We are going to be doing both a mass signature campaign around the world and trying to get prominent individuals and organizations to join our call to President Obama to pardon Snowden before he leaves office, he added.
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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 US national security.
The House Intelligence Committee report on September 15 accused Snowden of leaking secrets that “caused tremendous damage” to US security. “In light of his long list of exaggerations and outright fabrications detailed in this report, no one should take him at his word”. “And that’s why the policy of the Obama administration is that Mr. Snowden should return to the United States and face the very serious charges that he’s facing”.
Snowden went to Twitter to debunk the claims line by line, clarifying that data he exfiltrated was from an approved data handler and not an unapproved one-an attempt to “conflate my authorized government work with my unauthorized whistleblowing”, he tweeted-and reminding the committee that the mass surveillance programs he exposed were ruled illegal by a federal appeals court past year.
“Snowden was not a whistleblower”, the report continues to say. The committee also described Snowden as a “serial exaggerator and fabricator”.
It rejected his view of himself as a whistleblower, and said he was a disgruntled employee whose actions did nothing more than help USA enemies. It says that Snowden “failed basic annual training for NSA employees on Section 702” – a controversial part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that allows for the mass collection of information on foreign communications, which Snowden’s later disclosures threw into the global spotlight. According to the investigation, Snowden in mid-2012 had a “fiery email argument ” with a supervisor, for which he was reprimanded.
“Bottom line: after ‘two years of investigation, ‘ the American people deserve better”, he wrote.
Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said the probe revealed that the vast majority of what Snowden took had nothing to do with American privacy.
Among what is likely to be the report’s more controversial claims is the assertion that Snowden took some 1.5 million documents.
“If House Intel Committee had done its job of exercising oversight over NSA, there’d have been no Snowden”. But executive branch officials have said they have never found evidence he had been working with or for anyone else. “If you don’t want leaks, don’t build a secret, illegal system of mass surveillance and then hide it and lie about it to the public”.
Snowden’s case for a pardon may not be entirely hopeless.
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In a July 2015 response to a petition to pardon Snowden, the White House said he should “come home to the United States, and be judged by a jury of his peers”.
