Why Snowden Won’t (and Shouldn’t) Get Clemency
He went too far to be considered just a whistleblower.
By Fred Kaplan
... if his stolen trove of beyond-top-secret documents had dealt only with the NSAs domestic surveillance, then some form of leniency might be worth discussing.
But Snowden did much more than that. The documents that he gave the Washington Posts Barton Gellman and the Guardians Glenn Greenwald have, so far, furnished stories about the NSAs interception of email traffic, mobile phone calls, and radio transmissions of Taliban fighters in Pakistans northwest territories; about an operation to gauge the loyalties of CIA recruits in Pakistan; about NSA email intercepts to assist intelligence assessments of whats going on inside Iran; about NSA surveillance of cellphone calls worldwide, an effort that (in the Posts words) allows it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect. In his first interview with the South China Morning Post, Snowden revealed that the NSA routinely hacks into hundreds of computers in China and Hong Kong.
These operations have nothing to do with domestic surveillance or even spying on allies. They are not illegal, improper, or (in the context of 21st-century international politics) immoral. Exposing such operations has nothing to do with whistle-blowing ...
... The Times editorial paints an incomplete picture when it claims that he stole a trove of highly classified documents after he became disillusioned with the agencys voraciousness. In fact, as Snowden himself told the South China Morning Post, he took his job as an NSA contractor, with Booz Allen Hamilton, because he knew that his position would grant him access to lists of machines all over the world [that] the NSA hacked. He stayed there for just three months, enough to do what he came to do ...
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2014/01/edward_snowden_doesn_t_deserve_clemency_the_nsa_leaker_hasn_t_proved_he.html