President Trump is saying that he might issue a pardon to Edward Snowden. For some reason, he hasn’t said the same thing about Julian Assange.

But a pardon suggests that the person being pardoned has done something wrong. Neither Snowden and Assange has done anything wrong — at least not in a moral sense. It is the U.S. government — and specifically the national-security state branch of the federal government — that has engaged in terrible wrongdoing — wrongdoing that Snowden and Assange revealed to the American people and the people of the world.

Therefore, the real question is: Should Snowden and Assange pardon the U.S. for having destroyed a large part of their lives and liberty?

Oh, sure, the two of them technically violated the federal government’s national-security laws, rules, and regulations against revealing the dark-side, sordid policies and practices of the national-security establishment. Big deal. Those laws, rules, and regulations are illegitimate, at least in a moral sense. Why should the dark-side, sordid policies and practices of a government be immune from disclosure?

The American people have now become so accustomed to living under a national-security state form of governmental structure that many of them tend toward deferring to the laws, rules, and regulations that come with a national-security state. Thus, when the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA refer to Snowden and Assange as “enemies of the state” or “traitors,” the tendency of many Americans is to blindly accept their assessment.

Of course, it works that way under every national-security state. Look at China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia, They too are all national-security states. Like the U.S. national-security state, they all engage in dark-side, sordid policies and practices. And like the U.S. national-security state, they go after anyone who discloses such policies and practices with a vengeance. And most of their citizens blindly and loyally go along with it all.

The real question, however, is not whether Snowden and Assange should pardon the U.S. government. In fact, the real question isn’t even whether it should be a crime for people to disclose the dark-side, sordid policies and practices of a national-security state.

The real question — one that unfortunately will not be discussed in the presidential race — is whether it’s time to end America’s 75-year experiment as a national-security state.

A national-security state is a totalitarian form of governmental structure, one that empowers a government to engage, either secretly or openly, in dark-side, sordid policies and practices, such as torture, assassination, coups, murder, regime-change operations, invasions, bribery, kidnappings, indefinite detention, denial of due process, denial of trial by jury, and denial of speedy trial.

Keep in mind that the United States was founded as a limited-government republic, not a national-security state. In fact, if the Constitution had proposed a national-security state, there is no possibility that the American people would have approved the Constitution. That would have meant that the nation would have continued operating under the Articles of Confederation, a third type of governmental system under which the federal government’s powers were so weak and limited that it didn’t even have the power to tax people.

It wasn’t until the end of World War II that the federal government was converted into a national-security state. The rationale was that in order to prevent the communists, especially those that governed the Soviet Union (which, ironically, had been America’s wartime ally and Nazi Germany’s enemy) from from taking over the United States, it would be necessary to become a national-security state, just like the communist regimes were. A limited-government republic, it was said, would be insufficient to defeat a foreign regime that wielded omnipotent dark-side, sordid powers.

I challenge that notion. The best way to have opposed communism would have been to remain a free society and a limited-government republic, not by adopting the governmental structure and dark-side, sordid policies and practices of the communists.

Nonetheless, one thing is crystal clear: The Cold War ended in 1989 and so did the justification for converting the federal government into a national-security state in the first place.

By disclosing the dark-side, sordid policies and practices of the U.S. national-security state, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden have performed an invaluable service to the American people. They have helped remind us that this is not what America is supposed to be all about.

Assange and Snowden deserve the praise and thanks of every American. The best way we can honor them is by dismantling America’s Cold War legacy of a national-security state and restoring America’s founding system of a limited-government republic.

Read more:

https://www.fff.org/2020/08/19/should-snowden-and-assange-pardon-the-u-s-government/

Convicted of wire fraud, copyright infringement and money laundering, the entrepreneur awaits extradition to the US. In the meantime, he has thrown his weight over to the fight for Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder and publisher who is fighting Washington's attempts to extradite him from the UK to the US for trial.

Kim Schmitz, primarily known by his nickname as the founder of the Megaupload file hosting service 'Kim Dotcom', has tweeted at US President Donald Trump, suggesting that he pardon WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Dotcom insisted that Assange is only a truth-teller, arguing that "truth should never be a crime" in a bid to sway POTUS on the matter of refusing the whistleblower's extradition from the UK.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/us/202008291080316094-kim-dotcom-calls-on-trump-to-pardon-truth-teller-julian-assange-says-it-will-help-his-re-election/

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Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA's mass surveillance programme collected telephone, email and internet browsing records on nearly everyone in the United States, despite a law prohibiting the monitoring of US citizens without a court order.

The US Court of Appeals has ruled that the mass surveillance programme conducted by the National Security Agency, including the bulk collection of phone records, was illegal, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said on Wednesday.

According to the court ruling, the collection of millions of phone records violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and might have also violated the Fourth Amendment. The court referred to the case of four members of the Somali diaspora who have been convicted of for sending, or conspiring to send, $10,900 to Somalia to support a foreign terrorist organisation after the NSA obtained certain phone calls data. Their case, according to the ruling, have raised questions about the government's authority to collect data about citizens "under the auspices of foreign intelligence investigation".

In 2019, the ACLU said it obtained new documents showing that the NSA continued to illegally collect phone records on millions of Americans after claiming it had resolved technical problems that led to earlier unauthorised collections. The documents released by the ACLU show the NSA improperly collected Americans' call records in November 2017 and February 2018 and then began purging 600 million call records in June 2018.

Following disclosures about the mass surveillance  programme by Snowden, the US government set limits on the NSA's collection call records.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/us/202009021080352196-us-federal-appeals-court-rules-nsas-mass-surveillance-programme-was-illegal/

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Intimate data about the private lives of millions of Australians will be analysed and monetised by a partnership between a New Zealand company and a subsidiary of the world's biggest retailer, Amazon.

• NZ company Vector and Amazon Web Services have a deal to collect, analyse and sell data from 1.6 million Australian electricity meters
• The smart meters collect information about your energy use, and can provide insights into when you are at home and what appliances you use
• Privacy campaigners are concerned the data can be combined with other information to provide an intimate picture of your life

Smart meters deliver information about household power use and are being installed at a rate of 12,000 a month as the electricity grid juggles a boom in household solar with a nationally linked network of generators and users.

The data goes far beyond how much power you use in a certain time of day — revealing things like the number of televisions you have, the age of your fridge and other appliances, and the number of people in your home.

The information will be shared in a partnership between New Zealand utility company Vector and Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing subsidiary of internet behemoth Amazon.

"Smart meters, and the way you consume energy is very private," said Kaspar Kaarlep, co-founder of power technology company WePower.

"I would compare it to, let's say, the City of Melbourne selling access to all of its CCTV cameras to Amazon … to develop new products and services.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-07/amazon-will-soon-see-inside-millions-of-aussie-homes/12582776

My meters are old (possibly over 50 years) and still provide my electricity supplier with enough data that I use "too much" of it...

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There are at least eight prisons in London. To accommodate Julian Assange, the British judiciary has selected Belmarsh. The maximum-security facility in the east of London was built to house terrorists and felons. Conditions inside Belmarsh are considered harsh enough that the BBC has compared it to Guantanamo Bay.

Assange's prison cell will open on Monday morning and the founder of the WikiLeaks whistleblower platform will be transferred to a courtroom in London's Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, where his fate will be determined over the next three weeks. Will the 49-year-old be extradited to the US judiciary? If convicted in the United States, he could face a sentence of up to 175 years in prison.

Heike Hänsel, a member of Germany's lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, will be present at the extradition hearing. The Left Party deputy parliamentary leader lamented a "politically motivated trial targeting an investigative journalist" and extraterritorial persecution of a "journalist on European soil who worked as a journalist in Europe."

Read more: Opinion: I am Julian Assange

Powerful enemies

Assange has won numerous journalistic awards, but he has also made powerful enemies. That much became clear by July 2017, when Mike Pompeo called WikiLeaks a "nonstate hostile intelligence service." That statement was made during Pompeo's first public appearance as CIA director, a little more than a year before he became US secretary of state. Jeff Sessions, then the US attorney general, said in April 2017 that arresting Assange was "a priority."

Read more:

https://www.dw.com/en/assange-wikileaks-extradition/a-54822777

Most of the enemies of Assange have been the Western media that have not fought hard enough for his release. Time for ALL THE JOURNALISTS IN THE WESTERN WORLD to tell the UK to go and get fucked... something which might happen anyway with Boris hiring Tony Abbot as a "expert" on trade... Please....

Tony Abbott is the last person Britain needs

Dr Tim Davis, Don Dryley and other readers on the appointment of the former Australian prime minister as a trade adviser to the UK government

UK citizens are right to raise concerns about the appointment of the former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott as an official trade adviser (Report, 4 September). Boris Johnson notes that Abbott was elected by the “great liberal democratic nation of Australia”, but he fails to note that Abbott broke almost every election promise he made, except his promise to remove the carbon tax that was actually working to reduce Australia’s CO2 emissions.

Abbott is renowned for making claims that appeal to his supporters, such as that the science behind climate change is “absolute crap”, but seems to rarely base his actions on evidence. It is likely that Abbott’s climate stance contributed to the Australian government ignoring pleas from fire chiefs for more resources to combat what was predicted to be a disastrous fire season in 2019, resulting in Australia’s worst fires in living memory, a consequence of climate change.

It was even more galling that Abbott was given Australia’s top honours for his work with indigenous communities, given that he axed half a billion dollars from activities aimed at helping our First Nations people.

To take Australia’s top job on a litany of lies was an arrogant abuse of the democratic process, and it was unsurprising that he was deposed in an internal coup less than two years later. Given China’s economic retaliation against Australia for expressing concern about their political motives, Australia is keen for new trade deals. Anyone could do this job. Tony Abbott is the last person you need.
Dr Tim Davis
Heidelberg, Victoria, Australia

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/sep/06/tony-abbott-is-the-last...

But in the same way as the jews chose between Barrabas and Jesus, the Poms are about to choose Tony Abbott and reject Julian Assange... What a pity...

The WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, is due to appear at the Old Bailey in the latest stage of his legal battle against extradition to the US, where he faces a prison sentence of up to 175 years.

The hearing, which is scheduled to last four weeks, will hear allegations from the US Department of Justice that Assange tried to recruit hackers to find classified government information.

A US grand jury previously indicted Assange on 18 charges, 17 of which fall under the US Espionage Act. They cover conspiracy to receive, obtaining and disclosing classified diplomatic and military documents.

His lawyers say they have been given insufficient time to examine a new US indictment. They argue that the prosecution is politically motivated and that Assange is being pursued because WikiLeaks published US government documents that revealed evidence of war crimes and human rights abuses.

It will be the first time Assange, 49, has been in court for many months. He missed several recent appearances because of illness.

For the past 16 months, since being arrested in the Ecuadorian embassy in April 2019, he has been held on remand at Belmarsh prison. The extradition hearing was delayed because of the Covid-19 crisis. His supporters are expected to stage a protest outside the court as he arrives from the prison. Assange’s partner, Stella Moris, a South African-born lawyer, is expected to be among those in court.

Moris told PA Media Assange had lost a lot of weight in prison, his health was deteriorating and she feared her children would grow up without seeing their father.

She said: “Julian’s case has huge repercussions for freedom of expression and freedom of the press. This is an attack on journalism. If he is extradited to the US for publishing inconvenient truths about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, then it will set a precedent, and any British journalist or publisher could also be extradited in the future.”

Because of physical distancing requirements, only a few seats have been made available to the media and other observers, including NGOs and MEPs, in a separate courtroom in the Old Bailey. They will watch proceedings on a screen.

The case is being heard by the district judge Vanessa Baraitser, who normally sits at Westminster magistrates court and regularly hears extradition cases.

Among the lawyers representing Assange are Edward Fitzgerald QC and Jennifer Robinson of Doughty Street Chambers as well as Gareth Peirce of the law firm Birnberg Peirce.

Fitzgerald raised concerns at a preliminary hearing about problems communicating with his client. At one hearing, he said: “We’ve had great difficulties in getting into Belmarsh to take instructions from Mr Assange and to discuss the evidence with him … We simply cannot get in as we require to see Mr Assange and to take his instruction.”

Numerous human rights organisations and freedom of speech groups have condemned the US extradition request. Amnesty International has said Assange is at risk of “serious human rights violations including possible detention conditions that would amount to torture and other ill-treatment” in the US. The espionage charges, it adds, “could have a chilling effect on the right to freedom of expression, leading journalists to self-censor from fear of prosecution”.

The UN’s special rapporteur on torture, Prof Nils Melzer, who has visited him in Belmarsh, has said Assange is showing all the symptoms associated with prolonged exposure to psychological torture and should not be extradited to the US.

Claims that Assange was illegally monitored while he stayed in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and that sensitive information was passed to the CIA are likely to feature at the hearing. A Spanish court has heard allegations that while Assange was in the embassy, his conversations were recorded and his computer data downloaded; the information was then allegedly sold to US intelligence agencies.

Any decision made by the district judge is likely to go to appeal at a higher court.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/sep/07/julian-assange-due-court-l...

Gus:

In some ways, Julian would have the last laugh about all of this... He can hold his head high while all the other monkeys, including many journalists/parrots, are traitors to something called TRUTH. And yes, he has been a pain in the butt of the lying Americans since they lied to go to war on Saddam. Bush, Blair and Howard should be in prison... Not him !

With the other Australian, Tony Abbott, about to take an appointment as "trade advisor", guess which Aussie has integrity and history on his side? Tony Abbott seems to have been a liar all of his life, or at least an ignoramus of the truth while firmly lying about his intents. On the other side, Assange, the true Australian, is the prophet of truth — about the American/English/Australian lies... And these lies KILLED MANY PEOPLE. THESE LIES DID NOT MAKE THE WORLD SAFER! And these lies were followed by MORE LIES !

While Tony's conscience might be upright because he seems he does not have any, Assange conscience is clean and juste. He should be freed today!

The clamour of ALL the media should be loud and clear, instead of mute and repeating of blah blah blah charged with 175 years of death. It's stupid... The media like the Guardian should be punching below the belt of the English hegemony... Making a 1000 decibels noise in the land of justice where justice is being wronged... but all we hear is a few timid farts of vague protests that would not unseat a lost bird feather on a public bench.

We need J'ACCUSE! We need A REVOLUTION! We need a media BLITZ !... (virtual) BOMBS! 

Berlin should not be supporting the US-orchestrated attack "on journalists, on press freedom and on democracy," said Heike Haensel, the deputy head of the Left Party's parliamentary group in the German Bundestag, as she addressed a crowd of Assange supporters outside of the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales.

Dozens of people, including fashion designer Vivienne Westwood as well as journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger, have come to the Old Baily to support the WikiLeaks founder and call for his release on Monday ahead of yet another hearing on his extradition to the US, where he could face up to 175 years in jail.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/500076-berlin-navalny-assange-extradition-asylum/

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Dear Mr Trump, before you leave your Presidency after the next election, kill off this nasty witchhunt in pursuit of Julian Assange. Sign a decree for the deep state to stop harrassing this man... It will make you feel better... Actually do it as soon as possible. It might give you a few extra votes for an unlikely win...

Edward Snowden is accused of espionage and leaking secret National Security Agency documents, exposing to the world a domestic surveillance program in the United States that collected telephone and Internet data from citizens.

A former US National Security Agency contractor, Edward Snowden, revealed in an MSNBC interview on Friday that the White House has not contacted him or his representatives, after Trump vowed to "take a very good look at it" when talking about a possible pardon.

Snowden outlined that he has never sought a pardon from the United States.

He said that he will, however, ask for a pardon for others charged under the Espionage Act, implying that everyone "knows" that being charged under the act indicates that a fair trial is unlikely.

Snowden commented on Trump's recent remark that suggested that he would consider a pardon.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/us/202009121080443488-snowden-responds-to-potus-...

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Citing US court documents, CNN reported that Snowden "agreed" to forfeit more than $5 million he had allegedly earned from his book and speaking fees to the US government. The whistleblower reacted by saying that the news outlet has "badly misreported this."

"A) This is not a settlement; I didn't agree to it. B) The judgement from this censorship case is not enforceable while I am in exile, but I've never had that much money anyway," Snowden wrote on Twitter.

He suggested a "better" headline – "US could gain up to $5m by pardoning Edward Snowden" – instead of CNN's "Edward Snowden agrees to give up more than $5 million from book and speeches."

CNN added Snowden's comments to their story but kept the original headline.

Snowden published a memoire titled 'Permanent Record' last year, in violation of his contracts with the CIA and the NSA. According to CNN's story, a federal judge had sided with the Justice Department that filed a lawsuit to seize Snowden's proceeds.

The news channel quoted Snowden's lawyer Lawrence Lustberg as saying that the "agreement" filed in court on Tuesday does not mean that the US government will immediately collect the money because Snowden is considering appealing the judge's previous decision that he was liable for the disclosures.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/501486-snowden-corrects-cnn-story/

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