That was the question posed to all of the Democratic presidential candidates during the party’s first debate on Tuesday.
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Edward Snowden rose to global prominence after sharing internal National Security Agency documents with Guardian journalists exposing the scope of the US-headed information sharing network “Five Eyes”, which includes Australia.
Cooper started by invoking the Patriot Act, pointing out that both former Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee and Clinton voted in favor of it. “Governor Chafee…”
No, I would bring him home.
Snowden has said that he would be willing to serve time in jail, going as far as offering himself up to the government.
There is a consensus among all the major politicians running for president in America, regardless of their party: Edward Snowden, they all say, deserves to face federal prosecutors for illegally leaking vast troves detailed information about government surveillance programs to the press.
Chafee was stating a truth. The courts have ruled that what he did – what he did was say the American government was acting illegally. The same is true of the PATRIOT Act Sec. “Such expansive development of government repositories of formerly private records would be an unprecedented contraction of the privacy expectations of all Americans”, the decision read. Bernie Sanders effectively allowed Hillary Clinton to dodge what might have been one of the toughest issues of the Democratic debate.
Clinton stated that Snowden “could have gotten all of the protections of a whistleblower”, but he “broke the law”. He could have been a whistle-blower. Had he done so, Clinton said, he would have likely received a “positive response” to the issues that he raised.
Asked if Snowden was a hero, Sanders was less resolute: “He did break the law, and I think there should be a penalty to that”.
COOPER: Bring him home, no jail time?
ClINTON: In addition-in addition, he stole very important information that has unfortunately fallen into a lot of the wrong hands.
The Vermont Senator was the first to point out Snowden actually shined a light on something the American public didn’t know a lot about, while also throwing in what, by this point in the discussion, seemed like the company line of “Snowden broke the law”.
It appears that Black Lives Matter activists have teamed up with an unlikely ally: national whistleblower Edward Snowden. The Espionage Act explicitly prohibits such actions.
Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) agreed.
“I think Snowden played a very important role in educating the American people to the degree in which our civil liberties and our constitutional rights are being undermined”, Bernie Sanders pointed out, immediately after Clinton spoke. But I think what he did in educating us should be taken into consideration before he is (inaudible). But it doesn’t withstand inspection.
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Whistle-blowers do not run to Russian Federation and try to get protection from Putin. “We do have secrets – maybe too many – but we do have secrets that need to be protected”. If employees are retaliated against, the law defines certain procedures created to get justice for whistbleblowers.
