In the latest &#8220;<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-138-glenn-greenwald" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Sunday Special</a>&#8221; with Daily Wire editor emeritus <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/the-ben-shapiro-show?utm_campaign=shapiro&amp;utm_medium=paid&amp;utm_source=googlesearch&amp;utm_content=na_traffic&amp;cid=shapiro&amp;mid=g&amp;xid=0&amp;gclid=Cj0KCQjwu-KiBhCsARIsAPztUF1-5cYmut3-xEFn29xPUE0gd9reVpl4xL9gBbJvrH_sx63xlU0lHucaArdFEALw_wcB" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Ben Shapiro</a>, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/glenn-greenwald" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Glenn Greenwald</a> reveals details about his bombshell 2013 reporting on the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/national-security-agency-nsa" target="_blank" rel="noopener">NSA</a> and former NSA sub-contractor <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/edward-snowden" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Edward Snowden</a>, and explains why American institutions have targeted and continue to target former President Donald Trump.
Greenwald, a constitutional lawyer and bestselling author, told Shapiro during their hour-plus long sit-down that he firmly believes Snowden intended to act as a patriot and was not in any way working with an adversarial government, like Russia.
&#8220;[Snowden&#8217;s] father was in the Coast Guard, he was kind of a lower-middle class family, he didn&#8217;t really have a lot of educational opportunities, and after 9/11, he wanted to go and fight for his country, including in Iraq,&#8221; Greenwald said of Snowden. &#8220;He wanted to be enlisted in the U.S. Army — broke his legs in basic training, and instead ended up at the CIA. He was a true believer in what he was being told about what the security state does, that it protects the greatest democracy in the world, the United States, and that it does so with good intentions, and he wanted to be a part of that.&#8221;
After he saw that the NSA was &#8220;turning its powers inward on the American people,&#8221; he knew he had to &#8220;blow the whistle,&#8221; Greenwald continued. &#8220;He decided not to dump it all onto the Internet like he could have done if you wanted to harm the United States; he didn&#8217;t want to sell it to foreign powers, like he could have done and got very rich. He, in fact, came to journalists and told us, only release the information that you believe the public needs to know to understand these issues, and keep everything a secret that might endanger people, or in which you&#8217;re in doubt. And to this day, we&#8217;ve only released a small portion of that archive in accordance with his direction, because he really was acting patriotically.&#8221;
&#8220;You may disagree with the methods and all of that, but there&#8217;s no question, for me at least, that his motive was pure, which was that he was offended that the Internet — which is supposed to be this technological innovation designed to empower the citizenry, free us from centralized state and corporate control — was instead degraded into the opposite, the most powerful force for surveillance and coercion ever invented in human history.&#8221;
Greenwald also said Snowden is now in Russia because the Obama administration stopped his attempted route to Latin America, where he was going to get asylum, effectively trapping him in Russia. 
&#8220;To get there, he had to transit from Hong Kong, where he was meeting with us, through Russia and then Havana and onto Latin America,&#8221; Greenwald said. &#8220;Ben Rhodes, in his book, a senior national security official for the Obama administration, boasted of the fact that they knew Snowden was trying to get out of Russia and trying to get to Latin America. They called the Cubans, at which point they were negotiating the lifting of the embargo with Cuba, and they said, &#8216;If you have any hope of getting this embargo lifted, you better not let Edward Snowden pass safely through Havana. We want him trapped in Russia.&#8217; The Cubans withdrew their offer of safe passage, and they trapped him in Russia.&#8221;
&#8220;He didn&#8217;t choose to be in Russia,&#8221; Greenwald said of Snowden. &#8220;He never wanted to be in Russia as an American. He has an American wife, he has two kids; he wants to come back home. They trapped him in Russia and then they turned around and said, &#8216;Oh, look, he&#8217;s in Russia. That&#8217;s proof that he&#8217;s somehow working for a foreign power.'&#8221;
Greenwald also discussed how the political establishment and U.S. institutions, such as the FBI and CIA, are uniquely threatened by Trump due to the former president&#8217;s challenges to the status quo in Washington.
&#8220;I think what happened with Trump is, [&#8230;] he began questioning things that no presidential candidate that&#8217;s viable would ever have questioned previously, such as, for example, the ongoing viability of NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization),&#8221; he said.
&#8220;Whether NATO is viable, we can debate that, but you can&#8217;t debate that. That was declared off-limits,&#8221; Greenwald continued. &#8220;And when Trump started doing those things, or questioning the CIA attempt to remove Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and the entire premise of the U.S. posture about this war, he became a real threat to the permanent power centers in Washington. When he started kind of saying everything there is dirty: &#8216;It&#8217;s a swamp. I could get any politician on the phone I wanted by writing them a check and they&#8217;ll do my bidding.&#8217; This started to really threaten, I think, the stability not of one party or the other, but just of the entire status quo order in Washington.&#8221;
&#8220;They, for that reason, viewed him as a very unique threat and united to try and sabotage first his campaign and then his presidency,&#8221; he said. &#8220;Even if you hate Donald Trump, even if you agree that he&#8217;s a danger, this unique danger, which I don&#8217;t, [what&#8217;s] at least as dangerous, if not more so, is the fact that these institutions are now very willing to interfere in our domestic politics way beyond what they were ever supposed to do. And I regard that, and not any particular politician like Donald Trump, as the greatest threat to our democracy.&#8221;
Greenwald and Shapiro also talked about the state of journalism and social media censorship, and debated, from opposing viewpoints, U.S. foreign policy and American interventionism.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-138-glenn-greenwald" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Ben Shapiro Show: Sunday Special featuring Glenn Greenwald </a>

Glenn Greenwald, Ben Shapiro

Glenn Greenwald Talks Edward Snowden, Institutions Targeting Trump, And More In Latest Ben Shapiro ‘Sunday Special’

Ben Shapiro

Edward Snowden

Glenn Greenwald

Russia

U.S.

Adding to a trend of polling Twitter on significant issues, Elon Musk is asking users to opine on whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden should be pardoned.
Both Assange and Snowden are facing serious charges in the United States but are regarded by their supporters as critical whistleblowers of national security secrets.
&#8220;I am not expressing an opinion, but did promise to conduct this poll. Should Assange and Snowden be pardoned?&#8221; Musk asked in a tweet on Saturday evening. More than 14 hours into the 24-hour poll, with more than 2.6 million responses, a little more than 80 percent of users chose &#8220;yes.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
I am not expressing an opinion, but did promise to conduct this poll.
Should Assange and Snowden be pardoned?
&mdash; Elon Musk (@elonmusk) <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1599224347121500160?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 4, 2022</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Assange, a 51-year-old from Australia, is best known for his leadership of WikiLeaks, a group that has given a platform for whistleblowers to release sensitive documents. That includes publishing documents stolen from Democrats during the 2016 election cycle.
<a class="c-link" tabindex="-1" href="https://get.dailywire.com/subscribe/plus?utm_campaign=dwplus&amp;utm_medium=editorial&amp;utm_source=dwsite&amp;cid=dwplus&amp;mid=z&amp;xid=0" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-stringify-link="https://get.dailywire.com/subscribe/plus?utm_campaign=dwplus&amp;utm_medium=editorial&amp;utm_source=dwsite&amp;cid=dwplus&amp;mid=z&amp;xid=0" data-sk="tooltip_parent" data-remove-tab-index="true">TIRED OF THE LEGACY MEDIA&#8217;S BIAS CONTROLLING THE NARRATIVE AND OBSCURING THE TRUTH? JOIN US AND SAVE 30%.</a>
Assange was arrested in 2019 outside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London after a years-long asylum was revoked. He was <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/julian-assange-gets-50-weeks-for-jumping-bail/">sentenced to 50 months</a> in prison for skipping bail in 2012 when he faced possible extradition to Sweden in sex crimes investigations that <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/assange-wins-first-stage-in-effort-to-appeal-us-extradition">have since been dropped</a>.
This year, Assange has been fighting extradition to the United States to stand trial on charges stemming from the publication of classified documents more than a decade ago. A group of news outlets, including The New York Times, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/28/us/politics/julian-assange-wikileaks-charges.html">criticized the U.S. government</a> in a letter last week, saying that indicting Assange under the Espionage Act &#8220;sets a dangerous precedent&#8221; that jeopardizes national security reporting. Their letter did not voice support for federal prosecutors to drop the part of the case related to accusations of a hacking-related conspiracy, though it did note “some of us are concerned” about it.
Snowden, 39, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-charges-snowden-with-espionage/2013/06/21/507497d8-dab1-11e2-a016-92547bf094cc_story.html">has been charged</a> by the Justice Department with two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and one charge of stealing the property of the U.S. federal government after he left his job at an NSA facility in Hawaii in 2013. He then flew out of the country and leaked classified information, including documents about domestic surveillance programs.
Snowden has been living in exile in Russia for years, and on Friday, his lawyer said Snowden had <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/12/02/edward-snowden-russian-citizenship/">sworn an oath of allegiance</a> to Russia and received a Russian passport.
Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX who completed a $44 billion takeover of Twitter earlier this year, held a poll last month on the social media platform asking users if former President Donald Trump should be reinstated. Trump was banned after the Capitol riot in January 2021. After a slim majority voted in Trump&#8217;s favor, the former president&#8217;s <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/leftists-rage-over-musk-reinstating-trumps-account-on-twitter-this-is-bulls">account was reinstated</a>, though Trump has yet to tweet anything since then.

Elon Musk and Twitter

Elon Musk Polls Twitter On Whether Julian Assange and Edward Snowden Should Be Pardoned

Big Tech

Elon Musk

Julian Assange

Poll

Twitter

WikiLeaks

World

Former U.S. intelligence contractor <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/edward-snowden" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Edward Snowden</a> has received Russian citizenship on the order of Russian President <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/vladimir-putin" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Vladimir Putin</a>.
Putin signed the order granting Snowden, who has lived in Moscow since 2013 evading U.S. authorities, Russian citizenship on Monday, according to <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-grants-russian-citizenship-us-whistleblower-edward-snowden-2022-09-26/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Reuters</a>. Snowden previously received permanent residency to live in <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/russia" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Russia</a> in October 2020.
Snowden worked as a contractor for the National Security Agency in 2013 when he left his job at an NSA facility in Hawaii and flew to Hong Kong. From there, Snowden released thousands of documents on U.S. domestic surveillance programs and global security operations. While some have hailed Snowden&#8217;s actions, U.S. authorities have sought his extradition to prosecute him on charges of violating the Espionage Act.
Snowden was a systems administrator for the CIA before he moved into the private sector working for the contractors Dell and, later, Booz Allen Hamilton. While at Dell, Snowden began contract work for the NSA, working at a facility in Japan before moving to a facility in Hawaii. In early 2013, Snowden left Dell and went to work for Booz Allen, staying at the same Hawaii-based NSA facility.
In 2013, Snowden began downloading thousands of classified documents on U.S. and foreign intelligence operations. After leaving the U.S., Snowden began sharing his cache of documents with journalists who began reporting out some of its contents. Snowden&#8217;s supporters praised him as a whistleblower for revealing information on NSA domestic surveillance operations. Critics accused Snowden of irreparably harming U.S. national security and endangering American lives.
The Snowden leaks <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/edward-snowden-interview/who-edward-snowden-man-who-spilled-nsas-secrets-n114861" target="_blank" rel="noopener">spurred</a> then-President Barack Obama and Congress to take action at the time against what was seen as unconstitutional invasions of Americans&#8217; privacy revealed in the Snowden leaks. Top U.S. officials took steps to stop an NSA program that was gathering and storing data on millions of Americans.
The House Intelligence Committee launched an investigation into the Snowden leaks in 2014 and published a 38-page <a href="https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3245804/Hpsci-Snowden-Review-Declassified.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">report</a> two years later highly critical of the former intelligence contractor. Snowden is “not a whistleblower,” the report said.
“Snowden caused tremendous damage to national security, and the vast majority of documents he stole have nothing to do with programs impacting individual privacy interests – they instead pertain to military, defense, and intelligence programs of great interest to America’s adversaries,” it continued.
Snowden moved to Russia and received asylum protections to hide out of reach of U.S. authorities. From Moscow, Snowden leads the Freedom of the Press Foundation that <a href="https://freedom.press/about/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">monitors</a> “press freedom violations in the United States.”
While Snowden has criticized the treatment of journalists in the U.S., he has been silent on critiquing Russia&#8217;s own instances of restricting journalism and limiting transparency.
After receiving permanent residency in Russia in 2020, Snowden applied for Russian citizenship so he could hold the same citizenship as his son, who at the time was not yet born.

U.S. Expat Edward Snowden Granted Russian Citizenship

National Security Agency (NSA)

Vladimir Putin

Two individuals who reportedly sought pardons from President Donald Trump vented online on Wednesday when they did not get one.
&#8220;I am not at all disappointed to go unpardoned by a man who has never known a love he had not paid for,&#8221; Snowden snarked on Twitter. &#8220;But what supporters of his remain must never forgive that this simpering creature failed to pardon truth-tellers in far more desperate circumstances.&#8221;
Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Rebeccah Heinrichs wrote the following about Snowden last month:
<blockquote>In June 2013, Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, stole more American national secrets than anyone else in American history. He then took the 1.5 million files of highly classified intelligence to America’s adversaries: China, then Russia.
Those doubting that Snowden really is as bad as his reputation, however, should read the 2015 report from the bipartisan House Committee on Intelligence. The report shows Snowden is indisputably not a patriotic hero who bravely champions the cause of civil liberties. Instead, he is a gigantic busybody.</blockquote>
The report documents allegations that Snowden is a liar, a traitor, and a &#8220;disgruntled-employee&#8221; who &#8220;stole military secrets and made many of them public.&#8221; The report further notes that there are no records of Snowden ever trying to go through the proper channels to document his concerns.
The congressional report highlighted just a small sample of Snowden&#8217;s alleged poor character:
<blockquote>He claimed to have left Army basic training because of broken legs when in fact he washed out because of shin splints. He claimed to have obtained a high school degree equivalent when in fact he never did. He claimed to have worked for the CIA as a ‘senior advisor,’ which was a gross exaggeration of his entry-level duties as a computer technician. He also doctored his performance evaluations and obtained new positions at the National Security Agency by exaggerating his resume and stealing the answers to an employment test. In May 2013, Snowden informed his supervisor that he would be out of the office to receive treatment for worsening epilepsy. In reality, he was on his way to Hong Kong with stolen secrets.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
I am not at all disappointed to go unpardoned by a man who has never known a love he had not paid for. But what supporters of his remain must never forgive that this simpering creature failed to pardon truth-tellers in far more desperate circumstances:<a href="https://t.co/luyYyBViYE">https://t.co/luyYyBViYE</a>
&mdash; Edward Snowden (@Snowden) <a href="https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1351880732281626625?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 20, 2021</a></blockquote>
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Joseph Maldonado-Passage, also known as &#8220;Joe Exotic&#8221; from Netflix&#8217;s &#8220;Tiger King,&#8221; complained that he did not get a pardon from Trump because he was &#8220;too innocent and too GAY.&#8221;
&#8220;I was too innocent and too GAY to deserve a Pardon from Trump,&#8221; he wrote on Twitter. &#8220;I only mattered to Don Jr. when he needed to make a comment about me to boost his social media post. Boy were we all stupid to believe he actually stood for Equal Justice? His corrupt friends all come first.&#8221;
Maldonado-Passage&#8217;s attorney &#8220;had been waiting inside a limousine to pick Maldonado-Passage up from a Texas prison if he was pardoned,&#8221; Fox News <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/joe-exotic-assange-snowden-who-wanted-a-trump-pardon-but-didnt-get-one">reported</a>. &#8220;Maldonado-Passage, 57, was sentenced to 22 years in prison for his role in a murder-for-hire plot that targeted his rival, Carole Baskin.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
I was too innocent and too GAY to deserve a Pardon from Trump. I only mattered to Don Jr. when he needed to make a comment about me to boost his social media post. Boy were we all stupid to believe he actually stood for Equal Justice? His corrupt friends all come first. <a href="https://t.co/ysGfwnqlHi">pic.twitter.com/ysGfwnqlHi</a>
&mdash; Joe Exotic (@joe_exotic) <a href="https://twitter.com/joe_exotic/status/1351961406355222530?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 20, 2021</a></blockquote>
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Edward Snowden Speaks To The Guardian

Edward Snowden, Joe Exotic Whine That Trump Did Not Pardon Them

Donald Trump

Joe Exotic

Attorney General William Barr would be “vehemently opposed” to any push by President Trump to pardon <a href="http://dailywire.com/topic/edward-snowden">Edward Snowden</a>, the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor charged with leaking classified information.
Snowden is a “traitor” that jeopardized the national security of the United States, Barr told The <a href="https://apnews.com/49fce0a36f134da56786608aa5dfa4bc">Associated Press</a> on Friday. Snowden is currently evading prosecution by staying in Russia where he has been granted asylum.
“He was a traitor and the information he provided our adversaries greatly hurt the safety of the American people,” Barr said. “He was peddling it around like a commercial merchant. We can’t tolerate that.”
Trump said on Aug. 15 that he was considering <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/president-trump-says-hes-considering-a-pardon-for-edward-snowden">pardoning Snowden</a> and allowing the former national security specialist to <a href="https://dw-site-staging.dailywire.com/news/edward-snowden-says-he-wants-come-home-emily-zanotti">return to the United States</a> without the threat of prosecution. The announcement was a surprise and contradicted Trump’s stated position in 2013 that Snowden is “a spy who should be executed.”
“Well I’m going to look at it,” <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-to-pardon-someone-very-very-important-on-tuesday">Trump said</a> during an Aug. 15 press conference. “I mean, I’m not that aware of the Snowden situation, but I’m going to start looking at it. There are many, many people. It seems to be a split decision. There are many people think that he should be somehow treated differently, and other people think he did very bad things.”
“And I’m going to take a very good look at it. I mean, I’ve seen people that are very conservative and very liberal and they agree on the same issue. They agree both ways,” Trump said.
Snowden is responsible for leaking information on an NSA intelligence gathering operation called PRISM. The program, created to aid U.S. intelligence officials in locating and tracking terrorists, collected the meta-data from millions of Americans’ phone calls. The meta-data collected included such information as call times, durations, and other info not specific to what transpired during the actual phone call.
Critics of PRISM, Snowden among them, said that the NSA was infringing on the civil rights of every American whose data was collected for no better reason than they had used a cell phone. Snowden leaked details of the plan to journalists in 2013 before fleeing the United States to Hong Kong, then to Russia.
As <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/president-trump-says-hes-considering-a-pardon-for-edward-snowden">The Daily Wire</a> reports:
<blockquote>Snowden leaked the information to American journalists, using members of WikiLeaks’ team as go-betweens, back in 2013, revealing that the NSA was collecting “meta-data” – location, duration, and other information not specific to calls themselves – from Americans’ cellphones, creating a massive database designed to reveal terror threats.
The PRISM program never really yielded results. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/us/politics/nsa-phone-records-program-shut-down.html">According to most recent reports</a>, although the Trump administration, like the Obama administration before it, has routinely re-authorized the program, the bulk data collection and analysis program was too cumbersome to be valuable. Back in 2019, the program fell into disuse <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/us/politics/nsa-phone-records-program-shut-down.html">according to The New York Times</a> and, at this point, appears to be out of operation.</blockquote>

William Barr

William Barr ‘Vehemently Opposed’ To Trump’s Potential Pardon Of Edward Snowden

President Donald Trump is reportedly planning to pardon someone tomorrow that he said was &#8220;very, very important,&#8221; but it won&#8217;t be one major name that has been in the news recently.
The news comes as speculation has swirled that Trump could pardon former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked classified documents that damaged U.S. national security.
&#8220;On flight back from Wisconsin, Pres Trump told press pool he would be issuing a pardon on Tuesday to someone &#8216;very very important,&#8217; but said it was not Michael Flynn or Edward Snowden,&#8221; CBS News correspondent Mark Knoller tweeted. &#8220;Might see it as a way to detract attention from Democratic Convention speeches slamming him.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
On flight back from Wisconsin, Pres Trump told press pool he would be issuing a pardon on Tuesday to someone &quot;very very important,&quot; but said it was not Michael Flynn or Edward Snowden. Might see it as a way to detract attention from Democratic Convention speeches slamming him <a href="https://t.co/yxR3LbUZ3x">pic.twitter.com/yxR3LbUZ3x</a>
&mdash; Mark Knoller (@markknoller) <a href="https://twitter.com/markknoller/status/1295515133318443010?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 18, 2020</a></blockquote>
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The possibility of pardoning Snowden comes after Trump was <a href="https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-august-15-press-conference-transcript-in-nj-talks-mark-esper-postmaster-general-dejoy-and-snowden">asked</a> by a reporter last week, &#8220;Do you want to give Edward Snowden a pardon and bring him back?
&#8220;Well I’m going to look at it,&#8221; Trump responded. &#8220;I mean, I’m not that aware of the Snowden situation, but I’m going to start looking at it. There are many, many people. It seems to be a split decision. There are many people think that he should be somehow treated differently, and other people think he did very bad things. And I’m going to take a very good look at it. I mean, I’ve seen people that are very conservative and very liberal and they agree on the same issue. They agree both ways. I’m going to take a look at that very strongly, Edward Snowden.&#8221;
Snowden leaked classified information about the U.S. government&#8217;s efforts to collect and store all telephone metadata because of the Patriot Act.
Bloomberg columnist Eli Lake <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-08-17/trump-pardon-of-edward-snowden-would-backfire">highlighted</a> the problem with pardoning Snowden:
<blockquote>The problem, though, is that Snowden also stole and disclosed far more than that. In June 2013, while in Hong Kong, he shared with the South China Morning Post documents that identified the exact machines the NSA was hacking in China and Hong Kong, along with details of whether they were still monitored and how they were attacked.
This did not advance American civil liberties. Rather, it exposed U.S. efforts to monitor the cyber threats of a hostile power.
Another problem is that even though the U.S. government has conducted a damage assessment of Snowden’s theft of state secrets and disclosures, there is still much it doesn’t know. The reason for this is that Snowden devised a program to scrape the classified computer networks he was administering as a contractor for the NSA in Hawaii. The U.S. government knows the files that Snowden’s program probed, but it does not know which ones he stole.</blockquote>
Lake noted that then-Defense Intelligence Agency Director Michael Flynn was the one who oversaw the review of what Snowden stole and said that officials were concerned that Snowden may have &#8220;stolen information on defense capabilities, war plans and technical intelligence collection methods.&#8221;

President Trump Speaks During Wisconsin Campaign Rally

Trump To Pardon Someone ‘Very, Very Important’ On Tuesday

President Donald Trump said Saturday that he&#8217;s considering a pardon for former national security specialist Edward Snowden, who has been trapped for years in Russia, evading charges of leaking information on a National Security Agency cellphone meta-data collection program called PRISM.
Snowden leaked the information to American journalists, using members of WikiLeaks&#8217; team as go-betweens, back in 2013, revealing that the NSA was collecting &#8220;meta-data&#8221; – location, duration, and other information not specific to calls themselves – from Americans&#8217; cellphones, creating a massive database designed to reveal terror threats.
The PRISM program never really yielded results. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/us/politics/nsa-phone-records-program-shut-down.html">According to most recent reports</a>, although the Trump administration, like the Obama administration before it, has routinely re-authorized the program, the bulk data collection and analysis program was too cumbersome to be valuable. Back in 2019, the program fell into disuse <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/us/politics/nsa-phone-records-program-shut-down.html">according to The New York Times</a> and, at this point, appears to be out of operation.
Trump told reporters late last week that &#8220;there are a lot of people that think that [Snowden] is not being treated fairly,&#8221; and followed up on Saturday with comments suggesting that he and his administration are considering a pardon – though Snowden technically has not yet faced charges.
“I’m going to start looking at it,” Trump said.
“It seems to be a split decision,” Trump added, explaining the divide on Snowden&#8217;s actions. “Many people think he should be somehow treated differently. And other people think he did very bad things.”
That&#8217;s a dramatic change from Trump&#8217;s 2013 position on the subject when he tweeted that Snowden was “a spy who should be executed.”
&#8220;Snowden fled the United States and was given asylum in Russia after he leaked a trove of secret files in 2013 to news organizations that revealed vast domestic and international surveillance operations carried out by the NSA,&#8221; <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-politics-snowden/trump-says-he-is-considering-pardon-for-leaker-edward-snowden-idUSKCN25B10Z">Reuters reports</a>. &#8220;Snowden’s Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, told RIA news agency the United States should not simply pardon him but should drop all possible prosecutions against Snowden as he had not committed any crimes.&#8221;
The argument has long been that Snowden&#8217;s leak revealed a program that American citizens should have known about, regardless of the government&#8217;s argument for secrecy.
Snowden&#8217;s situation has taken on a different character since 2016, when, on his way out of office, then-President Barack Obama commuted a near-life sentence levied against leaker Chelsea Manning, who broke into a classified U.S. military database and stole hundreds of documents and videos recorded during the war in Iraq in an alleged attempt to punish the Army for failing its LGBT members.
Manning ultimately sent the materials to WikiLeaks who published them.
Snowden&#8217;s supporters argue that, unlike Manning, Snowden was looking to help the American people, not hurt the country&#8217;s diplomatic position abroad.
Snowden&#8217;s case, however, is complicated by a memoir he published last year, which the Department of Justice says violated a non-disclosure agreement Snowden signed when he agreed to work on NSA projects.

edward snowden

President Trump Says He’s Considering A Pardon For Edward Snowden

Exiled leaker Edward Snowden, who has been living in Russia since 2013, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/17/politics/edward-snowden-russia-us-fair-trial/index.html">told CBS&#8217;s &#8220;This Morning&#8221; on Monday</a> that he&#8217;d like to return home to the United States — but only if he can be guaranteed a fair trial.
Snowden leaked national security secrets to media back in 2013, including information about a massive NSA intelligence program that collected and analyzed metadata — mostly information from call logs — from millions of American cell phones. The warrantless wiretapping program, Snowden revealed, was part of a massive anti-terrorist effort, and the information was being stored indefinitely, ostensibly for use in detecting terrorist plots.
The NSA and other intelligence-gathering bodies have since admitted to the warrantless wiretapping program, and after an internal audit found that the metadata collection strategy resulted in millions of extraneous files, making scanning and analyzing for actual terrorist threats unwieldy, are reportedly considering tabling the program (the Trump administration, so far, isn&#8217;t on board).
Before emailing information about the metadata collection program to journalist Glenn Greenwald and others, Snowden departed the United States for Hong Kong, so that he was beyond the reach of federal law enforcement. From there, Snowden fled to Russia, where he was granted asylum until 2017. A request for extended protection was approved several years ago, and Snowden is &#8220;safe&#8221; to remain in Russia until at least 2020.
If he were to return, he would likely face charges of espionage and mishandling of top secret material, but he&#8217;s willing, he says, to face those charges if he can be guaranteed a fair trial.
&#8220;One of the big topics in Europe right now is should Germany and France invite me in to get asylum &#8230; And of course I would like to return to the United States. That is the ultimate goal,&#8221; Snowden told CBS &#8220;This Morning&#8221; hosts. &#8220;But if I&#8217;m going to spend the rest of my life in prison, the one bottom-line demand that we all have to agree to is that at least I get a fair trial. And that&#8217;s the one thing the government has refused to guarantee because they won&#8217;t provide access to what&#8217;s called a public interest defense.&#8221;
A &#8220;public interest defense&#8221; is a defense available only to those who leak classified information. If Snowden employed it, he would, essentially, be arguing that leaking information about the NSA&#8217;s metadata collection program was justified because disclosure was in the &#8220;public interest,&#8221; and the benefits of disclosure outweighed the overall threat to national security.
&#8220;I&#8217;m not asking for a parade,&#8221; Snowden added. &#8220;I&#8217;m not asking for a pardon. I&#8217;m not asking for a pass. What I&#8217;m asking for is a fair trial. And this is the bottom-line that any American should require.&#8221;
Snowden has spoken about returning to the United States before. At the end of Barack Obama&#8217;s presidency, Snowden was reportedly hoping that the outgoing leader would grant him some form of clemency similar to what his administration offered to convicted leaker Chelsea Manning. Snowden wasn&#8217;t as lucky as Manning and his request fell on deaf ears — potentially because Snowden&#8217;s leak exposed a project of Obama&#8217;s intelligence infrastructure and not President George W. Bush&#8217;s.
Right now, Snowden remains in Russia. His memoir, &#8220;Permanent Record,&#8221; will be published in September.

Edward_Snowden_gi.jpg

Edward Snowden Says He Wants To Come Home

The Trump administration is planning to bring an end to a National Security Agency bulk metadata collection program first exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, an aide to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) told media.
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/us/politics/nsa-phone-records-program-shut-down.html">The New York Times reports</a> that Luke Murray, an adivsor to McCarthy, told the Lawfare Podcast last week that the NSA hasn&#8217;t used the metadata collection program for more than six months, essentially proving that the program is and was unnecessary to tracking terrorist activity within the United States. The NSA and the Trump White House believe they program will wrap completely by year&#8217;s end.
The program, authorized by President George W. Bush as part of the PATRIOT ACT passed in the days following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, &#8220;permits the government to collect troves of data from phone companies with a simple court order. No actual warrant required,&#8221;<a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-nsa-stopped-collecting-bulk-phone-data-and-nothing-bad-happened"> according to the Washington Examiner</a>.
Then-NSA analyst Edward Snowden leaked details about the government&#8217;s massive metadata collection operation in 2013.
Congress reauthorized the program in 2015 with some subtle changes, but in the last year of the Obama administration, the NSA was revealed to have collected more than 151 million phone records, using 42 secret orders. In the first year of the Trump administration, the Examiner says, use of the progarm exploded, and the government collected around 543 million independent phone records, entirely without warrants.
Although the records don&#8217;t reveal much about the content of each conversation, the call &#8220;metadata&#8221; reveals things like location of the caller and recipient, length of the call, and patterns of behavior &#8212; all of which the NSA, at one time, said was necessary to help track and neutralize terrorist cells operating within the United States.
The NSA argued that Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless wiretaps and searches did not apply to non-specific metadata, which (theoretically) yielded patterns rather than instances of specific behavior, and that obtaining a warrant for each individual investigation would be tedious, expensive, and an unnecessary waste of time.
But as recently as 2018, the NSA expressed concerns that bulk metadata collection was difficult to manage and to use effectively. Data storage was unwieldy, requiring huge warehouses full of servers, and the program had not provided much in the way of useful information. As well, there were technical difficulties with the program &#8220;that led to collection of records on US persons that it didn&#8217;t have authority to collect.&#8221;
The program is due to expire in December, with the expiration of the 2015 USA FREEDOM ACT, and Murray told the Lawfare Podcast that he does not believe the adminstration will reauthorize the program.
&#8220;[T]he administration actually hasn&#8217;t been using it for the past six months because of problems with way in which that information was collected,&#8221; Murray told the hosts. &#8220;Possibly collecting on US citizens in the way that was transferred from private companies to the administration after they got FISA court approval.&#8221;
A spokesperson for Rep. McCarthy did not confirm or deny the administration&#8217;s plans, telling the NYT only that Murray &#8220;was not speaking on behalf of administration policy or what Congress intends to do on this issue.&#8221;
The NSA refused to confirm or deny the reports as well, saying that, rather, they were &#8220;carefully evaluating all aspects&#8221; of the program and would make a recommendation about it to the White House later in the year. Ultimately, the NSA told the NYT, a decision on whether to continue the program is up to the Trump administration.

NSA Ready To End Massive Data Collection Operation Exposed By Edward Snowden

National Security

Vladimir Putin is a liar, among other things. The KGB-operative-turned-Russian-autocrat runs the world&#8217;s most finely-tuned propaganda machine, replete with Kremlin-backed hackers, troll armies, and disinformation distributors. So you would think that he&#8217;d be able to fake some solid footage of Russian planes bombing ISIS terrorist targets for a sycophantic anti-American far-leftist filmmaker eager to gain access and cozy up to brutal dictators? Right?
Wrong. Footage shown to activist director Oliver Stone, a left-wing zealot even by Hollywood standards, during a recent trip to Moscow, purported to show Russian planes bombing ISIS; it turns out, however, that the video, shown via Putin&#8217;s iPhone, actually shows a U.S., yes, an American, U.S. AH-64 Apache laying waste to Taliban targets in Afghanistan. The footage is from a 2013 U.S. military operation designed to root out a a resurgent Taliban through the air with the assistance of Afghan soldiers on the ground. 
The problem for Putin was that <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2016/10/10/russia-says-its-fighting-isis-in-syria-this-map-proves-its-not/">Russia doesn&#8217;t really bomb ISIS</a>, no matter how much Kremlin spokespeople, Russian client states (see: genocidal Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad), and alt-right ethno-nationalists claim otherwise.
So what&#8217;s a poor boy like Vlad to do? Well why not show a gullible anti-American American dictator footage of American planes in action. To put it gently, Putin trolled Stone and Stone fell for it, which isn&#8217;t surprising given the fact that Stone eats up Russian propaganda with the ravenous appetite of a radicalized jihadi consuming extremist doctrines. This is the same director who made an entire movie about American traitor Edward Snowden based almost exclusively on interviews in Moscow overseen by the Kremlin minders.
Fortunately though, Putin&#8217;s lie caught the attention of Russian government watchdog groups.
The Russian leader&#8217;s lie was exposed by the Meduza Project, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/23/russian-journalists-meduza-project-latvia-kremlin-crackdown">an organization of self-exiled Russian journalists based out of Riga, Latvia</a>.
Watch below:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
Footage of &#8220;Russian helicopter bombing ISIS&#8221; shown to Oliver Stone by Putin appears to be taken from 2013 US Afghan video.H/t <a href="https://twitter.com/meduzaproject">@meduzaproject</a> <a href="https://t.co/qmWD1W6Tnw">pic.twitter.com/qmWD1W6Tnw</a>
&#8212; CIT (en) (@CITeam_en) <a href="https://twitter.com/CITeam_en/status/877152860089323522">June 20, 2017</a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
Now ain&#8217;t that some shit right there. <a href="https://t.co/hw8YHvWhc6">https://t.co/hw8YHvWhc6</a>
&#8212; Michael Weiss (@michaeldweiss) <a href="https://twitter.com/michaeldweiss/status/877165665072939008">June 20, 2017</a></blockquote>

Putin Shows Anti-American Director Oliver Stone Alleged Footage Of Russian Helicopters Bombing ISIS. Turns Out It Was  A Badass U.S. Apache Firing At The Taliban.

Afghanistan

Islamic State (ISIS)

Military

Oliver Stone

Taliban

As Barack Obama&#8217;s presidency comes to a close, small government libertarians, anti-war progressives, and privacy activists have all called for a last-minute pardon of NSA leaker Edward Snowden.
To some, the polarizing former NSA contractor is a traitor. To others, he&#8217;s a hero.
In all likelihood, Snowden will remain in Russia, where he&#8217;s been residing since he released classified US documents in 2013. The White House and the intelligence community are still deeply angered by Snowden&#8217;s leaks. That&#8217;s all to say that Snowden shouldn&#8217;t hold his breath for a presidential pardon.
Here are 11 things you need to know about Edward Snowden:
1. In May of 2013, Snowden contacted reporters from The Washington Post and The Guardian to reveal classified information he gathered as an NSA contractor.
2. Snowden revealed the existence of the NSA&#8217;s PRISM program. PRISM was a surveillance program that gathered information from major tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft in order to monitor potential threats against the homeland.
3. Snowden was a community college dropout who was making over $200k a year. Before leaving to Hong Kong to leak classified information, Snowden worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, a prominent defense company that had contracts with the NSA and other US intelligence agencies. He worked at a facility in Hawaii.
4. Snowden was a Ron Paul supporter. According to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/edward-snowden-says-motive-behind-leaks-was-to-expose-surveillance-state/2013/06/09/aa3f0804-d13b-11e2-a73e-826d299ff459_story.html?utm_term=.bf722b116cfe">The Washington Post</a>, &#8220;Snowden made a $250 donation to Ron Paul&#8217;s 2012 presidential campaign in March of that year.&#8221; Snowden himself suggested that he wasn&#8217;t a fan of both major parties. &#8220;A lot of people in 2008 voted for Obama. I did not vote for him. I voted for a third party,&#8221; Snowden <a href="https://mic.com/articles/47457/10-things-everyone-should-know-about-edward-snowden#.31VS2oga3">told</a> The Guardian. &#8220;But I believed in Obama&#8217;s promises. I was going to disclose it [but waited because of his election]. He continued with the policies of his predecessor.&#8221;
5. Snowden enlisted in the army in 2003 only to be discharged shortly after. He wanted to work in Special Forces. The Guardian reports: &#8220;In 2003, he enlisted in the US army and began a training program to join the Special Forces. Invoking the same principles that he now cites to justify his leaks, he said: &#8216;I wanted to fight in the Iraq war because I felt like I had an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression.&#8217; He recounted how his beliefs about the war&#8217;s purpose were quickly dispelled. &#8216;Most of the people training us seemed pumped up about killing Arabs, not helping anyone,&#8217; he said. After he broke both his legs in a training accident, he was discharged.&#8221;
6. After spending years working for US intelligence agencies, Snowden has become increasingly paranoid. Here&#8217;s The Guardian&#8217;s report again: &#8220;He lines the door of his hotel room with pillows to prevent eavesdropping. He puts a large red hood over his head and laptop when entering his passwords to prevent any hidden cameras from detecting them.&#8221;
7. The White House has rejected a petition calling for the president to pardon Edward Snowden. Back in 2015, nearly 167,000 people signed a petition in support of Snowden. It was promptly rejected by the federal government. To this day, the White House holds that Snowden should return to the United States and face criminal prosecution.
8. House Intelligence issued a 36-page report in September of 2016, arguing that Snowden&#8217;s leaks have caused &#8220;caused tremendous damage&#8221; to US national security. The report detailed the fact that Snowden&#8217;s leaks were selective insofar as they revealed information on US intelligence and defense programs of major interest to American enemies.
9. Many security analysts believe that Snowden has cooperated with the Russians. There&#8217;s no way to enter Vladimir Putin&#8217;s backyard with a head full of information about US surveillance and intelligence operations and a live a quiet life in the Russian countryside unmolested. It&#8217;s not a coincidence that Snowden has been slow to critique the Russian government for its rampant abuse of civil liberties. While the former NSA contractor may like us to believe that his live video chats are done independently, the truth is Snowden&#8217;s singularly negative focus on the United States plays right into Russia&#8217;s anti-West propaganda machine.
10. On December 22, 2016, Congress released a report confirming that Snowden has indeed been in contact with Russian intelligence officers since arriving in Russia. Snowden quickly denied the claims, posting on Twitter: &#8220;they claim without evidence that I&#8217;m in cahoots with the Russians.&#8221;
11. Snowden has kept a relatively low public profile since 2013. He&#8217;s rarely seen in public. However, he did create an official Twitter account in September of 2015. He gained nearly 110,000 followers in less than an hour after making his account. He routinely posts about US domestic policy and matters related to civil liberties, privacy, and surveillance. He only follows one Twitter account: the NSA.
&#8212;
Top image (Getty Images): Snowden talks to the audience and answers questions through a live connection from Russia at the premiere of the movie &#8216;Snowden&#8217; in Amsterdam, on November 10, 2016.

11 Things You Need To Know About Edward Snowden

Barack Obama

On Friday, President-elect Donald Trump announced a flurry of selections to fill top cabinet posts. One of them was Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Who exactly is Pompeo, and what can Americans expect from him as CIA director? Here are five things you need to know about Pompeo.
1. Pompeo has a 77 percent liberty score at Conservative Review. <a href="https://www.conservativereview.com/members/mike-pompeo/biography/">Conservative Review&#8216;s biography</a> praises Pompeo for his leadership on numerous conservative issues, including his fight to end various federal subsidies, but noted that &#8220;there is room for improvement.&#8221;
&#8220;Pompeo was elected in the 2010 wave and hasn&#8217;t performed to the same level as some of his conservative counterparts,&#8221; the biography states. &#8220;Pompeo has been on the wrong side of issues as varied as fast track trade authority for President Obama, the effort to oust John Boehner (R-OH) from the Speaker&#8217;s chair, and the defund Obamacare movement. Regarding the reauthorization of the crony capital Export-Import Bank, Pompeo has hedged and in limited circumstances has supported raising the debt ceiling.&#8221;
That said, there are still plenty of reasons for conservatives to be excited about him as CIA director.
2. Pompeo has been a staunch critic of the Iran deal. Pompeo and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) have accused the Obama administration of engaging in various side deals with the Iranian regime &#8211; accusations that have <a href="https://www.conservativereview.com/members/mike-pompeo/biography/">proven to be true</a>. Pompeo has also <a href="http://www.dailywire.com/news/10921/new-trump-cia-director-lets-dump-iran-deal-hank-berrien">tweeted</a> that he looks &#8220;forward to rolling back this disastrous deal with the world&#8217;s largest state sponsor of terrorism.&#8221;
3. Pompeo understands the threat of radical Islam. Here are some of the statements Pompeo has made about the issue, via the <a href="http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/politics-government/election/article115636563.html">Charlotte Observer</a>:
<ul>
<li>Pompeo has criticized the Obama administration for refusing to acknowledge the need &#8220;to defeat and destroy the threat from radical Islamic terrorism, whether it fights under the name of Al Qaeda &#8230; or Boko Haram or ISIS or any of the other dozens of groups that are founded on the central principle of the destruction of the West and the imposition of Sharia law.&#8221;</li>
<li>Pompeo has said the administration following Obama needs &#8220;a military, diplomatic and ideological defeat of radical Islamic terrorism.&#8221;</li>
<li>On the House floor in 2013, Pompeo railed against &#8220;the silence of Muslim leaders&#8221; after the Boston bombing attacks, stating that &#8220;when the most devastating terrorist attacks on America in the last 20 years come overwhelmingly from people of a single faith, and are performed in the name of that faith, a special obligation falls on those that are the leaders of that faith.&#8221;</li>
</ul>
Pompeo has also defended the use of enhanced-interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay and <a href="http://www.redstate.com/streiff/2016/11/18/mike-pompeo-great-choice-cia-director/">spoke out</a> against a Kansas mosque bringing a speaker who once sang &#8220;I Am From Hamas.&#8221;
4. Pompeo was on the House Benghazi committee. Pompeo and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) thought that Rep. Trey Gowdy&#8217;s (R-SC) report wasn&#8217;t harsh enough towards Hillary Clinton, so Pompeo and Jordan released <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2016/11/mike-pompeo-cia/508121/">another report</a> in which they stated that Clinton &#8220;misled the public&#8221; over what happened during the terror attacks in Benghazi, Libya. Pompeo has also <a href="http://pompeo.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=398666">asserted</a> that Benghazi is a worse scandal than Watergate.
5. Pompeo has supported the National Security Agency&#8217;s mass surveillance program. Pompeo has declared that Edward Snowden should &#8220;be given a death sentence.&#8221; Pompeo&#8217;s view on the NSA may be a sticking point with some conservatives, but as <a href="http://www.dailywire.com/news/10916/mixed-bag-flynn-nsa-pompeo-cia-sessions-ag-ben-shapiro">Ben Shapiro has noted</a>, Pompeo&#8217;s position is &#8220;relatively uncontroversial among intelligence hawks.&#8221;

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