No clear answers why Snowden remains free despite U.S. request for his arrest | Hacker News Reader

No clear answers why Snowden remains free despite U.S. request for his arrest

washingtonpost.com

114 pointsLibertatea30 comments

The tone of the article made me laugh. WaPo seems to expect China to ask "how high?" when the US says "Jump!" The Chinese have to decide how they're going to approach this, and there's no reason for them to take Snowden into custody until they do.

It is actually a Hong Kong issue at this point, and there are a ton of (even British) lawyers in HK who would die to take this case. China is not likely to do anything to interfere in any fashion that might suggest an encroachment of the autonomous rule Hong Kong enjoys.

And yet ultimately the decision will be made in Beijing, publicly or no.

Why do you think/say so?

China sees its management of Hong Kong as a precursor for handling reunification with Taiwan. That issue (territorial integrity) is hands-down the most sensitive political issue in China which means that the government will think about fifteen times before taking actions which will cause problems with Hong Kong (relations are already at an all-time low).

There is simply no way the Chinese government will violate Hong Kong political independence in such a ham-fisted manner given the huge publicity surrounding this case. Which means that assuming the Hong Kong police decide this is an arrestable offense and take Snowden into custody (having just been in Hong Kong literally yesterday, my guess is that no-one knows where he is), the question of what happens to him will play out in the Hong Kong courts and the court of public opinion, and it is very likely that he won't be extradited for years if at all.

I don't think Hong Kong has any political independence to violate. Decisions are already made in Beijing and then passed to Hong Kong's government to implement.

In this particular case the Chinese government has an official mechanism to override extradition decisions, but I don't think there's any reason for them to actually need it.

This is a no-op article. Obviously if there's an arrest out for a person, and the person is not arrested yet - it means that the person is still no found / not in custody. Unless the paper meant to point to some kind of collusion/corruption (which it makes no claims of) - there is nothing to see here.

Saying "We can't catch person cause he is missing/at large" adds nothing to the discussion.

It's actually not clear that there is a warrant for his arrest in Hong Kong, only a request by the US to Hong Kong authorities.

Right now I'm guessing Hong Kong and Beijing authorities are both dearly wishing Snowden had chosen somewhere else, and wondering what exactly to do with him. Until they figure that out, staying silent is probably the best thing they can do.

To me it seems they are going to protect him or at least prevent Us from searching him. After all he showed to the world that US is just as bad in the things as China is and you'd think China wouldn't want to just give him up for it.

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/42147_Hong_Kong_Want...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/1012461...

  Right now I'm guessing Hong Kong and Beijing authorities 
  are both dearly wishing Snowden had chosen somewhere else

Flip the actors. What if a Chinese spy had fled to the United States and started to feed the press information on how the Chinese government had hacked essentially every computer system in the US; and in return the Chinese issued an arrest warrant, and demanded that the US send him back to the mainland so he could be tortured to death?

If you had a point you were trying to make, it was lost in the absurd hyperbole.

Where is the absurd hyperbole? That he would be tortured? Look at the case of Manning. Look to what the three NSA whistleblowers said awaited him when he returned.

As a US citizen, I want to believe this is hyperbole and nonsense, but the fact is, this is exactly what we should be doing - turning the mirror upon ourselves and performing a real self-examination of who we are as a country.

Manning is not dead (hence, not "tortured to death"), and he is also subject to the military justice system, which Snowden is not.

Manning was tortured. Sleep deprivation for many months is recognized as torture under international law, right?

If you stop looking for a reason to argue and instead read my words with dispassion, you'll realize I never said he wasn't tortured.

Indeed. He wouldn't be tortured to death.

He would be tortured, then executed.

HK, maybe not, they may enjoy the opportunity to create strong precedent behind their autonomy.

Here's a paper, it might be interesting. I haven't read it yet. Not even sure it is related. http://www.law.emory.edu/fileadmin/journals/eilr/26/26.2/Din...

It is worse than that. The article ignores basic facts that have been widely reported elsewhere about the difficulty of doing this particular extradition. It really serves no useful purpose other than to draw clicks, and push for a drumbeat of complaints about Hong Kong and China for domestic political consumption.

See http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/22/edward-snowden-e... for a more realistic view of the difficulty of extraditing him.

Furthermore, it is not clear why he hasn't returned to the US, plead guilty, and thrown himself at the mercy of the courts. As requested.

Mainly because that's an incredibly stupid thing to do: the courts would show no mercy.

sarcasm by the OP...maybe?

Why would he do that? Neither he nor anyone else of importance would gain anything.

It seems very odd to expect someone to subject themselves to the anger of a deeply corrupt government recently (partly) exposed.

Not a single major bankster thrown in jail and now we're lecturing other countries about the Rule of Law? Hilarious.

Except isn't that exactly the rule of law? Making up laws after the fact and then convicting people of them is the opposite of the rule of law.

Wait, what? You don't honestly believe that no laws were broken in the inflation and collapse of the housing bubble, do you? You're just trolling, right? I'm sorry, you were being serious? Oh boy, where to begin...

Try http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/.

Yves Smith, who runs NC, has been covering this issue doggedly, as have Bill Moyers and Matt Taibbi, both of whom appear together here.

http://billmoyers.com/segment/matt-taibbi-on-big-banks-lack-...

And then there's PBS's Frontline, which did a devastating program on "Too Big To Jail" that focused on HSBC's money laundering for Mexican drug cartels, and specifically on why the Justice Department's refusal to prosecute in spite of having overwhelming evidence of unambiguously criminal conduct.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/untouchables/

Their number two official (Lanny Breuer) made the mistake of admitting, on camera, that is was because Justice saw HSBC as too big to jail. Specifically, they feared that criminal convictions would trigger a series of events leading to a a global financial collapse. This explanation happened to account for the total absence of prosecutions for a wide range of well-documented violations at all the major banks engaged in a variety of criminal endeavors. Breuer resigned suddenly right after the program aired, causing huge headaches for his boss, Eric Holder, who first admitted that Breuer's assertion was true before backtracking.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/business-economy-fin...

For the best introduction to this broader range of crimes, see "Inside Job", which focuses on the interlocking forms of corruption and unpunished illegality that allowed the whole crisis to develop in the first place. You can watch it in full, for free, here (kudos, by the way, to Sony Pictures Classics for making it so publicly available).

http://vimeo.com/62026076

It was made well enough to win an Oscar, so you'll probably find it worth your time.

Yes, I'm pretty familiar with this topic. I'm not trolling, I just don't know what else was supposed to be done. It was a big complicated affair. My mistake here was contributing to the political noise that is taking over HN.

Fair enough. Sorry about the ton of bricks.

"Political noise"? Rather discussing trivial things is a political statement as well, and to my ears the true cacaphony in all this.

  Those who lead the country into the abyss
  Call ruling too difficult
  For ordinary men.
  Ah, what an age it is
  When to speak of trees is almost a crime
  For it is a kind of silence about injustice!

Bertold Brecht, "To Posterity" (1939)

Hong Kong / China is not U.S. territory. How is this not clear?

Some people think the US rules the world. There are plenty of countries that don't give a shit about the US...

There aren't any countries that can afford to not give a shit about the US, but that's not the same thing as saying they need to buckle to every whim in Washington.

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