A decade on, Edward Snowden remains in Russia, though U.S. laws have changed | Hacker News Reader

A decade on, Edward Snowden remains in Russia, though U.S. laws have changed

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33 pointsrntn22 comments

He's a citizen there, and his family is there. His children only know Russia as home.

Also, there's the tin foil hat point: would Russia let him leave?

As long as he hasn't received a pardon, there's literally no reason for him to leave.

If Putin wanted to let him leave, he would have left already. He's effectively a sort of hostage.

Are you sure he would have left? Going to any US-friendly country (or ones that will buckle under their pressure) gives him a high chance of getting arrested and extradited to the US, or he could suffer the Assange treatment from the inhumane Brits. So it seems there are 2 locks keeping him in the "prison".

He said he wasn’t headed to Russia initially, but his passport was revoked while he was there. If he has a Russian passport now, there’s no obvious reason he couldn’t go to his original destination.

Wikipedia says he was going to a Latin American country, but "while he was aboard the plane [to Moscow], his destination countries grew reluctant to allow him in, and Snowden was thus stuck in the transit area of Moscow Sheremetyevo International Airport." but there is no citation.

Funnily enough he only got the Russian passport many years later, and if I were to speculate, even if he was free to leave, he probably saw after those few years that Moscow was fine and safe enough to live in that he stopped considering leaving, especially if there was a risk of getting CIA'ed in another country.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden_asylum_in_Russi...

> he only got the Russian passport many years later, [...] he probably saw after those few years that Moscow was fine and safe enough to live in

The years he spent passport-less IMHO signaled that the regime considered him a hostage of sort - as others said, a chip that could be spent later on. This might have changed since, but we don't really know if granting him that passport required some sort of deal about not leaving.

I wouldn't even assume he lives in Moscow, tbh; at various points he posted pictures showing he was travelling to pretty far-flung places IIRC. If his threat model is "not getting CIA'd", I reckon a less-known city with fewer foreigners, where an external operative would stand out more, would suit him better.

The people seeking to collect him illegally grounded the planes of other nation's leaders to look for him.

That seems like the reason you're missing.

Though they likely surveil him quite closely, I feel that, without further (compelling, even circumstantial) evidence, it is unlikely they feel any sort of need to keep him.

If I were Putin, I'd keep Snowden as some sort of bargaining chip, although as years go on, Snowden's value as such a chip would continue to decrease that the Americans would probably refuse that barter, preferring to see Putin get screwed rather than to capture Snowden.

But if I were Snowden I'd be worried about the regime after Putin, imagine a backroom deal where the US government secretly says "We'll help you get to power in Moscow if you agree to withdraw out of Ukraine, and give us Snowden."

Sure, there is that, but also any Russian administration will want the employees of their enemies to feel safe defecting to Russia. I.e., if the Kremlin gives Snowden to the US, future employees of the US intelligence community become less likely to choose to switch their allegiance to the Russian side.

Happy to have as a chip? Sure.

Willing to be shown making effort to that end? That is different.

There is also the issue that it seems safe to assume that many people at the CIA etc consider him a traitor and would like to assassinate him, given the opportunity, even if he could be assured of immunity from prosecution.

In his position I'd never set foot in the USA or a USA-friendly place ever again, and I'd just have my frozen pizza rolls and hot pockets flown in.

> There is also the issue that it seems safe to assume that many people at the CIA etc consider him a traitor and would like to assassinate him, given the opportunity, even if he could be assured of immunity from prosecution.

The US is known for supporting or conducting extrajudicial executions, but they all served a very specific geostrategic and geopolitic goal.

There isn't a single case of a political assassination case conducted out of spite, such as the one in the conspiracy theory you fabricated. There is also no goal to achieve, or win to be had, or position to be improved by assassinating Snowden. Snowden's relevance ended a long time ago. In fact, any of those conspiracy theories would represent an unequivocal loss for the US.

If anything, the CIA would be involved in protecting Snowden in the US from the likes of Russia to avoid a false flag assassination to embarrass the US.

They plotted to poison Assange, literally just out of spite, so you are wrong.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/jun/30/poison-julian-a... https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/sep/27/senior-cia-off...

Assassinating a non-US citizen (Asange) outside of the US borders is something that the CIA does from time to time. Conducting operations within the US borders is not cool for them [1], and killing US citizens doubly so.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_the_United_S...

>In 2015, Congress rewrote the law that allowed the NSA to scoop up everyone's records. The U.S.A. Freedom Act now prohibits the bulk collection of phone records by American citizens.

Leave it to NPR to run interference for the government. The Freedom Act reformed the reauthorization of the Patriot act. At least on paper. NSA's PRISM project that Snowden revealed was authorized under section 702 of the 2008 FISA Amendment. This law has not been changed.

That law is about collecting data from targeted foreigner's accounts outside the US. It has not been deemed illegal and probably never will be. Snowden misread the documents to think that he could collect any Americans' data if he were an analyst instead of a SharePoint admin, but that isn't NPR's fault.

What happens is that the US has other five eyes members spy on Americans, and then they get the data from them.

Also, Snowden reported that the data of Americans WAS being collected, and that was the thing he warned everyone about. Pretending there was no illegal/invasive activity on the NSA's part is revisionism at best.

> What happens is that the US has other five eyes members spy on Americans, and then they get the data from them.

[citation needed]

What you've repeated here is a conspiracy theory that became popular around the time of the Snowden leaks that has no supporting documentation. If it were true, Snowden would have been sure to find documentation for it to leak because it would have been the single biggest bombshell story in multinational government conspiracy of the century.

> Also, Snowden reported that the data of Americans WAS being collected, and that was the thing he warned everyone about

Phone metadata. That was shut down, and it had nothing to do with Section 702 or PRISM.

Snowden's documents specifically included information about FVEY members spying on each others' citizens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosure...

It included information about the FVEY members collecting data from each other's citizens, but it did not contain information saying that members illegally asked other members for data on their own citizens, as you initially claimed. What you're now claiming they did is perfectly legal. What you originally claimed is not.

The one law that would give him a fair trial still hasn't changed.

If you're tried under the espionage law you are not allowed to claim public interest as a defense. One of many ways in which American Russificafion prevents Edward Snowden from returning.

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