Before I Forget
I wondered why Snowden wasn’t charged under the laws that I was constantly being reminded of when I was at NSA, then someone explained it all.
Snowden didn’t work for the government, and those laws apply to people who work for the government. Snowden worked for Booz-Allen and his actions would have been a civil matter of the non-disclosure clause in his employment contract. The government had to go to the Espionage Act to find something to charge him with that was criminal in nature.
Another thing that happens because Snowden didn’t work for the government, is that the complaints process wasn’t available to him. He wasn’t part of the system and had no chain of command to act on his complaints. No one in the government was required to listen to anything he had to say, much less generate any paperwork.
It has been suggested that he could have sent his concerns to Congress. Yeah, right. Senators Wyden and Udall couldn’t get Congress to do anything, but some unknown Booz-Allen employee was going to be taken seriously.
This would be the same Congress that is now suggesting that he was in league with Russia. There were a 1000 people at NSA who were system administrators and every one of them should have been able to do what Snowden did, if they were qualified for their jobs.
January 20, 2014 8 Comments
