Edward Snowden's worst fear has not been realised – thankfully | Glenn Greenwald. This column was written by Glenn Greenwald for the Guardian's newspaper edition In my first substantive discussion with Edward Snowden, which took place via encrypted online chat, he told me he had only one fear. It was that the disclosures he was making, momentous though they were, would fail to trigger a worldwide debate because the public had already been taught to accept that they have no right to privacy in the digital age. Snowden, at least in that regard, can rest easy. The fallout from the Guardian's first week of revelations is intense and growing. If "whistleblowing" is defined as exposing secret government actions so as to inform the public about what they should know, to prompt debate, and to enable reform, then Snowden's actions are the classic case. US polling data, by itself, demonstrates how powerfully these revelations have resonated.
As always with polling data, the results are far from conclusive or uniform. The fallout is not confined to the US. Snowden’s Constitution, Obama’s Constitution, and Criminal Law. Edward Snowden is not a constitutional lawyer. But his public statement explaining his decision to blow the whistle on what he and Congress both know to be only the “tip of the iceberg” of state snooping secrets expresses his belief that, in a democracy, the people – not his defense contractor employers or the government that hires them – should ultimately determine whether mass surveillance interfering with everyone’s privacy is reasonable. Some have tried to minimize the snooping exposed by Snowden on the grounds that the government is just storing the information, and has not yet searched it. The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures.”
Seizure – the taking of private information – is what the government has now been forced to admit. The Supreme Court reads the Fourth Amendment’s “unreasonable” test to mean not ”objectively reasonable,” United States v. A strong case can be made that Snowden is right. Will not go Will go Neither No. Edward Snowden Q&A: NSA whistleblower answers your questions | World news. Snowden faces execution as sealed complaint charges espionage. So When will Dick Cheney be charged with Espionage? His Crime was the Same as Snowden's. The US government charged Edward Snowden with theft of government property and espionage on Friday. Snowden hasn’t to our knowledge committed treason in any ordinary sense of the term.
He hasn’t handed over government secrets to a foreign government. His leaks are being considered a form of domestic spying. He is the 7th leaker to be so charged by the Obama administration. All previous presidents together only used the charge 3 times. Charging leakers with espionage is outrageous, but it is par for the course with the Obama administration. The same theory under which Edward Snowden is guilty of espionage could easily be applied to former vice president Dick Cheney. Cheney led an effort in 2003 to discredit former acting ambassador in Iraq, Joseph Wilson IV, who had written an op ed for the New York Times detailing his own mission to discover if Iraq was getting uranium from Niger. And yet, Cheney mysteriously has not been charged with Espionage.