Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> You mean the promises to arrest him for releasing confidential information? I'm honestly confused why people don't think he should be arrested.

If the government believes that he still has valuable intelligence potentially damaging to national security that may not have already been released, and if the government's primary concern with his actions is addressing the national security impact (which all public statements point to), the primary goal of the government should be preventing foreign powers, potentially hostile ones, from getting access to the secrets he possesses.

Publicly threatening to arrest and try him for serious and potentially capital offenses like espionage while he is in territory not subject to the US or any close ally that would be likely inclined to cooperate given the circumstances is, from that perspective, quite foolish.

View on HN

This train of logic doesn't make any sense.

    the primary goal of the government should be preventing foreign powers,
    potentially hostile ones, from getting access to the secrets he possesses.

    Publicly threatening to arrest and try him for serious and potentially
    capital offenses like espionage while he is in territory not subject to
    the US or any close ally that would be likely inclined to cooperate given
    the circumstances is, from that perspective, quite foolish.

If the government were to take that tack, it would only encourage leakers and 'spies' to grab the most valuable documents possible, in essence blackmailing their way out of prosecution.

If you're the US government, your default assumption must be that Putin has a hard drive with everything that Snowden took. If that's the case, it makes absolute sense to publicly threaten to arrest him and charge him with the most severe of consequences.

Look at it from a game theory perspective; the US government 'lost' the first game to Snowden. The only reason they are still engaging with him is that the US is playing a repeating game. They need to make the penalty for leaking high enough to persuade other potential leakers to stay quiet.

I think you are confusing two different issues: publicly threatening to arrest and prosecute him for capital offenses while he is outside of the practical reach of the US government and seeking to arrest and prosecute him.

You can do the second without doing the first; indeed, the first can be actively counterproductive to the second, since he cannot be arrested and prosecuted without first being brought within the practical reach of the US government, which the public threats to him (and the public threats to other sovereign states) have made less, not more, likely.

> Look at it from a game theory perspective; the US government 'lost' the first game to Snowden. The only reason they are still engaging with him is that the US is playing a repeating game. They need to make the penalty for leaking high enough to persuade other potential leakers to stay quiet.

Making public threats that make acheiving the stated goals of those threats less likely, thus demonstrating impotence, is not a particularly effective method of doing that.

You are advocating for arrest first, charge second. You seem to think that keeping the desire to arrest and prosecute Snowden a secret would somehow help the government's position. What kind of precedent would it set if this information was kept secret and folks could then seek asylum citing a presumed yet not stated threat from their government. When asked about it, how should the government respond?

Plus assuming that anyone would actually think that there is no desire to prosecute Snowden is foolish, as would be your suggestion for the government to keep its intentions a secret, especially given the nature of this case.

> You are advocating for arrest first, charge second.

No, I'm not.

> You seem to think that keeping the desire to arrest and prosecute Snowden a secret would somehow help the government's position.

No, I said that not making the kind of public threats they are making would improve their ability to serve a particular, clearly specified national security interest, if it was their goal.

> What kind of precedent would it set if this information was kept secret and folks could then seek asylum citing a presumed yet not stated threat from their government.

People can (and do) seek asylum on those grounds now.

> When asked about it, how should the government respond?

They could point out that they don't share information about ongoing investigations.

Or that confirming or denying anything related to the matter could potentially adversely impact national security.

Or...

The government is not making threats - they are stating their intentions. I find your stance laughable and I don't think it would work once, and certainly not twice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com