> only American citizens have rights protected by the US constitution.
Untrue, though this is a popular myth. There are a few Constitutional rights explicitly restricted to citizens (voting is the big one), but pretty much all the rest are rights of people generally that the government (either federal or state, depending on which Constitutional provision is involved) is restricted from intruding on. Both the plain text and the case law of the Constitution is inconsistent with this “only American citizens have rights protected by the US constitution” view.
There is some case law that certain actions by the US government affecting noncitizens outside of the US are not limited by certain provisions of the Constituion that would affect actions that were either within the US or directed at citizens (or, at least, that such actions are not subject to legal process in the federal courts, which amounts to the same thing), but the particular exception is quite narrow.
And yet, the following have been considered compatible with the rights of all people: slavery, torture of non-citizens, assassination of non-citizens on suspicions of a crime, assassination of citizens on external territory on suspicions of a crime.
That's because of statutory restrictions (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) on surveillance of citizens adopted in the wake of the foreign intelligence apparatus being broadly used against domestic opposition, not Constitutional limits on rights to citizens.
From the ruling at issue: «We conclude that the government may have violated the Fourth Amendment and did violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”) when it collected the telephony metadata of millions of Americans»
This assertion is counter to the core principles of the nation's founding — that one's rights are innate, and the constitution simply places limits on the government regarding what can be regulated and to what extent. That means we recognize that every person of any nationality has the right to free speech, fair and speedy trials, no torture, etc.
If you mean other nations don't recognize the same rights, then I grant you that, but the constitution doesn't limit this recognition to US citizens.
That's your interpretation, but the same text has been considered perfectly compatible with chattle slavery for more than a hundred years, starting immediately as it was written. So I don't think it's as clear cut as the text might make you think.
If the plain text as written ought to have forbidden slavery but the people including the people that wrote it acted as if it didn't for a century their failure to act doesn't and shouldn't constrain others from interpreting the plain text different from the framers or even its author.
You can also say "if the writers of the constitution considered slavery to be acceptable, the the intent was for the constitution to allow it, so we should consider that it does, current meanings of the words notwithstanding".
Of course, the conclusion to draw from this is that a new constitution is needed, one that does actually, at the time of writing, explicitly intend to disallow slavery and other offenses against human rights. Why should a document that has been shown to be compatible with slavery (and anti-gay sentiment, and segregation, and extra-judicial killings, and internment camps for the japanese and so on) be considered to carry any weight?
A fine sentiment but for practical purposes advancement by the path of constitutional amendment is nearly impossible at this point. Should we forever forgo meaningful change even when well supported by the plain text of the law in order to cleave to what we believe someone meant 200 years ago?
If you don't accept that, then what can stop a court from interpreting a law that says "the penalty for jaywalking is 100$" to mean "the penalty for walking around somewhere the locals don't want you is 100$"?
If the courts are free to interpret the letter of the law without thinking about the intention of the framers, and the meaning that was given before, what is the difference between courts and lawmakers?
Note: I'm talking entirely philosophically here. In practice, I'm extremely happy that the Supreme Court doesn't allow slavery and that they consider gay marriage to be a human right, that elective abortion is also a human right etc. But, as happy as I am that these are accepted as fundamental human rights, as I think they should be, I don't understand what the point of the constitution really is in this place.
I 100% agree he did. I 100% agree that this counts as a service to people in those countries.
My point was that those things do nothing to add to the lore that he is an American patriot that defended American constitutional rights. The question of should he receive a pardon by a US President should should put significantly more weight in the service he did to Americans compared to the service he did to other people.
I don’t mean to come off as xenophobic or nationalist. However, the title American Patriot is earned for services given to Americans and the United States itself.
Patriot definition: a person who vigorously supports their country and is prepared to defend it against enemies or detractors.
I don't know if residents have a special status. But the DOJ appears to claim that Congress could pass a law establishing religion for foreigners, demand other countries extradite all their citizens, and sentence them in the US for not following this law.
The problem is usually with the definition of 'people'. Slaves, for example, did not qualify for a long time. 'People' living outside the country are not generally considered to be covered (see the routine open assassination of people accused of 'terrorism').
He exposed what basically any G20 nation does and lives pretty damn well by virtue of doing the bidding of a foreign government that seeks to undermine democracy in the world.
The notion that he gave up his highly paid government contractor job in sunny Hawaii in favour of becoming an international fugitive, for personal gain, is clearly nonsense. You really think an apartment in Moscow is worth all that?
He leaked a lot more US government programs than that one, and all of those were legal. Had he only leaked phone metadata collection, he would have a case.
It took 7 years for the courts to finally figure that out even though it seemed like ridiculous overreach to everyone.
Off the top of my head I recollect they were intercepting hardware like switches and compromising it, inserting spying equipment in Google data centers forceing them to now to end to end encryption and many other shady things.
Not to mention the collection of zero days that almost certainly will get discovered by other nation states and bad actors and risk our security. They used parallel construction with other law enforcement orgs as they leaked run of the mill criminal behavior (not national security related) so as to not disclose the real way they got the info.
There are many more examples of overreaches he brought to light but I don't recall all of it. The core concern I have is all this apparatus are tools of fascism and control of any dissenting voices including the opposing political party. Where we are politically today I think would be hard to fathom back when Snowden leaked all this.
> It took 7 years for the courts to finally figure that out
It was ruled illegal in 2015 by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
> inserting spying equipment in Google data centers
There is no evidence of this in the Snowden leaks or anywhere. Google would know if it had unaccounted for hardware in its datacenters. They put network analyzers on international links that carried Google traffic.
> they were intercepting hardware like switches and compromising it
For hardware shipped to targeted foreigners. We should expect our spy agencies to do this if they are even moderately competent.
> They used parallel construction with other law enforcement orgs as they leaked run of the mill criminal behavior (not national security related) so as to not disclose the real way they got the info.
Where is the evidence for this claim?
> The core concern I have is all this apparatus are tools of fascism and control of any dissenting voices including the opposing political party.
That would be a valid concern for unchecked domestic surveillance but not for what Snowden leaked.
You make it seem like they’re just hitting Googles hardware randomly. It’s been postulated publicly that spies have been found at Google that facilitate information to the CCP. If I were a defense organization this would concern me and I believe they have legal clout to act. Liberal does not mean lawless. You expect USA to do nothing but sit back and accept it’s just a part of doing business to get spied on and IP theft?
I was on mobile so difficult to give adequate sources at the moment.
My point was they were essentially MITM'ing all traffic in google data centers. I fail to see how that "makes the US more secure".
"The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials.
By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot."
> Hacking private companies and spying on Americans seems outside their charter IMO.
Aside from phone metadata collection, they weren't spying on Americans. They could tap communications of non-Americans outside the US, and they could find those communications in Google WAN traffic crossing the US border. It's Google's fault for not encrypting it because any number of other countries with fewer laws against spying on their citizens could have done the same thing. It is good that Google and other Internet companies now use https everywhere and encrypt their WAN traffic, but the threat vector should have been well known at that point given what China had already been doing publicly for years.
Do you have a reference for actual detected spies at Google? Of course it would be valuable to have them there. Google has lots of systems to keep track of what information you access thought, from when I was there. IE if you say want to look at PII like real user names for some debugging reason, you had to go through a portal that was along the lines of declaring: "I need to access this internal system that has PII, here is my authenticated request with my name on it". And when I was there, they would follow up and ask me about it. This was on a database product.
On the other hand, there were multiple stories about the guy from Saudi Arabia who was at twitter and I think he got away back to S.A.
The Special Counsel investigation publicizing a Russian connection to Wikileaks' release of Hillary Clinton's damaging emails was far more recent than 2016 [0]. For myself, and I presume much of the general public, that would be the point in time where awareness of Assange's role in an alleged Russia-involved conspiracy manifest.
I said after 2016. Wikileaks is a media company that reports info/intel from their sources, no different from the NYT, CNN, fox etc. There were no questions coming from these sections of the general public and the media you allude to when it was bush and it's very convenient for the intelligence community to discredit where they can. Snowden addresses the case against Assange in his latest episode on Joe Rogan, a very interesting listen.
Assange and Snowden are widely known to be conflated among the general public. [0]
I don't personally think either of these people are or have ever knowingly been Russian assets.
But that's not the point. Particularly after the Special Counsel investigation, Assange/Wikileaks has been portrayed quite publicly through a credible federal investigation as being used as a puppet for distributing Russian-acquired documents.
Snowden clearly ended up in Russia for lack of options when fleeing HK. There's never been any credible allegations of a Russian affiliation outside of that AFAIK.
Why is it confusing that he would flee to somewhere where the US couldn’t easily extradite him, throw him in a “detention center,” give him an unfair trial, or assassinate him?
I live in Germany and When I moved here I sensed animosity for America. When I asked my local friends they said It was made a lot worse after what he leaked.
"But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them [you] they are being attacked [by Russia], and denounce the pacifists [Snowden] for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
I agree him being in Russia currently isn't a good look... but I don't think he was a Russian asset. To me, he always seemed like a really good person who followed his conscience.
I think where he messed up was he got help from Assange when he was at his neediest, took it, and ended up in Moscow.
