the street with all of these systems that surround us today - is producing records about our lives. It's the modern pollution.
On coming back to the U.S. to face trial
My ultimate goal will always be to return to the United States. And I've actually had conversations with thegovernment, last in the Obama administration, about what that would look like, and they said, "You should come and face trial." I said, "Sure. Sign me up. Under one condition: I have to be able to tell the jury why I did what I did, and the jury has to decide: Was this justified or unjustified." This is called a public interest defense and is allowed under pretty much every crime someone can be charged for. Even murder, for example, has defenses. It can be self-defense and so on so forth, it could be manslaughter instead of first-degree murder. But in the case of telling a journalist the truth about how the government was breaking the law, the government says there can be no defense. There can be no justification for why you did it. The only thing the jury gets to consider is did you tell the journalists something you were not allowed to tell them. If yes, it doesn't matter why you did it. You go to jail. And I have said, as soon as you guys say for whistleblowers it is the jury who decides if it was right or wrong to expose the government's own lawbreaking, I'll be in court the next day.
Sam Briger and Thea Chaloner produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web.

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Edward Snowden Speaks Out: 'I Haven't And I Won't' Cooperate With Russia

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In 2013, Snowden showed journalists thousands of top-secret documents about U.S. intelligence agencies' surveillance efforts. He's been living in Russia ever since. His new book is Permanent Record.

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7) As Trump weighs pardons, GOP divided on whether Snowden should receive one

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7) As Trump weighs pardons, GOP divided on whether Snowden should receive one

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gop divided on whether snowden should receive one. - cnnpolitics

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As Trump weighs pardons, GOP divided on whether Snowden should receive one

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The expectation that President Donald Trump will issue a flurry of pardons in his final days in office has sparked a contentious discussion among congressional Republicans over whether former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden deserves one.

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5) Why Democrats aren't trying to push for Snowden's pardon

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5) Why Democrats aren't trying to push for Snowden's pardon

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Many Democrats in Congress acknowledge that National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed vast government surveillance overreach. They demonstrated their concern with their actions: When key provisions of the Patriot Act were up for reauthorization earlier this year, progressive Democrats led the charge to strip the law of language used to justify mass surveillance programs uncovered by Snowden.

But now, as President Donald Trump considers whether to pardon Snowden for his alleged crimes, only one Democratic member of Congress has pushed the lame-duck president to do it. The federal government has charged Snowden with three felonies: one count of theft and two violations of the 1917 Espionage Act.

Trump said in August that he was going to "start looking at" the idea of pardoning Snowden.

The most concerted, public effort to push Trump toward pardoning Snowden has come from a handful of conservative lawmakers. Three Republican members of Congress and one Republican-turned-independent encouraged Trump on Dec. 12 to pardon Snowden.

The appeals on Twitter from Sen. (R-Ky.) and Reps. (R-Fla.), Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Justin Amash (I-Mich.) were part of a coordinated initiative by surveillance critics on the right to leverage Trump's hostility toward the intelligence agencies, which he calls the "deep state," to exempt Snowden from prosecution for revealing the extent of the NSA's spying programs on American citizens.

But thus far, outgoing Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard is the only Democratic member of Congress to Trump to pardon Snowden. And some civil liberties advocates are disappointed.

"Lawmakers should celebrate and protect the brave people who expose government abuse and corruption, regardless of who is in the White House when it happens," said Evan Greer, deputy director of the digital freedom group Fight for the Future.

This is a test of principle over partisanship, and Democrats are woefully failing it. Glenn Greenwald

Twenty House Democrats signed a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) in October 2019 to warn that they would withhold support for the reauthorization of Section 215 of the Patriot Act absent major reforms. That section provided the supposed legal justification for the first and most prominent mass surveillance program that Snowden uncovered with his 2013 leaks: the NSA's collection of virtually all Americans' phone records without a warrant. (Thanks in part to this pressure from progressives, Congress reached a stalemate on reform that prompted Section 215 to expire altogether in March; this past September, a federal appeals court also ruled the original phone data collection program unconstitutional.)

Aside from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), who addressed the matter in an interview with The Intercept, HuffPost reached out to all of the letter's signatories about whether they would join the call for Trump to pardon Snowden.

The offices of Reps. Earl Blumenauer (Ore.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Don Beyer (Va.), Judy Chu (Calif.), Lloyd Doggett (Texas), Jesús "Chuy" Garcia (Ill.), Raúl Grijalva (Ariz.), Deb Haaland (N.M.),Grace Meng (N.Y.), Eleanor Holmes Norton (Washington, D.C.), Alan Lowenthal (Calif.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Frank Pallone (N.J.), Bobby Rush (Ill.), Jan Schakowsky (Ill.), José Serrano (N.Y.), Mark Takano (Calif.) and Nydia Velázquez (N.Y.) did not respond.

As of Monday evening, only the office of Wisconsin Rep. Gwen Moore replied to HuffPost's inquiry.

"Rep. Moore has been extremely troubled about Trump's frequent and flagrant misuse of the pardon power throughout his presidency and believes that the pardon process should be normalized and go through the Dept of Justice vetting process like other presidents have undertaken for pardons in the past," Moore's chief of staff Sean Gard told HuffPost in a statement.

HuffPost also asked several prominent progressive surveillance critics - including Sens. Patrick Leahy (Vt.), Dick Durbin (Ill.), Martin Heinrich (N.M.), and Ron Wyden (Ore.), as well as Reps. Ro Khanna (Calif.) and Pramila Jayapal (Wash.) - for their opinion on a potential pardon for Snowden.

Leahy, Durbin, Heinrich, Khanna and Jayapal, who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus, did not respond.

Wyden, whose 2013 hearing question to then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper prompted Clapper to lie about the existence of mass surveillance of U.S. citizens, provided a statement praising the impact of Snowden's actions without endorsing a pardon.

"I'm not going to sit in judgment on pending criminal charges, though I certainly don't think there should be a double standard where defenders of particular programs can leak classified information and get off scot-free, while critics of those programs go to prison," Wyden said.

"Mass surveillance was never going to end until the public found out about it, and in fact, after The Guardian and Snowden revealed dragnet government surveillance, Congress ended that unconstitutional program," he continued. "That's why I spent years urging the Bush and Obama administrations to be straight with the American people and why I'm continuing the long fight to protect Americans' rights."

Other progressives sympathetic to Snowden have stopped short of whole-heartedly embracing his pardon. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has repeatedly praised the effect of Snowden's leaks, called in 2016 for the federal government to grant Snowden "clemency" by promising a lighter sentence in exchange for Snowden's return to the U.S. And Ocasio-Cortez, who is the most famous left-wing member of the House, told The Intercept that Snowden "should be considered" for a pardon by either Trump or President-elect Joe Biden.

There are, of course, many outspoken opponents of pardoning Snowden in the still-dominant, hawkish wing of the Republican Party, from Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) to Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.).

But the absence of Democratic participation in the push to pardon Snowden is notable because it runs counter to the Democratic Party's historic commitments. From the 1975 Church Committee investigations into domestic spying to the post-Snowden scramble to curb the government's surveillance powers, left-leaning members of the Democratic Party have been some of the national security establishment's boldest opponents and most successful reformers.

Glenn Greenwald, an independent journalist who first published Snowden's leaked documents and is an outspoken advocate for his pardon, accused Democrats of being more protective of national security leakers like Daniel Ellsberg who reveal classified information during Republican administrations than of Snowden, who acted while Barack Obama was president.

"This is a test of principle over partisanship, and Democrats are woefully failing it," Greenwald said.

One reason that progressive Democrats have traditionally been vigilant about federal government snooping is the frequency with which such tactics have been used to undermine social movements associated with the left. The FBI spied not only on more radical elements of the Black civil rights, antiwar and Puerto Rican independence movements in the 1960s and 1970s, but also on mainstream figures like Martin Luther King Jr., infamously using evidence of King's adultery to encourage his death by suicide.

This legacy, and the more recent, bipartisan fight to allow the expiration of the key Patriot Act provisions, should make pardoning Snowden a progressive cause, according to Greenwald and some other civil liberties activists.

"Democrats who oppose the Patriot Act, who think that Bush-era warrantless wiretapping and other mass surveillance programs were wrong ... need to understand that the possibility of pushing back against the surveillance state is in large part a function of Snowden's good deeds, and his work in the public interest should be defended," said David Segal, executive director of Demand Progress, a liberal group that opposes mass surveillance. "He should be defended and protected with a pardon."

They're letting Republicans pretend to be the party of liberty and basic rights. It's depressing. Evan Greer, Fight For the Future

Greer put it more bluntly.

"It's frankly outrageous that Democrats have been so silent, or even worse have falsely labeled [Snowden] as a traitor," Greer told HuffPost in a statement. "By doing so they're letting Republicans pretend to be the party of liberty and basic rights. It's depressing."

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation ― groups that have called for Snowden's pardon ― declined to comment when asked whether lawmakers from both parties, including sympathetic Democrats, should join the calls for Snowden's pardon. (An ACLU attorney leads Snowden's legal defense team.)

The editorial board of The New York Times, which appealed to Obama to offer Snowden clemency, has stayed out of the push to encourage lenient treatment from Trump.

HuffPost also reached out to Free Press, a digital rights group that also supports pardoning Snowden. "We tend not to play pardon politics and don't see much value in engaging with the Trump administration on any issue," said Tim Karr, a Free Press spokesperson.

But, Karr added, "We'd certainly be supportive of any push in Congress."

These groups' quietness on the matter reflects a tactical consideration to let Republicans do the heavy lifting, according to a prominent civil liberties advocate, who requested anonymity so as not to jeopardize the prospects of Snowden's pardon. Civil liberties groups associated with the left worry that appeals from lawmakers and institutions that have been critical of Trump could undermine the appeal of a possible pardon by speaking up more vocally, according to the advocate.

Greenwald, who has appeared on Fox News to make his case for a Snowden pardon, maintains, by contrast, that progressive encouragement of Trump would, at the very least, do no harm to the cause. It might even help, Greenwald ventured. "I think Trump does like the idea of being applauded across the spectrum," he said.

Some progressives have called for Democrats to prioritize the pardoning of Reality Winner, a former NSA translator who is serving a five-year prison sentence for leaking official documents showing that Russia tried to interfere with voting systems in 2016. Unlike Winner, Snowden lives freely with his wife in Moscow, where the Russian government continues to provide him with asylum. (Contrary to some people's misconceptions, Snowden is a critic of the Russian government who sought protection there as a last resort.)

While presidents tend to defer to the intelligence agencies, which argue that no leak of sensitive national security information should go unpunished, Trump's impulsive style and personal grievances with federal law enforcement agencies, some of which are legitimate, make him a unique target for the campaign to pardon Snowden.

"In this moment, for a variety of reasons there are ideologues in both parties who support the same legislative vehicles to constrain surveillance, to constrain war, and who recognize that an unchecked national security and military industrial complex is not in the interests or wellbeing of the broader public and want to do something about it," Segal said.

In addition, it is clear that many Democratic lawmakers' silence about a Snowden pardon does not spring from tactical concerns about the best way to influence Trump. In 2016, when liberal civil liberties groups were conducting a more public campaign pressuring then-President Obama to pardon Snowden, there was no comparable fear that Democrats' endorsement of the cause would undermine the political case for a pardon. But no Democratic member of Congress embraced that call to pardon Snowden either.

"Some leading Democrats have led efforts to rein in the illegal mass surveillance programs that Snowden exposed," Greer said. "The least they can do is support a pardon for the person who provided the information they are basing their reforms on."

BEFORE YOU GO

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Almost No Democrats Are Calling On Trump To Pardon Edward Snowden

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Many Democrats in Congress acknowledge that National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed vast government surveillance overreach. They demonstrated their concern with their actions: When key provisions of the Patriot Act were up for reauthorization earlier this year, progressive Democrats led the charge to strip the law of language used to justify mass surveillance programs uncovered by Snowden.

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6) Snowden allies see opening amid Trump clemency blitz

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6) Snowden allies see opening amid Trump clemency blitz

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Sen. Rand Paul has talked to Trump about a Snowden pardon, as has Rep. Matt Gaetz, both lawmakers who have had Trump's ear. The just-pardoned Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser, also made a public appeal for Snowden's clemency.

Their pitch: Snowden has been unfairly persecuted after revealing the mendacity of people like James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence. It's an argument that may play well with Trump, who also sees himself as a victim of the American intelligence services and despises Clapper.

"He revealed that James Clapper, the highest-ranking, most powerful spy in the world, was spying on Americans and lied to us about it," Paul said in an interview. "So I think what Snowden did was a service to the American people and he ought to be pardoned."

But while the libertarian wing of the GOP is pushing for a Snowden pardon - alongside a few scattered Democrats and high-profile human rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union - more traditional Republicans are opposed. To them, Snowden is a traitor - full stop. He broke the law by leaking classified information and did irreparable damage to the country's spying capability.

"I think he's a traitor worthy of federal prison," Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said bluntly.

But Republican members of Congress who have spoken with the president recently view him as increasingly malleable in his final days in office, especially as he works to win over lawmakers to his attempt to challenge final certification of President-elect Joe Biden's win in Congress on Jan. 6. The result could be a more amenable Trump as he fields eleventh-hour pardon requests.

It's a pattern that has been playing out in recent days as Trump issued two rounds of pre-Christmas pardons and commutations, including for three former members of Congress, numerous people convicted in Robert Mueller's probe into Russia's 2016 election interference, and four security contractors convicted for massacring Iraqi civilians in 2008.

Many of the 49 acts of clemency originated with pleas from Trump's friends and allies. Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who helped defend him in his 2020 impeachment trial, made some suggestions, as did Christopher Ruddy, the CEO of the pro-Trump media outlet Newsmax.

Other pardons were supported by Matt Schlapp, chair of the American Conservative Union, whose wife worked for Trump at the White House and his unsuccessful reelection campaign, and former lawyer and lobbyist David Safavian, who himself was pardoned by Trump in February for his role in obstructing a federal investigation.

Paul himself pushed for four of the pardons, including Jesse Benton, the senator's relative by marriage who was convicted of campaign finance violations.

And more batches of pardons are expected, according to two Republicans close to the White House.

Trump may give preemptive pardons to as many as 20 close associates and family members, including his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, and his children, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump, none of whom have been charged with a crime. Steve Bannon, a former campaign and White House aide who was charged with defrauding investors in a scheme to independently build a southern border wall, has also been discussed.

But he could easily expand the circle to include any number of names suggested by those around him. And Snowden is increasingly being mentioned.

After being pardoned on Wednesday, Stone, who was convicted of obstructing a congressional investigation and witness intimidation, urged Trump to provide a "full and unconditional pardon" to Snowden.

"The injustice done to me does not stand alone," he wrote in a statement. "Other good Americans have been victims of a corrupt system made to serve venal power-seekers, rewarding deceit and manipulation, rather than reason and justice. President Trump can be the purveyor of justice over the vile machinations of wicked pretenders to the mantle of public service."

Some Trump allies say the Snowden pardon overtures could work because the president usually bypasses the lengthy, multilevel process for clemency that had been conducted at the Justice Department for a century in lieu of making decisions himself in consultation with a handful of aides.

"Why would I go through DOJ?" said one of the Republicans, who is pushing for a pardon for someone else. "The Constitution says it's the president who has the authority."

The Constitution does give the president power "to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment." That typically either comes in the form of a commutation - which reduces or eliminates a sentence, but does not wipe away a conviction - or a full pardon, which disposes of all legal consequences from a crime.

The White House did not respond to questions about Snowden.

Many of Trump's pardons have gone to headline-grabbing individuals: 19th Century suffragist Susan B. Anthony, former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, George W. Bush adviser Scooter Libby and Charles Kushner, his son-in-law's father.

Snowden, 37, would certainly fit in that category. Currently living in Russia, Snowden faces charges of espionage and theft of government property for disclosing classified NSA information, including the details of secret spying programs that hoovered up internet activity and telephone records.

The Obama administration accused Snowden of harming national security. But Snowden has advocated for a pardon on Twitter, saying he didn't cause death to any Americans and highlighting lawmakers who support the idea.

But a former senior administration official said he doubts the Snowden push will work, given the high percentage of Republicans who favor his prosecution.

"By and large most Republicans would agree he is a traitor," the person said.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and former Speaker Newt Gingrich, both Trump allies, oppose the pardon.

"Snowden did enormous damage to the United States and I can't imagine any reason for pardoning him," Gingrich said.

But Gaetz, a Florida Republican and Trump ally who introduced a resolution calling for the federal government to drop all charges against Snowden, said in a brief phone call that he hopes Trump pardons Snowden.

And on Twitter, he claimed "Trump is listening to the many of us who are urging him" to pardon Snowden.

Trump's stance is less obvious.

Trump once called Snowden a "traitor" and a "spy who should be executed." But he more recently expressed a willingness to consider a pardon. In August, Trump said he was considering offering clemency to Snowden, lamenting that "a lot of people" believe the former NSA contractor was "not being treated fairly."

But ever since Trump expressed an openness to pardoning Snowden, several members of Congress who once stood by Trump are balking at the idea of a pardon.

"He's responsible for the largest, most damaging leak of classified information in U.S. history," said House GOP Conference Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.). "He gave secrets to our adversaries, the Chinese, the Russians. It would just be unconscionable to pardon him."

Cheney has been a top political foe of the libertarian wing of the GOP that Paul and Gaetz represent, drawing criticism for months now as she has broken with the president on several issues.

Even the president's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., has gone after her publicly, comparing her to Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who does not support the president and voted to remove him from office in the Senate's impeachment trial earlier this year. More recently, Trump himself slammed Cheney on Twitter.

Notably, few Democrats have gotten behind the push for a Snowden pardon. Top Democrats have been pushing for reforms to the federal government's surveillance powers in the wake of Snowden's actions, but they are hesitant to publicly back an erasure of federal charges for Snowden.

Instead, Democrats are focusing their ire on the process Trump has used to issue his pardons and sentence commutations. Democrats say that while the presidential pardon authority is absolute, Trump has abused the process to reward his allies and associates and has gone around the traditional Justice Department protocols for issuing them.

"I think there needs to be a process for pardons. It should not be a political, knee-jerk response. It should be based upon the considerations which go to the severity of the crime as well as the humanitarian issues," said Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), a top member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "And I don't believe he is doing any of his pardoning considerations that way. I think the process he's using is just wrong."
Sarah Ferris contributed to this report.

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Snowden allies see opening amid Trump clemency blitz

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Sen. Rand Paul has talked to Trump about a Snowden pardon, as has Rep. Matt Gaetz, both lawmakers who have had Trump's ear. The just-pardoned Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser, also made a public appeal for Snowden's clemency. Their pitch: Snowden has been unfairly persecuted after revealing the mendacity of people like James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence.