“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 bipartisan letter said. Accused of violating the Espionage Act, he faces at least 30 years in jail.
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The 36-page report is classified, but officials released a shorter, unclassified version.
In the unclassified summary findings of a two-year investigation into Snowden’s actions, the committee lays out why it takes such a dim view of Snowden and the actions he carried out.
A pardon by the president appears to be unlikely.
The report goes to great lengths to remind Obama of his own words and opinion on the matter, quoting a speech made by the president in 2013 where he called Snowden a criminal.
Mr Snowden insists he has not shared the full cache of 1.5 million classified documents with anyone. It has been widely reported that the NSA can not determine what data he copied and that it based its estimate on the number of documents to which he gained access. “They did so responsibly and carefully, and their efforts have led to historic reforms”, Wizner said.
“It is also not clear Snowden understood the numerous privacy protections that govern the activities of the [Intelligence Community]”, the summary says.
The US government has struggled to manage the effects of Snowden’s disclosures, which brought to light extensive its digital surveillance programmes and have led to dramatic changes in digital communications security and global data-sharing arrangements, including the annullation of a data-sharing treaty between the US and the EU.
Presumably the thinking is that if a pardon for Snowden is to be secured, they have a much better chance of persuading Obama than likely next President Hillary Clinton – who is thought to be a level of magnitude more hawkish on national security issues. The latter being the NSA’s program to request user data from technology giants including Facebook and Google. We think the proper response to Edward Snowden shouldnt be what the punishment should be, it should be how to thank him.
At the time, he was in Hong Kong.
Snowden ended up stranded at Moscow’s global airport after his passport was annulled by the United States government when trying to fly to South America.
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In the ensuing debate over surveillance, leaders of intelligence oversight committees – particularly in the House – were some of the most outspoken defenders of the programs he had disclosed and some of his harshest critics. Rather, investigators interviewed people with “substantively similar knowledge as the possible witnesses” as well as those who had reviewed reports of interviews with Snowden’s colleagues.
