The tensions between those engaged in the dangerous and compromising pursuit of whistleblowing, and those who use the fruit of such efforts has been all too coarsely revealed in the Washington Post stance on Edward Snowden.
Oliver Stone’s Snowden has done a good deal of stirring on its release, suggesting that the pardon powers of the Presidential office should be activated. A recent petition calling for a pardon of the former National Security Agency contractor has already received signatures from Steve Wozniak, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jack Dorsey.
The ACLU, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch similarly believe that Snowden should be exempted from the vengeful retribution of the US state for his 2013 revelations of uncontained, indiscriminate mass surveillance by the NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ.
In taking its boggling stance, the Post’s myopic editorial refuses to deem such interception programs as PRISM threatening to privacy, though it does concede that one all-hoovering metadata program “was a stretch, if not an outright violation, of federal surveillance law, and posed risks to privacy.” (Point to note there: it was The Guardian, rather than the Post, that jumped on that one.)
In rather damnable fashion, the board suggests that these technological nasties were otherwise very much within the remit of the law, blithely ignoring the ACLU suit that yielded a completely different result. A program such as…