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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEVlyP4_11M
Interesting video, skip to 4:55 for the Snowden part.

Will Snowden really come back to US? Isn't he afraid?

I doubt he will ever come back which is pretty sad. He was labeled a traitor by the government so coming back would not be in his best interest.

Video isn't available in my country bullshit. How long is the interview with Snowden? I might just download the episode if it worthwhile seeing.


Being labeled a traitor is the least of his worries. It's being tried as one that he probably has no interest as he's almost certainly going to get found guilty and locked away for a very long time.

USA is a parody version of Oceania (http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/56045/why-is-oceania-only-at-war-with-one-other-nation).

http://www.filedropper.com/lastweektonightwithjohnoliver-governmentsurveillancehbo

Pretty sure snowden will face lifetime or death sentence ( chances for the latter arent high though)

I think he'll be assasined but will be published as normal death ;D
ps: just a conspiracy not to worth mention in the news ;D

I don't think that the judges will award him a death sentence, which would immediately make him a martyr. A life without parole is possible. And he will be facing the worst of the CIA torture methods.

No he wont. The CIA or anyone else wont lay a hand on him. They're not going to torture their own citizens.

Is this sarcasm or are you really that dumb? Governments don't give a crap if you're a citizen or not... you get in there way, they're going to do whatever they have to do to shut you up.

The hell would he want to go back?  The only reason U.S. isn't the huge butt of jokes by other countries is that they're more decent than the U.S. are.

I'm not the one who is dumb here. If you're going to accuse people of being dumb you might want to know the difference between there/they're/their. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about. Name me these American citizens who've been tortured before? If they even laid a finger on him he'd get off free on all charges not to mention sued for quite a substantial amount of money.

It's still his home where all his friends and family are. I think most people would want to go back to their homeland but it wouldn't be a good idea unless he gets a pardon or something.

Name me these American citizens who've been tortured before?
Would "suffering" prior to mass-murder count as "torture" in your world?


The Moral Promise of Freedom

The moral promise of a free society involves the boundaries of private property. The promise is this: property boundaries cannot be legally invaded or trampled upon. When property is protected, people can keep the fruits of their labor and investment, and not have them plundered by others. People can own land, for example, and this land can be used as the owners see fit. Private property allows wide latitude for experimentation. Property holders can form communities with internal cultures. Just as business can conduct its own affairs, people can separate themselves out entirely from the rest of society if they so desire. They need only respect the rights of others to do the same.

It's the nature of private property and a free society that it allows room for diversity of work, modes of production, and ways of life. That's how Mr. Jefferson wanted it, and that's what the authors of the Constitution promised. In the sixties, for example, hippie communes sprang up all over the country. The participants were eccentric and the utopias didn't work, but the attempts were tolerated by society and state.

Today the promise of private property is routinely violated by both private criminals and government. The attack on property began subtly at first, but today it has become explicit, sometimes brutal, and sometimes even deadly.

The community of faith that once lived at Mount Carmel in Waco, Texas, believed the promise of free society. They chose to separate themselves from society, as so many others have done in our nation's history. This was not allowed in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, or Maoist China. That's one reason we regard these regimes as tyrannical.

Yet in its dealings with the Waco religious dissenters, the central government revealed that it has become intractably opposed to any individual or group that represents a challenge to its singular authority. To counter this challenge, the central government resorted to tactics that resulted in the death of 86 men, women, and children. As for the survivors, the government has put them on trial.

This sort of brutality is inevitable in a system of absolute and centralized power. A government that invades private business by demanding confiscatory taxes, imposes unbearable regulations, and rules over business culture through pervasive labor controls, builds an appetite for even more power. As the power builds, so does the extent of corruption at the top and the disinformation that covers up the truth about its tyranny.

So it was in Waco, where the tragic events combined all the elements of a government out of control. Most of what the public thinks it knows about David Koresh, the group's spiritual leader, is false. But as with war, military invasions, and other acts of state – as J.S. Griffey of the University of Houston argued in an outstanding article in the Southern Partisan – the first impression is the one that lasts.

For example, most people probably believe that the government attacked the Waco Christians because they were "stockpiling" weapons. Were they? Texans own 60 million firearms, about 3.5 per person. At Mt. Carmel there were two firearms per person, most of them locked away. The rest of their protection consisted of hay bales and plywood.

The stockpiling accusation was an act of projection, for the real stockpiler was the government. In the attack on Waco, agents used MI 13 personnel carriers, M2AO Bradley fighting vehicles, Sikorsky Blackhawks, Apache and UH-1 Bell helicopters, Abrams MI tanks, 7.62mm machine guns, FBI SWAT snipers, two varieties of hand grenades, and the FBI's psychological warfare experts. The government even fired canisters of CS gas, banned in warfare by international treaty, through windows and walls.

The BATF got their helicopters from the Texas National Guard. Under the law, the military cannot be involved in domestic law enforcement. But a special provision of the U.S. Code allows the government to use military equipment in drug cases. So the BATF told Texas governor Ann Richards that they suspected Mount Carmel had a drug lab. This canard was not in the BATF's search warrants and it hasn't been mentioned since.

Did Koresh want a confrontation with law enforcement agents? All evidence indicates he desired good relations with the law. In 1992, Koresh had actually invited the BATF into the compound so agents could see for themselves. But the government reneged. "Why do you all have to be so big all the time?" Koresh asked the FBI during the month-long standoff. "Why didn't you just talk to me?"

Did the community have a death wish? Twenty minutes before the fire began, the community hung out a sign reading: "We want our phones fixed." (The government had cut them off, along with the electricity.) That's not a message sent by people hungering for the Apocalypse. None of the survivors report discussion of suicide plans.

There is still no evidence that the religious people set the fire that destroyed their building. The place was a firetrap, entirely made of wood and sealed shut. Since the government had cut off their electricity, lanterns were their only light. The government shot out the windows, so sheets were their only protection from the weather. The tanks that battered the building probably set the fire, either accidentally or deliberately.

The initial raid was on February 28, 1993. Several people say the government shot through the roof from a helicopter, but we cannot know for sure. The physical evidence is reduced to ashes, and the government plowed the land over a week after the home went up in flames.

As the standoff continued, the women and children were upstairs because they were afraid of the government. The tanks destroyed the stairways that would have allowed them to escape the fire. The underground shelter was destroyed as well.

After the fire, the FBI made three claims it later retracted. First, the Bureau said that two agents saw community members lighting a fire. Second, the Bureau said one agent saw someone dressed in black "cupping his hands," as if to light a fire. Third, the Bureau said some members trying to flee the fire were shot by others. All assertions were false and were subsequently dropped.

The Justice Department contributed its share of lies. Spokesmen said an "independent arson investigator" concluded that members of the community started the fire. But the "independent investigator" turned out to be Paul Gray, an agent for the BATF from 1962 to 1990 whose wife stills works for the agency as secretary to the man who planned the raid. They apparently could not be sure a genuinely independent investigator would come to the preordained conclusion.

The stated purpose of the raid was to save children from abuse. Yet Janet Reno lied about that too. The information she used was already discredited, and she later admitted it. The real child abuse was committed by the government: to harass community members, the FBI turned on massive floodlights at night and played recordings of Buddhist chants, dental drills, and screaming, slaughtered rabbits. Reno herself ordered the house to be saturated with CS gas, knowing that the community's gas masks couldn't fit the children.

In ways that have become typical, the media and government worked together in this disaster. One day before the raid, the Waco Tribune-Herald started a series on "The Sinful Messiah." On the morning of February 28, 1993, before BATF arrived at Mt. Carmel, at least 11 reporters were on the scene already. After the religious community was torched, the entire media participated in the beatification of Janet Reno for her actions in Waco.

The consequences for the victims were public humiliation and death. There were zero consequences for the perpetrators, unless we consider the three agents who were suspended with pay and perks, which is no punishment at all.

The methods and strategies of the government's assault against Waco had been used for years by the military, but against foreign governments and their leaders, not against the domestic citizenry. The most familiar case of foreign intrigue was the government's attack on Manuel Noriega, in which it used similar tactics (blaring music, planting evidence, spreading disinformation), and therein lies the connection between foreign policy and domestic. Anything a government allows itself to do to foreign countries will eventually be done at home. That's one reason George Washington warned us against foreign entanglements.

We may never know the full truth about Waco or the extent of government perfidy, but we can draw lessons from the experience. This particular event was a fiasco, but it also tells something about what our government has become: "the organizer-in-chief of society," as Bertrand de Jouvenel said, which is "making its monopoly of this role ever more complete." It is a parasite and a monster that acts to protect itself. Mises was right: government's nature is coercive. It is "beating, killing, hanging." Coercion is necessary in society to protect the rights of property holders against those who do not respect property. But when government itself become the source of arbitrary violence, we have tyranny. That's why unchecked power should never be invested in a centralized government, even one with a democratic mandate. This power will invariably be exercised at the expense of peaceful social relations.

In its dealings with the community of believers at Mount Carmel, the central government abandoned the moral promise of a free society, and, as all tyrannies eventually do, ignored its own standards of law and ethics. But it paid the price of losing some measure of public confidence, which is already at historic lows. A government that governs by fear alone eventually finds itself unable to govern at all.

by Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX)
The Free Market
March 1994

No it wouldn't. Waco is entirely different and not relevant here (unless once they got them out they holed them up and tortured information out of them).

Good post, wow.  Thanks for making it worthwhile to sort through all the shit posters like this:

Care to actually elaborate on that rather than providing a hollow "wow good post" shitpost yourself? I guess you think police brutality is also the same as CIA torture or no?

Sorry about that one random typo douche. Working 18 hours straight on university work, computer programming, and business development without sleep can screw with your focus.

I don't really believe any of that, but douche? Seriously? Are you sure you're old enough to be at university? Regardless and irrelevant of that care to actually back up your initial claims instead of just childish insults and accusing people of being dumb?

I have no doubt that it doesnt matter for intelligence agencies who they torture - because usually it wont get public attention and they are "working according to the rules and directives".

Here are some known cases:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_El-Masri


http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/09/cia-torture-report-us-brave-step-uk-chilcot-report



http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/08/cia-torture-report-release-date-nears





well, sad world we living in.
united states of freedom (and torture for some people)

somehow alot of truth, george orwell was a extremely intelligent human being.

/edit

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/12/08/5-questions-about-the-cia-detention-and-interrogation-report-you-wish-you-didnt-have-to-ask/

you guys can now choose the red or the blue pill

"Edward Snowden wants to come back to US...."
"Edward Snowden is ready to comeback to US..."

^^ https://www.google.co.in/search?q=edward+snowden+want+to+come+back+to+us

---

That's why I asked whether he will go back. He obviously want to come back as it is his home country.

He has said that he will come back to the United States, if the authorities can guarantee him a fair trial. But the authorities are reluctant to promise him anything, so Snowden will remain in Russia for the rest of his life.  ;D

Snowden will come back only if there is an attitude change in the USA resulting in a change in the political party in power being more concerned about individual rights, particularly privacy.

Right now the Democrats and Republicans are both split on the issue of privacy and rights versus big government survelliance.  Given that situation what should happen is Snowden is pardoned by a US President - this would shield him from any future prosecution.

However Obama is not going to do that, he is a big government fascist - he'll pardon on his last day of office all the criminals that worked with him.

The vast majority of the American people do not understand Snowden or the issues at stake and driving his actions. 

that is what bush did, dont think obama can repeat some bullshit like that.

they always do. Part of me was hoping he'd do the right thing and pardon him but like you said he wont because he's a coward. I have no idea how Snowden could ever be guaranteed a fair trial and how do they even make that promise? Clearly any trial set in the US wont be fair. Looks like he's never going to be able to set foot in the US ever again unless there's a seachange in policy but we know that's never going to happen.

The US is a clusterfuck.  Most of the shit they do is covered up,  and the stuff in the open people refuse to believe anyway("must be conspiracy").  Just replacing the government we're aware of wouldn't be enough since there's a too much other evil that would quickly take it's place.

I like some of his stuff but I hate to break it to Mr. Snowden.. a government which did not have "the ability to interfere with [our] rights" would not be a governmnet would it?   Sort of like daydreaming about water that would never drown anybody since it would not be wet.

There is zero chance he gets a fair trial, and let's consider for a moment how fast democrats and republicans alike lined up to crucify him in the immediate aftermath. Snowden leaked documents for the overall good of the nation, to force the government to have the debate over this power it granted itself in the public sphere - which it most certainly was not going to do voluntarily, as it demonstrated itself by keeping it secret.

Compare the rhetoric against Snowden with the treatment of Petraeus, who got a sweetheart plea deal for leaking classified information - not for the good of the nation, but to impress his mistress and for his own glorification (she was writing his biography) - and realize that Snowden is an outsider and that's why the government will try to hang him, while Petraeus - an insider - gets off with a laughable slap on the wrist.

Disgusting.

Petraeus Plea Deal: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/03/03/david-petraeus-paula-broadwell/24312109/ (http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/03/03/david-petraeus-paula-broadwell/24312109/)

He'd have to be nuts to set one foot on American soil or of any nation that would be willing to ship him back in exchange for some free moniez, errr, I mean in the interests of reciprocal diplomatic relations, which is the same thing in the end.

never habe been more true

The TedTalk with Edward Snowden is a bit less funny but is definitely enlightening and worth a watch for anyone interested in the nsa and their <super helpful and awesome> tactics

http://www.ted.com/talks/edward_snowden_here_s_how_we_take_back_the_internet?language=en

Its also cool because he appears at the talk as a robot avatar.. you know cause he would probably get into an "accident" or tossed in prison if he leaves Russia-that place where liberty is not valued, unlike America :p