As former USA defense contractor Edward Snowden continues to receive widespread praise for blowing the whistle on the National Security Agency’s domestic phone surveillance program, a new congressional report said Thursday he is anything but a hero. Sadly, US Congress has yet to issue an official review of the movie, but the House intelligence committee released the next best thing with its report on Snowden himself and boy, is it a doozy.
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The Pardon Snowden campaign, launched Wednesday by three major human rights groups, is urging President Barack Obama to pardon Snowden and allow him to return the US.
The whistleblower is also the subject of an Oliver Stone movie set for release Friday in the United States.
“Rather than avail himself of the many lawful avenues to express legal, moral, or ethical qualms with U.S. intelligence activities, Mr Snowden stole 1.5 million classified documents from National Security Agency networks”.
“Mr. Snowden is not a patriot”.
Now Snowden’s supporters are seeking a presidential pardon because he says he helped his country by revealing secret domestic surveillance programs.
US officials have said Obama is not considering a pardon for Snowden, who is facing USA criminal charges for providing classified information to unauthorized persons.
Most of the files leaked by Edward Snowden were not about privacy invasion, it revealed America’s intelligence and defense programs overseas, the 4-page summary of original 36-page report said.
It also accuses Snowden of sharing classified intelligence with the Russian government and making it incidentally available to other adversaries or enemies of the U.S. This one is awesome: “I reported an XSS (hacking) vulnerability in Central Intelligence Agency annual review system”, Snowden said.
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.
Ben Wizner, Snowden’s attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the committee’ report was an attempt to discredit a “genuine American hero”.
“The enormous value of Mr Snowden’s revelations is clear”, Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth and Amnesty International chief Salil Shetty wrote in The New York Times on Thursday.
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“What we’re hoping is that after the election when Obama is in his final months in office at that stage he can begin to do something that are appropriate as a matter of conscience but politically hard”, Roth told the AP. And one of the most disappointing aspects of his presidency has been his treatment of whistle-blowers and the fact that they have prosecuted more leakers in history than any other administration. But, he said, the Espionage Act does not permit a public interest or whistleblower defense.
