slate | The U.S. government charged former National Security Agency
contractor Edward Snowden with three felonies, including two under the
Espionage Act. He now becomes the eighth person to be charged under the
Espionage Act under Obama, according to Firedoglake.
That is more than double all previous presidents combined. Prior to
Obama’s administration only three people who leaked information had been
charged under the 1917 statute that was never really intended for
leakers. The arguments that Obama uses now to use that statute to go
after those who reveal information were first brought up by Ronald
Reagan’s administration when it went after a Navy civilian analyst who
leaked photographs to a British military magazine. But now the practice
has become widespread.
The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald
wonders how these prosecutions are even “remotely defensible” coming
from a president who vowed to usher in an era of transparency in
Washington. Sure, Snowden may have broken the law, writes Greenwald, but
he hardly committed “espionage.” He didn’t sell secrets to foreign
governments, or try to profit from them in any way. Snowden simply blew
the whistle on something he saw. “The irony is obvious,” writes
Greenwald, “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.’”
