He s now campaigning for President Obama to pardon him before his presidential term is up.
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“I think it’s no exaggeration to say this man changed the world”, Naureen Shah, the director of Amnesty International USA’s Security and Human Rights Program, said at a press conference in NY to announce the Pardon Snowden initiative.
“This man changed the world”, said Naureen Shah of Amnesty International.
Snowden himself asked Obama for a pardon in an interview with The Guardian published on Tuesday, telling the British newspaper by video-link: “If not for these disclosures, if not for these revelations, we would be worse off”.
“I love my country”, Snowden said. He said he was moved by the outpouring of support.
“I want to know what he was thinking, walk in his shoes”, Stone said. “That is not what Snowden did”, Press Secretary Josh Earnest said.
He said people today are living “in the greatest crisis of computer security that we have ever seen”.
In 2013, Snowden leaked a trove of classified documents about top-secret surveillance programs to journalists.
Stone ends with a shot of the real Snowden speaking from Russian Federation, where he has temporary asylum, to a crowd via the Internet.
“He should come home to the United States, and be judged by a jury of his peers-not hide behind the cover of an authoritarian regime”, she added. “He is accused of leaking classified information and there is no question his actions have inflicted serious harms on our national security”.
He insisted that Snowden “will of course be afforded the rights that are due to every American citizen in our criminal justice system, but we believe that he should return to the United States and face those charges”.
The site also features quotes from prominent figures like Attorney General Eric Holder supporting Snowden.
Other supporters of the PardonSnowden.org campaign, launched Wednesday, are Harvard law professor and tech policy author Lawrence Lessig; tech investor Esther Dyson; noted cryptographer and MIT professor Ron Rivest; and Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow. “Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined, three years ago, such an outpouring of solidarity”.
Amnesty International has repeatedly called on the US government to drop the charges against Edward Snowden, or to guarantee him a public interest defense in the event of his case going to trial.
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“Mr. Snowden’s risky decision to steal and disclose classified information had severe consequences for the security of our country and the people who work day in and day out to protect it”, Lisa Monaco, the President’s Advisor on Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, wrote in a response to the request.
