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Hillary Clinton is Wrong About Edward Snowden (New Yorker)
Last edited Thu Oct 15, 2015, 08:56 AM - Edit history (1)
from http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/hillary-clinton-is-wrong-about-edward-snowden
This from someone who thought Hillary actually won the debate.
The commentary is about Hillary's reply to the question about Snowden:
He broke the laws of the United States. He could have been a whistle-blower. He could have gotten all of the protections of being a whistle-blower. He could have raised all of the issues he has raised. And I think there would have been a positive response to that. In addition, he stole very important information that has unfortunately fallen into a lot of the wrong hands. So, I don’t think he should be brought home without facing the music.
Did Snowden break the law? In passing classified information to reporters, he did. The Espionage Act explicitly prohibits such actions. But this violation surely needs to be balanced against the public service that Snowden carried out in informing the American public about the extent to which their government had been spying on them. “I think Snowden played a very important role in educating the American people to the degree in which our civil liberties and our constitutional rights are being undermined,” Bernie Sanders pointed out, immediately after Clinton spoke. “He did—he did break the law, and I think there should be a penalty to that. But I think what he did in educating us should be taken into consideration.”
Evidently, Clinton disagrees. In saying that Snowden should have invoked “all of the protections of being a whistle-blower,” she was repeating an argument that President Obama has made. But it doesn’t withstand inspection. The Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989, which provided legal immunity to government employers who reveal lawbreaking, malfeasance, or abuse of authority, doesn’t apply to employees of the intelligence agencies, including contractors like Snowden. These workers are covered by the 1998 Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act; but, as, Michael German, a senior counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, pointed out, in 2013, “it is no more than a trap.”...“Reporting internally through the ICWPA only identifies the whistleblowers, leaving them vulnerable to retaliation,” he noted. “The examples of former NSA official Thomas Drake, former House Intelligence Committee staffer Diane Roark and former CIA officer Sabrina De Sousa show [this] too well.”
...
Finally, what about Clinton’s claim that some of the information Snowden took from the N.S.A. has “fallen into a lot of wrong hands”? The assertion echoed a report, published in June by the Sunday Times, which quoted anonymous officials in the British government who said that Russia and China had decrypted some of the files taken by Snowden...At this stage, though, there has been absolutely no confirmation of this allegation, nor even that Russia or China obtained any of the classified material that Snowden accumulated...as Glenn Greenwald, another journalist who worked with Snowden, pointed out on Twitter: “It is ironic how Hillary used the same slimy innuendo against Snowden that’s been used for months about her emails.”
So what was Clinton up to? Perhaps she is such a pillar of establishment thinking, and of the national-security state, that she really believes what she said. Perhaps she was just using Snowden to burnish her credentials as a hawk and appeal to the American public at large, which is rather less sympathetic to Snowden than most progressives are...Ultimately, speculating about motives doesn’t get us very far. The fact is that Clinton said what she said, and she said it unapologetically, just as she did in telling Cooper that she didn’t regret voting for the Patriot Act. At least some Democratic voters—those who take seriously the right to privacy established under the Fourth Amendment—will have been listening.
Evidently, Clinton disagrees. In saying that Snowden should have invoked “all of the protections of being a whistle-blower,” she was repeating an argument that President Obama has made. But it doesn’t withstand inspection. The Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989, which provided legal immunity to government employers who reveal lawbreaking, malfeasance, or abuse of authority, doesn’t apply to employees of the intelligence agencies, including contractors like Snowden. These workers are covered by the 1998 Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act; but, as, Michael German, a senior counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, pointed out, in 2013, “it is no more than a trap.”...“Reporting internally through the ICWPA only identifies the whistleblowers, leaving them vulnerable to retaliation,” he noted. “The examples of former NSA official Thomas Drake, former House Intelligence Committee staffer Diane Roark and former CIA officer Sabrina De Sousa show [this] too well.”
...
Finally, what about Clinton’s claim that some of the information Snowden took from the N.S.A. has “fallen into a lot of wrong hands”? The assertion echoed a report, published in June by the Sunday Times, which quoted anonymous officials in the British government who said that Russia and China had decrypted some of the files taken by Snowden...At this stage, though, there has been absolutely no confirmation of this allegation, nor even that Russia or China obtained any of the classified material that Snowden accumulated...as Glenn Greenwald, another journalist who worked with Snowden, pointed out on Twitter: “It is ironic how Hillary used the same slimy innuendo against Snowden that’s been used for months about her emails.”
So what was Clinton up to? Perhaps she is such a pillar of establishment thinking, and of the national-security state, that she really believes what she said. Perhaps she was just using Snowden to burnish her credentials as a hawk and appeal to the American public at large, which is rather less sympathetic to Snowden than most progressives are...Ultimately, speculating about motives doesn’t get us very far. The fact is that Clinton said what she said, and she said it unapologetically, just as she did in telling Cooper that she didn’t regret voting for the Patriot Act. At least some Democratic voters—those who take seriously the right to privacy established under the Fourth Amendment—will have been listening.
(More at link.)
(post edited to bold certain lines for emphasis, for those whose eyes glaze at 4 paragraphs of solid text
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13 replies
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