There is no indication that President Obama will grant the pardon. Two full-time staff members have been hired to specifically push for a pardon and manage the overall campaign.
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If Laura Poitras’ Oscar-winning documentary “Citizenfour” was the technical, unflinching, nonfiction telling of the story of Snowden’s explosive NSA leaks, Stone’s film is most definitely the Hollywood version.
Timed to coincide with the release of Oliver Stone’s feature film, Snowden (hitting theaters this Friday), the Pardon Snowden effort (and its website PardonSnowden.org), launched Wednesday morning with a bevvy of high-profile supporters.
“This is an independent campaign that was lead by Amnesty [International], the ACLU and Human Rights Watch”, Snowden told the crowd at the conference (Snowden is under asylum in Moscow and addressed the audience through the use of a telepresence robot).
A number of celebrities, like Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak, actress Susan Sarandon, director Terry Gilliam, Professors Noam Chomsky and Cornel West, and others have lent their voices to the movement for Snowden’s pardon. The support for his cause exceeded his “wildest dreams”, he said.
Snowden insisted he had widespread support, saying the “public, by and large, cares more about these issues far more than I anticipated”. “It’s about us. It’s about our right to dissent”.
In his own appearance, Snowden didn’t want to talk about a potential pardon.
Snowden fled to Russian Federation soon after the NSA leaks became public in June 2013. “I love my family. I think the intelligence community would go ballistic”. “These risks, these burdens that I took on I knew were coming, and no one should be in this position to make these kinds of decisions. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined, three years ago, such an outpouring of solidarity”.
Since then, Snowden’s been in exile in Russian Federation after being charged under the Espionage Act. The almost century old law, passed during World War I, is exceedingly tight and provides no provisions for revelations made in the public interest. The White House maintains that Snowden’s leaks “damaged the United States”.
The advocates say a presidential pardon would put Obama, who leaves office in January, “on the right side of history”.
The ACLU is behind a campaign to prompt President Obama to pardon National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden. “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”.
“It’s worth being optimistic about all those things, but it’s also probably worth paying attention and considering what might the downsides be of this new technology that we’re inheriting”, he says.
“We’re trying to tell people from the rooftops that life is changing”, he said.
He said people today are living “in the greatest crisis of computer security that we have ever seen”. “We must ensure whistleblowers can act again”.
Comey admitted that he keeps a piece of tape over his computer camera, saying that it is a “sensible” practice not unlike locking your home or vehicle.
“With increasing terrorist attacks, security is critical, but not without any accountability or oversight”, Gabriel said in a statement.
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How did a guy who’s against authoritarian governments that spy on their citizens end up in Vladmir Putin’s Russian Federation?
