Edward Snowden Livechats Via Twitter About NSA’s Criminal Actions While Holder Offers Plea Deal for Exposing Them

No, we don't get tired of this image. Why do you ask?This afternoon, the Free Snowden site, put
together by the Courage Foundation to do exactly what the site’s
name says, relayed questions sent via Twitter to National Security
Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden for responses. Then they hosted
Snowden’s answers.

Some notable points:

  • Snowden thinks it’s possible for the United States to recover
    from the damage caused by the surveillance scandal with new laws
    and oversight. “We can correct the laws, restrain the overreach of
    agencies, and hold the senior officials responsible for abusive
    programs to account,” he writes.
  • America’s whistleblower protections are extremely weak in the
    national security arena. Snowden had no “official channels” to
    report this wrongdoing. “I still made tremendous efforts to report
    these programs to co-workers, supervisors, and anyone with the
    proper clearance who would listen,” he writes. “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 … .”
  • He thinks it’s “interesting” that President Barack Obama gave
    his limp
    NSA reform speech
    prior to the release of the report by the
    Privacy and Civil Liberties Board declaring that the NSA’s mass
    metadata collection system is
    illegal and should be stopped
    . “When even the federal
    government says the NSA violated the constitution at least 120
    million times under a single program, but failed to discover even a
    single ‘plot,’ it’s time to end ‘bulk collection,’ which is a
    euphemism for mass surveillance,” he writes. “There is simply no
    justification for continuing an unconstitutional policy with a 0%
    success rate.”
  • He says he never stole anybody’s passwords or tricked coworkers
    to get access he shouldn’t have, contrary to reports.
  • He says not all spying is bad. He is against the indiscriminate
    mass surveillance of citizens who are not suspected of any
    wrongdoing. “This is a global problem, and America needs to take
    the lead in fixing it,” he writes. “If our government decides our
    Constitution’s 4th Amendment prohibition against unreasonable
    seizures no longer applies simply because that’s a more efficient
    means of snooping, we’re setting a precedent that immunizes the
    government of every two-bit dictator to perform the same kind of
    indiscriminate, dragnet surveillance of entire populations that the
    NSA is doing.”
  • Asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper under what conditions would he
    return to the United States, Snowden responded that he wants to,
    but the laws under which he’s charged forbid him from mounting a
    fair defense for his actions. Over at Politico, Eric Holder says
    the Department of Justice would offer Snowden a
    plea deal
    to return home, which sounds like a typical tone deaf
    response from our nation’s prosecutors.
  • When asked about the recent
    BuzzFeed piece
    where anonymous government intelligence
    officials said they wanted to kill Snowden, he responds he’s
    concerned “that current, serving officials of our government are so
    comfortable in their authorities that they’re willing to tell
    reporters on the record that they think the due process protections
    of the 5th Amendment of our Constitution are outdated concepts.
    These are the same officials telling us to trust that they’ll honor
    the 4th and 1st Amendments. This should bother all of us.” I would
    add that it’s also a concern that even a relatively young media
    outlet like BuzzFeed is already falling into the entrenched
    Washington media habit of allowing government officials
    anonymity — not for the purpose of providing valuable
    information the public deserves to know, but to attack others
    without having to risk any consequences.

Read the whole livechat here.

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