Washington, Estados Unidos. El Gobierno estadounidense debería tener clemencia con Edward Snowden o
ofrecerle algún acuerdo legal debido al valor público de sus revelaciones sobre
el extenso programa de espionaje de la Agencia de Seguridad Nacional, dijo el diario The New York Times en un editorial, mientras que The Guardian
instó al presidente Barack Obama a perdonar al ex contratista.
En su
editorial principal, el diario dijo que ahora los estadounidenses entienden hasta
qué punto fueron vigiladas sus llamadas telefónicas, correos electrónicos y
otro tipo de datos.
La
información entregada por Snowden a periodistas condujo a una necesaria
revisión legal de la recopilación de inteligencia y llevó a que un panel
presidencial pidiera una gran reforma a punto de la agencia, conocida por sus
siglas en inglés de NSA.
"Considerando
el enorme valor de la información que reveló, y los abusos que expuso, el señor
Snowden merece algo mejor que una vida en permanente exilio, temor y
fugas", escribió la junta editorial del New York Times. "Puede que
haya cometido un crimen al hacerlo, pero le hizo un gran favor a su país".
The
Guardian, un periódico británico que junto con The Washington Post recibió
documentos filtrados por Snowden, también instó al presidente Barack Obama a
perdonar al ex contratista en un editorial publicado.
"Esperamos
que mentes frías en la actual Gobierno estén trabajando en una estrategia que
permita al señor Snowden regresar a Estados Unidos con dignidad, y que el
presidente use sus poderes ejecutivos para tratarlo humanamente y de una forma
que sea un ejemplo sobre el valor de quienes denuncian y de la libre
expresión", dijo The Guardian.
Snowden,
que vive en Rusia bajo asilo temporal, filtró el año pasado documentos que
recolectó mientras trabajaba para la NSA. Estados Unidos lo acusó de espionaje
y podría presentar otros cargos en su contra.
Las
filtraciones desataron un debate sobre hasta qué punto puede el Gobierno de
Estados Unidos recopilar información para proteger a sus ciudadanos del
terrorismo y generó varias demandas.
La
semana pasada un juez federal determinó que la recolección de registros de
llamadas telefónicas por parte de la NSA era legítima, mientras que otro
magistrado había cuestionado poco antes la constitucionalidad del programa de
vigilancia. Es probable que el tema sea llevado ahora a la Suprema Corte.
Rusia
otorgó el asilo a Snowden hasta agosto.
El
estadounidense podría enfrentar hasta 30 años de cárcel por los cargos de
espionaje, aunque según el Times es mucho más probable que reciba cadena
perpetua.
El
nuevo vicedirector de la NSA, Rick Ledgett, recientemente dijo que
era partidario de negociar una amnistía con Snowden a cambio de documentos de
seguridad en su posesión. La Casa Blanca rechazó la idea.
La
junta editorial del New York Times dijo que Snowden "estaba claramente
justificado" en sus filtraciones debido a que las leyes actuales sobre
denuncias no cubren a los contratistas privados.
El
editorial enumeró varias maneras en que la NSA violó la confianza del público
estadounidenses, diciendo que infringió las leyes federales de privacidad
"miles de veces al año", socavó el sistema básico de codificación de
Internet e infiltró las redes de comunicación de centros de datos en todo el
mundo.
Obama,
que instó a Snowden a volver a Estados Unidos, debería en cambio darle "un
incentivo para regresar a casa", dijo el diario.
"Cuando
alguien revela que funcionarios del Gobierno han violado la ley rutinaria y
deliberadamente, esa persona no debería enfrenar cadena perpetua a manos de ese
mismo Gobierno", dijo el periódico.
El Financiero.com.mx. 02/01/14
Edward
Snowden, Whistle-Blower
Nueva York, Estados Unidos. Seven
months ago, the world began to learn the vast scope of the National Security
Agency’s reach into the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the United
States and around the globe, as it collects information about their phone
calls, their email messages, their friends and contacts, how they spend their
days and where they spend their nights. The public learned in great detail how
the agency has exceeded its mandate and abused its authority, prompting outrage
at kitchen tables and at the desks of Congress, which may finally begin to
limit these practices.
The
revelations have already prompted two federal judges to accuse the N.S.A. of
violating the Constitution (although a third, unfortunately, found the dragnet
surveillance to be legal). A panel appointed by President Obama issued a
powerful indictment of the agency’s invasions of privacy and called for a major
overhaul of its operations.
All of
this is entirely because of information provided to journalists by Edward
Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor who stole a trove of highly classified
documents after he became disillusioned with the agency’s voraciousness. Mr.
Snowden is now living in Russia, on the run from American charges of espionage
and theft, and he faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life looking
over his shoulder.
Considering
the enormous value of the information he has revealed, and the abuses he has
exposed, Mr. Snowden deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and
flight. He may have committed a crime to do so, but he has done his country a
great service. It is time for the United States to offer Mr. Snowden a plea
bargain or some form of clemency that would allow him to return home, face at
least substantially reduced punishment in light of his role as a
whistle-blower, and have the hope of a life advocating for greater privacy and
far stronger oversight of the runaway intelligence community.
Mr.
Snowden is currently charged in a criminal complaint with two violations of the
Espionage Act involving unauthorized communication of classified information,
and a charge of theft of government property. Those three charges carry prison
sentences of 10 years each, and when the case is presented to a grand jury for
indictment, the government is virtually certain to add more charges, probably
adding up to a life sentence that Mr. Snowden is understandably trying to
avoid.
The
president said in August that Mr. Snowden should come home to face those
charges in court and suggested that if Mr. Snowden had wanted to avoid criminal
charges he could have simply told his superiors about the abuses, acting, in
other words, as a whistle-blower.
“If the
concern was that somehow this was the only way to get this information out to
the public, I signed an executive order well before Mr. Snowden leaked this
information that provided whistle-blower protection to the intelligence
community for the first time,” Mr. Obama said at a news conference. “So there
were other avenues available for somebody whose conscience was stirred and
thought that they needed to question government actions.”
In
fact, that executive order did not apply to contractors, only to intelligence
employees, rendering its protections useless to Mr. Snowden. More important,
Mr. Snowden told The Washington Post earlier this month that he did report his
misgivings to two superiors at the agency, showing them the volume of data
collected by the N.S.A., and that they took no action. (The N.S.A. says there
is no evidence of this.) That’s almost certainly because the agency and its
leaders don’t consider these collection programs to be an abuse and would never
have acted on Mr. Snowden’s concerns.
In
retrospect, Mr. Snowden was clearly justified in believing that the only way to
blow the whistle on this kind of intelligence-gathering was to expose it to the
public and let the resulting furor do the work his superiors would not. Beyond
the mass collection of phone and Internet data, consider just a few of the
violations he revealed or the legal actions he provoked:
■ The
N.S.A. broke federal privacy laws, or exceeded its authority, thousands of
times per year, according to the agency’s own internal auditor.
■ The
agency broke into the communications links of major data centers around the
world, allowing it to spy on hundreds of millions of user accounts and
infuriating the Internet companies that own the centers. Many of those
companies are now scrambling to install systems that the N.S.A. cannot yet
penetrate.
■ The
N.S.A. systematically undermined the basic encryption systems of the Internet,
making it impossible to know if sensitive banking or medical data is truly
private, damaging businesses that depended on this trust.
■ His
leaks revealed that James Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence,
lied to Congress when testifying in March that the N.S.A. was not collecting
data on millions of Americans. (There has been no discussion of punishment for
that lie.)
■ The
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court rebuked the N.S.A. for repeatedly
providing misleading information about its surveillance practices, according to
a ruling made public because of the Snowden documents. One of the practices
violated the Constitution, according to the chief judge of the court.
■ A
federal district judge ruled earlier this month that the
phone-records-collection program probably violates the Fourth Amendment of the
Constitution. He called the program “almost Orwellian” and said there was no
evidence that it stopped any imminent act of terror.
The
shrill brigade of his critics say Mr. Snowden has done profound damage to
intelligence operations of the United States, but none has presented the
slightest proof that his disclosures really hurt the nation’s security. Many of
the mass-collection programs Mr. Snowden exposed would work just as well if
they were reduced in scope and brought under strict outside oversight, as the
presidential panel recommended.
When
someone reveals that government officials have routinely and deliberately
broken the law, that person should not face life in prison at the hands of the
same government. That’s why Rick Ledgett, who leads the N.S.A.’s task force on
the Snowden leaks, recently told CBS News that he would consider amnesty if Mr.
Snowden would stop any additional leaks. And it’s why President Obama should
tell his aides to begin finding a way to end Mr. Snowden’s vilification and
give him an incentive to return home.
The Editorial Board. The New York Times.com. 01/01/14
Snowden
affair: the case for a pardon
Londres, Reino Unido. Snowden
gave classified information to journalists, even though he knew the likely
consequences. That was an act of courage
In an
interview with the Washington Post just before Christmas, Edward Snowden
declared his mission accomplished. At first sight it seemed a grandiose, even
hubristic, statement. In fact, it betrayed a kind of modesty about the
intentions of the former NSA analyst. "I didn't want to change
society," he explained. "I wanted to give society a chance to
determine if it should change itself."
Mr
Snowden – through journalists, in the absence of meaningful, reliable
democratic oversight – had given people enough knowledge about the nature of
modern intelligence-gathering to allow an informed debate. Voters might, in
fact, decide they were prepared to put privacy above security – but at least
they could make that choice on the basis of information.
That
debate is now actively happening. In a remarkable week before Christmas, a US
judge found that the "almost Orwellian" techniques revealed by Mr
Snowden were probably unconstitutional. A review panel of security experts
convened by President Obama himself made more than 40 recommendations for
change. The leaders of the eight major US tech companies met the president to
express their alarm. Parliamentarians, presidents, digital engineers,
academics, lawyers and civil rights activists around the world have begun a
wide-ranging and intense discussion. Even the more reasonable western security
chiefs acknowledge a debate was necessary.
Man
does civic duty, and is warmly thanked? Of course not. Should Mr Snowden return
to his homeland he can confidently expect to be prosecuted under the Espionage
Act and, if convicted – like Chelsea Manning before him – locked away for a
very long time. For all his background in constitutional law and human rights,
Mr Obama has shown little patience for whistleblowers: his administration has
used the Espionage Act against leakers of classified information far more than
any of his predecessors. It is difficult to imagine Mr Obama giving Mr Snowden
the pardon he deserves. There has been some talk of an amnesty – with NSA
officials reportedly prepared to consider a deal allowing Mr Snowden to return
to the US in exchange for any documents to which he may still have access. The
former head of MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller recently predicted such an
outcome, though Mr Obama's own security adviser, Susan Rice, thought he didn't
"deserve" it. A former CIA director, James Woolsey, suggested he
"should be hanged by his neck until he is dead".
The
first world war vintage Espionage Act is, like its British counterpart, the
Official Secrets Act, a clumsy and crude law to use against government
officials communicating with journalists on matters where there is a clear
public interest – if only because it does not allow a defendant to argue such a
public interest in court. It is at least possible that, should he ever face
trial, there could be a "jury nullification", where a defendant's
peers acquit him even though technically guilty – as in the UK in the 1985 case
of Clive Ponting, a civil servant who leaked defence information. Such an
outcome would be a humiliating rebuke to those bringing a prosecution.
Mr
Snowden gave classified information to journalists, even though he knew the
likely consequences. That was an act of some moral courage. Presidents – from
Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan – have issued pardons. The debate that Mr
Snowden has facilitated will no doubt be argued over in the US supreme court.
If those justices agree with Mr Obama's own review panel and Judge Richard Leon
in finding that Mr Snowden did, indeed, raise serious matters of public
importance which were previously hidden (or, worse, dishonestly concealed), is
it then conceivable that he could be treated as a traitor or common felon? We
hope that calm heads within the present administration are working on a
strategy to allow Mr Snowden to return to the US with dignity, and the
president to use his executive powers to treat him humanely and in a manner
that would be a shining example about the value of whistleblowers and of free
speech itself.
The Guardian.com. 01/01/14
“Quien
dice la verdad no comete un crimen”: Edward Snowden
México, Distrito Federal. El exanalista de inteligencia de la Agencia Nacional de
Seguridad de Estados Unidos, Edward Snowden, abogó por la libertad de expresión
y las sociedades abiertas en un manifiesto que publicó el semanario Der
Spiegel.
“Quien
dice la verdad no comete un crimen”, sostuvo Snowden en el manifiesto que,
según la revista, escribió en su exilio en Moscú el 1 de noviembre y le hizo
llegar a través de un canal cifrado ese mismo día.
Criticó
que algunos gobiernos hayan reaccionado a sus revelaciones de los últimos meses
sobre las prácticas masivas de espionaje “con una campaña de persecución nunca
antes vista”.
El
analista informático recordó “que la vigilancia masiva es un problema global
que necesita soluciones globales” y demandó que la existencia de tecnología del
espionaje no domine a la política.
“Tenemos
la obligación moral de velar por que nuestras leyes y nuestros valores limiten
los programas de vigilancia y protejan los derechos humanos”, urgió Snowden, y
se mostró convencido de que esto sólo podrá conseguirse “a través de un debate
abierto, sin contemplaciones y enfocado en la materia”.
Proceso.com.mx. 03/11/13
