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There are a number of narratives  being floated by the usual suspects to attempt to demonstrate that Edward Snowden is a traitor who has betrayed secrets vital to the security of the United States. All the arguments being made are essentially without merit.

Snowden has undeniably violated his agreement to protect classified information, which is a crime. But in reality, he has revealed only one actual secret that matters, which is the United States government’s serial violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution through its collection of personal information on millions of innocent American citizens without any probable cause or search warrant.

That makes Snowden a whistleblower, as he is exposing illegal activity on the part of the federal government. The damage he has inflicted is not against U.S. national security but rather on the politicians and senior bureaucrats who ordered, managed, condoned, and concealed the illegal activity.

First and foremost among the accusations is the treason claim being advanced by such legal experts as former Vice President Dick Cheney, Speaker of the House John Boehner, and Senator Dianne Feinstein. The critics are saying that Snowden has committed treason because he has revealed U.S. intelligence capabilities to groups like al-Qaeda, with which the United States is at war. Treason is, in fact, the only crime that is specifically named and described in the Constitution, in Article III: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”

Whether Washington is actually at war with al-Qaeda is, of course, debatable since there has been no declaration of war by Congress as required by Article I of the Constitution. Congress has, however, passed legislation, including the Authorization for Use of Military Force, empowering the President to employ all necessary force against al-Qaeda and “associated” groups; this is what Cheney and the others are relying on to establish a state of war.


http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/edward-snowden-is-no-traitor/

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Obama should be happy. The presence of Snowden in Moscow is the best thing that could happen. This presence is obviously due to the will of the Russian authorities. Without the agreement of the security services, it is impossible he could fly and land here. We imagine that the Chinese have learned what they could from Snowden's computers, before he left Hong Kong. The Russians then finished the job. How can we imagine for a moment that this frail young man can oppose them both? But the presence of Snowden at Sheremetyevo airport for three weeks solves a serious problem for Obama. Before his arrival, the Americans hesitated. There was a debate: is there a whistleblower or a traitor? Now, this is clearly a traitor. Obama has avoided the threat of impeachment because the administration was monitoring non-Americans and Snowden then turned into a traitor. Putin has saved Obama.But how Putin can play it Snowden card?
Putin has no problem with it. I thought at first that Snowden was a hot potato. But Putin, in smart man knows that Obama owes him. You can not fault Putin's attitude. He is therefore the winner. He is able to tell Westerners: "You reproach me Magnitsky [dead lawyer in prison as a result of abuse in late 2009] You have yours You reproach me abuse of individual rights? Look at what you made of these rights. "Even human rights can not defend Snowden, because it would attack the United States.
Translation by google

http://www.lemonde.fr/europe/article/2013/07/16/lilia-shevtsova-poutine-a-sauve-obama-dans-l-affaire-snowden_3448326_3214.html

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Meanwhile, 19 organisations represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed a suit against the NSA for violating their right of association by illegally collecting their call records.

The coalition includes Unitarian church group, gun ownership advocates, and a broad coalition of membership and political advocacy groups.

"The First Amendment protects the freedom to associate and express political views as a group, but the NSA's mass, untargeted collection of Americans' phone records violates that right by giving the government a dramatically detailed picture into our associational ties," Cindy Cohn, the legal director for the EFF, said.

"Who we call, how often we call them, and how long we speak shows the government what groups we belong to or associate with, which political issues concern us, and our religious affiliation.

"Exposing this information – especially in a massive, untargeted way over a long period of time – violates the Constitution and the basic First Amendment tests that have been in place for over 50 years."

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2013/07/201371704225666982.html

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Russian President Vladimir Putin has said bilateral relations with the US are more important than "squabbles between special services".

In his latest comments on fugitive US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden, Mr Putin said he had been warned against any "activity that harms Russian-American relations".

On Tuesday Mr Snowden applied for temporary asylum in Russia.

He is wanted by the US for leaking details of surveillance programmes.

Mr Snowden has been in Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport for the past three weeks.

He has no travel documents, so has been unable to take up asylum offers from a number of Latin American states.

Mr Putin stressed on Wednesday that Russia was "an independent country and we have an independent foreign policy".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23339418

 

 

 

the double-cross matrix...

THE GAME OF SECRETS is the hot house of deception.

In it, the child of truth is spared in favour of the rod of deceit. In the conspiracy matrix, involving a trading of secrets, the entertainment of exposures and the trafficking of lies, conspiracy theories are near friends. Speculation is never far. Move over the post-nuclear world, argued Paul Virilio — we are living in the age of the information bomb.

For one thing, there is an undercurrent of suspicion as to why Edward Snowden did, in fact, reveal what he did and when he did.

Such is the insidiousness of the security establishment that the very idea of a moral whistleblower is considered untenable. This is where the novelistic fabrication comes into play. As Friedrich Nietzsche explains, the point about human beings is their enormous capacity for invention, the dream that continues while one is awake. In that dream, Snowden is a plant, a deception, or even – heaven forbid – a fiction. But from which side?

http://www.independentaustralia.net/2013/international/snowden-greenwald-and-assange-the-conspiracy-matrix/

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We live in the age of deceit... And yet we have to expect that even in the game of deceit some mistakes are going to be made... We have to expect that somewhere there is some relative truth lurking around and we have to expect that lives are going to be fodder. Leaks are going to happen, though leaks may be made to happen... Is this a way to embarrass the governments of Europe that have been complicit in the PRISM "conspiracy?... Is this a way to tell us "look folks, whatever you may think about us spying on you, it is happening and it will continue to happen — tough titties!!!.. So behave and no harm will fall upon you"...

more from snowden...

According to some European press, Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald is in possession of up to 20,000 hot-potato documents from Snowden... These documents "are very long and complex... Some of these documents show that as well as spying on its allies, the US has also infiltrated communications in Brazil in particular and South America in general"... These revelations were made by Greenwald to Brazil's senate committee on communications...

prosecuting whistle blowers...

 

During WWI, President Wilson signed off on the Espionage Act, in a bid to keep a lid on German spies in the US. But 96 years later, President Obama is using the act to aggressively prosecute leaks to the press.

The Obama administration has cracked down hard on national security leaks to the press over the past four years, dusting off the almost 100-year-old Espionage Act to pursue prosecutions against leakers in seven cases, twice the number of any other presidency combined.

At the end of last month, Bradley Manning became the first successful Espionage Act conviction under the Obama administration. Manning was WikiLeaks' source for some 700,000 diplomatic cables and battlefield reports, the largest single leak of secret information in US history. Edward Snowden, who leaked several secret National Security Agency surveillance programs to the press, is the latest leaker to be charged under the act.

Signed into law in 1917, the Espionage Act criminalizes the transmission of defense information, which could cause injury to the US or give advantage to a foreign nation, to unauthorized people. According to Stephen I. Vladeck, an expert on national security law, the language of the act makes no distinction between old-fashioned espionage by foreign spies and whistle-blowing government abuse to the press.

"For better or worse, the Espionage Act is the American statute that best fits the crime of wrongfully disclosing national security information to someone who's not entitled to receive it," Vladeck told DW via email.

"Whether we'd call it leaking, whistle-blowing, or classic espionage, the statute treats all three as the same offense - and so the government understandably gravitates toward it in any case where it can," he said.

http://www.dw.de/obama-turns-wwi-era-law-against-leakers/a-17010507

Now, one could ask: what is there to know that is still secretly done illegally by the US government?...