Edward Snowden addressed specific claims of the report by the House Intel Committee, which accused him of lying about his record, cheating on his exams, and becoming a whistleblower due to personal grievances.
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The 33-year-old was speaking ahead of the opening of a film about him at the same time as a committee of senior USA politicians denounced him as a “serial exaggerator and fabricator” but argued he does not fit the profile of a whistleblower. It also makes you reconsider Snowden if you ever thought of him as a traitor or snake; he put his country’s (and perhaps this world’s) citizens before his own life, exposing violating and illegal practices being conducted by the government.
The campaign, supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch, asks supporters to sign a letter asking President Barack Obama to pardon the former NSA contractor.
It also set off a fierce debate that pitted civil libertarians concerned about privacy against more hawkish lawmakers fearful about losing counterterrorism tools.
The committee rejects the characterization of Snowden as a whistle-blower, arguing, as other intelligence officials have in the past, that “the Committee found no evidence that Snowden took any official effort to express concerns about US intelligence activities – legal, moral, or otherwise – to any oversight officials within the USA govemnent, despite numerous avenues for him to do so”.
The Republican-led committee released a three-page unclassified summary of its two-year bipartisan examination of how Snowden was able to remove the documents from secure NSA networks, what the documents contained and the damage their removal caused to USA national security.
Several prominent human rights groups have launched a campaign to convince President Barack Obama to pardon Snowden, who is living in exile in Russian Federation.
Snowden, of course, made global headlines in 2013 when he leaked classified details on the National Security Agency’s bulk surveillance programme to The Guardian and confirmed to the world that yes, the United States security services are hoovering up literally all of our internet data. In the scenes in his hotel room in Hong Kong where his paranoia of the government listening in or finding him is supposed to be running high, Gordon-Levitt as Snowden seems to be nearly indifferent to telling his story to the press and the documentary filmmaker. Critics are split on “Snowden” just as opinion is divided on the actions of the real man, but Levitt plays him so well, that when the real Edward Snowden shows up in the film’s closing minutes, I thought for a moment I was still watching the actor. Snowden is the 33-year-old, ex-CIA contractor who spilled great gobs of National Security Agency secrets to the Washington Post and the London Guardian in 2013.
The report also painted him as a “serial exaggerator and fabricator” who chose to lash out against his colleagues following a “workplace spat”, after he was reprimanded multiple times and failed to pass yearly NSA tests, which he claimed were “rigged.” .
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told the media on September 12 that Snowden is “charged with serious crimes, and it’s the policy of the [Obama] administration that Snowden should return to the United States and face those charges”, ABC news reported.
Snowden insists he has not shared the full cache of 1.5 million classified documents with anyone.
“Finally, the Committee remains concerned that more than three years after the start of the unauthorised disclosures, NSA, and the intelligence community as a whole, have not done enough to minimise the risk of another massive unauthorised disclosure”, the executive summary says.
Edward Snowden was a “disgruntled employee” and not a “principled whistleblower”, according to a report from Congress released Thursday, which comes amid mounting pressure for a presidential pardon. “Diminishes them”, tweeted Snowden, who says he no longer has private access to any of the documents he leaked.
Two weeks before he began to download classified documents at an NSA installation in Hawaii, the report said, he was reprimanded after “engaging in a workplace spat” with managers.
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Speaking with the stars in the film, it is highly unlikely they would agree with the report’s findings.
