Civil liberties advocates have launched a national publicity campaign calling on President Obama to pardon Snowden, who has been accused of espionage, before he leaves office.
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“The U.S. government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars, and will eventually spend billions, to attempt to mitigate the damage Snowden caused”, the House Intelligence Committee said in an unclassified summary of its 36-page report.
Also, it says, Snowden actually violated – not safeguarded – the rights of Americans.
He added, “The truth is that Edward Snowden and the journalists with whom he worked did the job that the House Intelligence Committee was supposed to do: bring meaningful oversight to the USA intelligence community”.
“He put our service members and the American people at risk after perceived slights by his superiors”, he said. “I look forward to his eventual return to the United States, where he will face justice for his damaging crimes”. But the summary contained strong words about Snowden’s actions and background. It had been operating with the approval of a federal court that oversees classified surveillance programs.
The entire panel – Democrats and Republicans alike – signed a letter sent directly to the president, asserting that Snowden is “not a patriot”.
He added that the report lacked substance, agreeing with Snowden, who said the report “diminishes the committee”. The main point, however, is a claim that he was “not a whistleblower”.
The majority of the documents, the authors also argue, “have nothing to do with programs impacting individual privacy interests”.
The idea that a Hollywood thriller could completely change Edward Snowden’s life seems surreal, yet that’s exactly what “Snowden” director Oliver Stone hopes will happen for the Natural Security Agency’s controversial whistleblower. He fled to Russian Federation and now faces charges in the United States that could land him in prison for up to 30 years.
Wanted in the U.S. for violating the Espionage Act, he faces at least 30 years in jail if convicted there.
Edward Snowden, who is in Moscow, is seen on a giant screen during a live video conference for an interview as part of Amnesty International event in Paris, France, Dec. 10, 2014.
“They’ve been using the same rhetoric about damage to national security for three and a half years and have produced absolutely no evidence of concrete harm”, he said.
In addition to the government asking internet companies to turn over data about their users, the documents leaked by Snowden revealed that the USA physically intercepted routers, servers and other network equipment in order to install surveillance tools before they were shipped to users.
The committee didn’t release the full report to the public because it includes classified information.
“One of them we would be is to pardon Snowden”, he said.
USA officials have said Obama is not considering a pardon for Snowden, who is facing US criminal charges for providing classified information to unauthorized persons. Instead, it relied on interviews with US intelligence officials.
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The summary calls Snowden a longtime “serial exaggerator and fabricator”, and suggests he stole the files not only out of civic duty but because he got in a “workplace spat with NSA managers” two weeks earlier and was reprimanded.
