Moving on Snowden

Confirming a report in the Washington Post newspaper, the US official said that a sealed criminal complaint had been lodged with a federal court in the US state of Virginia and a provisional arrest warrant had also been issued.

Snowden was charged with theft of government property, unauthorised communication of national defence information and willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorised person, the document said.

[...]

Meanwhile, an Icelandic businessman linked to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks said on Thursday he had readied a private plane in China to fly Snowden to Iceland if Iceland's government would grant asylum.

  al Jazeera

NPR this morning is spreading the rumor that Snowden is in police custody in Hong Kong. We shall see.

[D]uring the Obama presidency, there are now seven [Espionage Act prosecutions]: more than double the number under all prior US presidents combined. How can anyone justify that?

[...]

In what conceivable sense are Snowden's actions "espionage"? He could have - but chose not - sold the information he had to a foreign intelligence service for vast sums of money, or covertly passed it to one of America's enemies, or worked at the direction of a foreign government. That is espionage. He did none of those things.

[...]

[The] irony is obvious: the same people who are building a ubiquitous surveillance system to spy on everyone in the world, including their own citizens, are now accusing the person who exposed it of "espionage". It seems clear that the people who are actually bringing "injury to the United States" are those who are waging war on basic tenets of transparency and secretly constructing a mass and often illegal and unconstitutional surveillance apparatus aimed at American citizens - and those who are lying to the American people and its Congress about what they're doing - rather than those who are devoted to informing the American people that this is being done.

[...]

The Obama administration leaks classified information continuously. They do it to glorify the President, or manipulate public opinion, or even to help produce a pre-election propaganda film about the Osama bin Laden raid. The Obama administration does not hate unauthorized leaks of classified information. They are more responsible for such leaks than anyone.

What they hate are leaks that embarrass them or expose their wrongdoing. Those are the only kinds of leaks that are prosecuted. It's a completely one-sided and manipulative abuse of secrecy laws.

  Glenn Greenwald

What a delicious dilemma this all provides for Republicans in Congress. They thought that they wanted nothing more than to get rid of Barack Obama. And now that they have a possible chance to impeach on the grounds Snowden has provided, they can’t, because they find themselves on his side.

“I think it’s very surprising to accuse someone of espionage who hasn’t worked for a foreign government, who didn’t covertly pass information to an adversary [or] enemy of the United States, who didn’t sell any top secret information,” [Glenn] Greenwald told Hayes, arguing that Snowden “simply went to newspapers, asked newspapers to very carefully vet the information to make sure that the only thing being published are things that informed his fellow citizens but doesn’t harm national security. That is not espionage in any real sense of the word.”

[...]

“I don’t think you’ll find very many people who argue that he should not be charged with any sort of criminal offense,” Greenwald responded. “I think when he did what he set out to do that he understood that it was in violation of the law. He felt like it was a noble act, justified under basic theories of civil disobedience, and that he expected to be charged with a crime.”

[...]

“[The Espionage Act] is a 1917 statute enacted under Woodrow Wilson to criminalize opposition to World War I,” Greenwald continued. “It has been used very, very sparingly throughout American history until the Obama administration, which has embraced it with extreme vigor as a means of punishing and prosecuting whistleblowers, and so in that regard, I think it’s unsurprising.”

[...]

“If this administration were equitable and consistent in trying to punish people who leak classified information, you could look at this act and say, ‘I think it’s excessive but at least it’s consistent,’” Greenwald continued, saying various administration officials were not prosecuted despite leaking top-secret or classified information that made the White House look good.

  Raw Story

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.