UnNews:U.S. still the only country that wants Edward Snowden
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This article is part of UnNews, your source for up-to-the-picosecond misinformation. |
3 July 2013
Edward Snowden became a household name in recent weeks after he made two NSA spy programs known to the public. A consequence of pointing out that the government spies on people is that Snowden has been charged with spying.
The looming charges have kept Snowden out of the U.S. and have forced him to appeal to foreign governments to hide him from the United States. Unfortunately for Snowden, no nation has yet given refuge to the 30-year-old leaker. Even North Korea has said it won't let Snowden in their country, citing IRC logs of Snowden in which he said Bradley Manning should be shot for leaking classified information and that he abhors the sensible and beloved metric system.
The first government program involuntarily disclosed by the NSA was that Verizon and others turn over all phone call metadata -- the numbers called, dialed, and the duration of the phone call in question -- to the NSA. The second program is an agreement the NSA has with major tech companies, including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Wikia that requires those companies to turn over information the NSA for national security purposes. This information varies from photos and videos to video conference logs, log-in logs, and Lincoln Logs. Surprisingly, the NSA sent a request to Uncyclopedia for the website to hand over its photos and articles. Uncyclopedia administrators replied with a link to Uncyclopedia.
The NSA has downplayed the telephone metadata as it does not tell them much, yet the agency emphasizes that it is somehow still vital to American insecurity. The agency also clarified that they only spy on people outside of the U.S., which is based on the recently invented legal principle that Americans outside the U.S. have less rights than Americans who do not betray their country by visiting others. Critics say it raises more questions, such as "How do you tell by metadata alone if the person making the call is a foreigner?" However, the metadata is only acquired after reasonable suspicion has been established that the person is going to destroy America because they are envious of our untampered freedoms. In a legal context, reasonable suspicion usually has to be articulated, but a special court that nobody is supposed to know about gives the NSA authorization to circumvent an archaic legal tradition called "due process."
The court is called FISA and it is made up of 11 federal judges appointed by the Chief Justice of the United States. This court signs off on the NSA's search warrant, sometimes after reviewing it. Contrary to popular belief, the search warrants are no longer thrown down a memory hole as was originally done during the Bush administration. In the spirit of transparency, the Obama administration prefers to present the warrant in the rare event that there is a trial but then invokes a special privilege to not disclose what their reasonable suspicion was because the program that authorized it is a secret and disclosing it is a threat to national security.
The NSA has also justified the program because of its successful efforts to mitigate terrorist threats, much in the same way that if you indiscriminately let drug sniffing dogs search homes you will certainly find some drugs somewhere hopefully.
Since his escape from Hong Kong, Snowden has been living in an airport transit area in Moscow, Russia, a real-life Russian version of the Tom Hanks film The Terminal. He is unable to travel because the U.S. has revoked his passport and put his face all over milk cartons, virtually guaranteeing his capture. He has applied for political asylum in numerous countries with the help of WikiLeaks but none have granted him asylum. Ecuador seemed like the most likely home for Snowden, but the Ecuadorian government quickly denied Snowden's application because he never filled one out. Furthermore, Bolivian President Evo Morales had his flight to Bolivia from Vienna, Austria turned back around because it was believed Snowden was on board the flight. After thoroughly x-raying Evo Morales' anus to ensure Snowden did not hide himself there, Austrian authorities allowed Morales to leave without further probing.