ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Edward Snowden, in exile in Moscow after leaking U.S. National Security Agency documents, said Friday he intends to vote in the U.S. presidential election, but did not say which candidate he favors.
“I will be voting,” Snowden said, speaking at a conference in Athens by video link from Moscow.
“But as a privacy advocate I think it’s important for me … that there should never be an obligation for an individual to discuss their vote. And I won’t be doing so with mine.”
He added: “What I will say about the candidates is that I’m disappointed we’re not hearing much about the constitution in this election cycle. We’re not hearing very much about our rights.”
The 33-year-old spoke ahead of the opening of the movie “Snowden,” starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
Snowden thanked human rights groups for their campaign to seek a pardon for him from President Barack Obama.
“I’m not actually asking for a pardon myself because I think the whole point of our system and the foundation of our democracy is a system of checks and balances,” he said. “But … I’m incredibly grateful and fortunate to be able to experience the support of the world’s three leading human rights organizations.”
A Republican-led bipartisan U.S. House intelligence committee on Thursday released a report calling Snowden a “serial exaggerator and fabricator” who doesn’t fit the profile of a whistleblower. All of the committee members separately sent Obama a letter urging him not to pardon Snowden, who revealed the NSA’s collection of millions’ of Americans phone records.
The American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are behind the campaign to pardon him.
Kenneth Roth, HRW’s executive director, was on the panel of the Athens conference, and described the effort as “an uphill battle.”
“What we’re hoping is that after the election when Obama is in his final months in office — at that stage he can begin to do something that are appropriate as a matter of conscience but politically difficult,” Roth told the AP.
“One of them we would be is to pardon Snowden,” he said. “There’s been broad recognition that Edward Snowden has done an enormous public service by disclosing the degree to which all of our privacy has been invaded needlessly.”
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Snowden’s voting from Russia.
I’m sure that ballot will be super duper top secret.
Pardoning him would be de facto condoning what he did. A ton of copycats would result. He says the a lot of good but that’s a matter of opinion. Once in possession of his information he made his choice: how top disseminate it. He had options. One would be to approach privacy rights advocates in the Senate like Rand Paul and use the system he claims to love so much to fix what he thought needed fixing. Instead he chose to take sensitive national security information and tote it around the world after copying it to Glen Greewald’s hard drive to be used by Mr. Greenwald to aggrandize himself.
The material was literally dumped for the world to see. It seems privacy is a one way street to Mr. Snowden. Given his claimed value set why would it be wrong to get a copy of his absentee ballot and put it in the front page of China’s and Russia’s major newspapers? Privacy means that. It means folks have a right to do in private what you don’t like.
The notion of a pardon is silly.No POTUS is going to do that. There isn’t a candidate Mr.Snowden can vote for that’s going to do that. He isn’t going to be pardoned. He’ll stay in Russia until a political situation arises in which the Russians see an advantage in booting him ( the same goes for his buddy Assange ) . It takes whopping dose of hubris on Snowden’s part to think he deserves a pardon.
“Privacy advocate”. Well, his own privacy apparently.
He did something that was right in just about as much of a wrong way as he could. Basically, he got played - but I doubt his ego lets him see it that way.