December 17, 2013 -- Updated 1638 GMT (0038 HKT)
NSA leaker Edward Snowden writes an "open letter to the people of Brazil" offering to help probe U.S. surveillance on them. FULL STORY
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Edward Snowden swore to uphold the U.S. Constitution above all, and
reported massive surveillance of Americans that a judge says violates
the Constitution. So, who can say he's guilty?
FULL STORY
December 17, 2013 -- Updated 1947 GMT (0347 HKT)
Russia has given NSA leaker Edward Snowden temporary asylum.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Kirk Wiebe: Edward Snowden is entitled to amnesty in the U.S. without fear of incarceration
- Wiebe: Snowden reported surveillance of Americans that violated the Constitution
- Wiebe, an NSA whistleblower, says federal employees swear to uphold Constitution
- Wiebe: People who designed, implemented the surveillance also deserve a fair trial
Editor's note: J. Kirk
Wiebe is retired from the National Security Agency, where he worked for
more than 32 years. He received the NSA's second highest award, the
Meritorious Civilian Service Award; the Director of CIA's Meritorious
Unit Award; and a Letter of Commendation from the secretary of the Air
Force, among other awards. He was an NSA whistleblower on matters of
privacy involving massive electronic surveillance.
(CNN) -- Edward Snowden deserves amnesty and the
ability to return to the United States without fear of being
incarcerated for reporting crimes by people in high places in the U.S.
government. Monday's ruling by U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon that
the NSA's widespread collection of millions of Americans' telephone records was unconstitutional bolsters this view.
But for some, whether to
give Snowden amnesty is not an easy matter to reconcile. After all, they
say, he broke laws in divulging classified information.
J. Kirk Wiebe
Indeed, some say he is a
traitor. But just as a member of the U.S. military is not required to
follow an unlawful order, it is proper that an employee of the United
States intelligence community -- NSA, CIA, DIA and others -- should
report any information that concerns law-breaking by the intelligence
agencies or their employees.
An NSA official's
suggestion that amnesty for Snowden could possibly be put on the table
was undoubtedly welcome news for Snowden, yet NSA Director Gen. Keith
Alexander rejected the suggestion.
But how can anyone
believe that Snowden would not be deserving of amnesty? Clearly it is
the government and its senior officials who committed the crime --
people who took oaths to defend the Constitution from enemies both
foreign and domestic and who failed to take to heart the words they
swore to uphold. Indeed, Snowden did not -- nor does any government
employee -- swear allegiance to the president of the United States, or
even to the secretary of Defense or the director of NSA. No, he swore to
uphold and defend the Constitution.
Unfortunately, while
federal law protects whistleblowers who work in other government sectors
from reprisals for truth-telling and have paths for reporting
wrongdoing and mismanagement, those who work in intelligence are
expressly denied such rights. When NSA employees Bill Binney, Tom Drake,
Diane Roark and I submitted a formal complaint about mismanagement at
the agency, the government's response on July 26, 2007, was to send the
FBI to raid our homes, searching them for seven hours and seizing our
computers, phones and other digital media. We are just now getting our
property back after having successfully sued the government in December
2012.
The government even
indicted Tom Drake, although it dropped its criminal charges in the case
against him. Still, for the five of us, it was the equivalent of a
punch in the face and a warning to other would-be "truth-tellers" not to
report wrongful government activities or the government will come after
you.
Snowden writes open letter to Brazil
NSA ruling exonerate Edward Snowden?
Can Edward Snowden get amnesty?
Snowden clearly saw what
the government does to whistleblowers who try to work within government
to fix things that are wrong. He knew that our complaint to the United
States Department of Defense inspector general in September 2002 went
for naught. Although the report agreed that our complaint was
well-founded, nothing happened -- no one was found guilty of wrongful
behavior or waste of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.
Even before writing the
complaint, we -- all longtime and senior NSA employees -- along with
Diane Roark, a senior staffer on the House Permanent Select Subcommittee
on Intelligence, had approached Congress in 2001 about the matter of
illegal collection of data about U.S. citizens. No action. Snowden might
have known that we were ultimately punished by approaching officials,
and even had our security clearances revoked when the FBI raided our
homes -- despite the fact that four of the five of us were not indicted
and none of us was found guilty of committing a crime.
For employees in the
business of intelligence, there are no honest brokers, no viable paths
to follow to report the subverting of the U.S. Constitution. It is the
reason Snowden went first to Hong Kong and ultimately Moscow to seek
refuge. He did not go to those places to give away national secrets,
rather he needed a place to stay that was safe from extradition and
where he could wait while the United States sorted through the facts,
especially those regarding government leaders who violated the most
basic of our nation's laws -- the right to privacy.
It was shocking to see
the interview on MSNBC a few years ago with the former director of NSA,
Michael V. Hayden, and hear him redefine the Fourth Amendment of the
U.S. Constitution. When asked whether NSA had violated the Fourth
Amendment, Hayden said it had not. Hayden said "probable cause" was not
the Fourth Amendment's standard for violating a citizen's privacy -- it
was based on "reasonable suspicion."
Recognizing that the
whole matter of secret presidential orders and extreme interpretations
of the Constitution in regard to executive wartime authorities by the
U.S. Department of Justice could be the subject of a book by themselves,
one thing is clear -- no one asked either the Supreme Court or the
people of the United States whether bulk collection of citizens' phone
metadata was constitutional. As we saw on Monday, Judge Richard Leon
does not think so.
In recent days, Hayden
defended the actions of both the Bush and Obama administrations, stating
that the NSA collection program was "blessed" by all three branches of
the U.S. government.
What Hayden has not said
is that neither the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court nor
Congress had a good understanding of what was going on. The NSA contends
it provided Congress with the opportunity to be briefed on the
surveillance, but some members of Congress dispute that. Snowden's
revelations since June have certainly made it clear that no one --
except the NSA -- believes they had the whole truth about the
extensiveness of its data collection efforts, whether from the Internet
or from the phone system.
Perhaps more germane to
this discussion whether Snowden should receive amnesty and the matter of
who committed the real crime -- Snowden or the government -- is that
the legal basis for NSA in defending its actions can be found in a
single court case called Smith v Maryland (1979) -- which went to the
Supreme Court at a time when there was hardly an internet and nobody
even dreamed there would be cell phones, social network sites or
Twitter.
In this case, touted by
the government as legitimizing the bulk collection of metadata under
Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the police inserted a recording device
at the telephone company to record the metadata -- phone number
originating the call, time of call, number called and duration of
conversation -- associated with a man suspected of robbing a lady. The
alleged thief challenged the constitutionality of the police recording
the metadata associated with the phone call, but the Supreme Court
backed the lower court's decision that doing so under the circumstances
was constitutional.
Now, one might ask how
does the Supreme Court's approval of the collection of metadata
associated with a single phone call made by a suspected thief end up
authorizing the bulk collection of phone metadata of hundreds of
millions of American citizens by the most powerful spy agency in the
world? We all know that the field of law has its quirks, but it's clear
such an interpretation of law does not constitute justice, let alone
make sense.
With those facts as
background, I think most Americans would agree that Edward Snowden
deserves amnesty. In fact, it is those who allowed these programs to be
implemented and developed over the past 12 years who should be
prosecuted. After all, do we not stand for "equal justice for all"?
Snowden hints at Brazil asylum
NSA leaker Edward Snowden writes an "open letter to the people of Brazil" offering to help probe U.S. surveillance on them.
FULL STORY
- 5 questions about the NSA court ruling
- Analyst: This leak equals murder
Snowden's open letter offers to help Brazil investigate NSA surveillance
December 17, 2013 -- Updated 2125 GMT (0525 HKT)National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden poses with German Green party parliamentarian Hans-Christian Stroebele in Moscow on October 31. Stroebele returned from the meeting with a letter from Snowden to German authorities, which was distributed to the media. In it, Snowden said he is confident that with international support, the United States would abandon its efforts to "treat dissent as defection" and "criminalize political speech with felony charges."
HIDE CAPTIONNSA leaker Edward SnowdenSTORY HIGHLIGHTS- NEW: Snowden has agreed to testify via video to a European Parliament panel, sources say
- Snowden's "open letter" was posted online in two places, according to journalist Glenn Greenwald
- Snowden says he has offered to help Brazil look into National Security Agency spying
- He mentions the need for asylum
(CNN) -- National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden has written an "open letter to the people of Brazil" offering to help investigate U.S. surveillance of Brazilian citizens.
The letter was posted on the website pastebin and on the Facebook page of David Michael Miranda, partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald, according to a tweet from Greenwald.In the letter, Snowden says he has told Brazilian lawmakers that he is willing to help investigate "suspected crimes against Brazilian citizens.""I have expressed my willingness to assist wherever appropriate and lawful, but unfortunately the United States government has worked very hard to limit my ability to do so -- going so far as to force down the Presidential Plane of Evo Morales to prevent me from traveling to Latin America!"Until a country grants permanent political asylum, the U.S. government will continue to interfere with my ability to speak."Brazil has been in an uproar over reports of U.S. spying. In September, Brazilian lawmakers said they planned to send a commission to Russia to speak with Snowden, who had allegedly leaked information about U.S. spying against the country's president.Foreign Minister Luiz Alberto Figueiredo called the situation "an inadmissible and unacceptable violation of Brazilian sovereignty."Last month, Brazil acknowledged its own past snooping. The newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo revealed that Brazil spied on foreign diplomats inside Brazil in 2003 and 2004. Its targets included officials from Russia, Iran and the United States."I see the situations as completely different," Brazilian Justice Minister Jose Eduardo Cardozo told the paper.In his letter, Snowden, a former NSA contractor, writes, "Today, if you carry a cell phone in Sao Paolo, the NSA can and does keep track of your location: they do this 5 billion times a day to people around the world. When someone in Florianopolis visits a website, the NSA keeps a record of when it happened and what you did there. If a mother in Porto Alegre calls her son to wish him luck on his university exam, NSA can keep that call log for five years or more. They even keep track of who is having an affair or looking at pornography, in case they need to damage their target's reputation."American Senators tell us that Brazil should not worry, because this is not 'surveillance,' it's 'data collection.' They say it is done to keep you safe. They're wrong. There is a huge difference between legal programs, legitimate spying, legitimate law enforcement -- where individuals are targeted based on a reasonable, individualized suspicion -- and these programs of dragnet mass surveillance that put entire populations under an all-seeing eye and save copies forever. These programs were never about terrorism: they're about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power."Snowden may testifySnowden has agreed to testify, via teleconference, before a civil liberties committee of the European Parliament, sources in the Parliament say.Some within the Parliament opposed the invitation, but the majority supported the idea, the sources said. The testimony may take place in January, they said.It's unsure whether Snowden would testify live or would be pre-recorded, the sources said, adding that his testimony is expected to cover all aspects of NSA surveillance internationally.COPY http://edition.cnn.com/
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