The Washington Post is calling for the criminal conviction of one of its own sources, saying Edward Snowden “broke the law” as well as “oaths and contractual obligations.”
“Mr. Snowden’s defenders don’t deny that he broke the law, not to mention oaths and contractual obligations, when he copied and kept 1.5 million classified documents,” the paper argued in an unsigned editorial Saturday evening. “They argue, rather, that Mr. Snowden’s noble purposes, and the policy changes his ‘whistle-blowing’ prompted, justified his actions.
“He made the documents public through journalists, including reporters working for The Post, enabling the American public to learn for the first time that the [National Security Agency] was collecting domestic telephone ‘metadata,’ information about the time of a call and the parties to it, but not its content, en masse with no case-by-case court approval,” the editorial said.
“The complication is that Mr. Snowden did more than that. He also pilfered, and leaked, information about a separate overseas NSA Internet-monitoring program, PRISM, that was both clearly legal and not clearly threatening to privacy,” editors added. “It was also not permanent; the law authorizing it expires next year.”
Despite publishing thousands of files provided by the former NSA contractor, the Post smudged details on at least two issues. The NSA’s metadata collection regime vacuumed up unique device identifiers and GPS data as well as call details, and the agency never informed Congress it had claimed authority to operate the PRISM program under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
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“Ideally, Mr. Snowden would come home and hash out all of this before a jury of his peers. That would certainly be in the best tradition of civil disobedience, whose practitioners have always been willing to go to jail for their beliefs,” the Post added.
“The second-best solution might be a bargain in which Mr. Snowden accepts a measure of criminal responsibility for his excesses and the U.S. government offers a measure of leniency in recognition of his contributions,” the paper added. “Neither party seems interested in that for now. An outright pardon, meanwhile, would strike the wrong balance.”
The commentary comes amid a campaign by the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to win a presidential pardon for Snowden before President Obama leaves office. The campaign coincides with this weekend’s release of an Oliver Stone-directed film centering on Snowden’s exploits.
The Washington Post is the first publication that took documents from Snowden to call for his criminal trial. Two others, the Guardian and the New York Times, have called for his exoneration.
