Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence

Edward Snowden

Edward Snowden

Know all ye by these presents that Edward Snowden is hereby awarded the Corner-Brightener Candlestick, presented by Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence.

Sam Adams Associates are proud to honor Mr. Snowden’s decision to heed his conscience and give priority to the Common Good over concerns about his own personal future. We are confident that others with similar moral fiber will follow his example in illuminating dark corners and exposing crimes that put our civil rights as free citizens in jeopardy…

Heeding the dictates of conscience and patriotism, Mr. Snowden sacrificed his career and put his very life at risk, in order to expose what he called ‘turnkey tyranny.’ His whistleblowing has exposed a National Security Agency leadership captured by the intrusive capabilities offered by modern technology, with little if any thought to the strictures of law and Constitution. The documents he released show an NSA enabled, rather than restrained, by senior officials in all three branches of the U.S. government.

Just as Private Manning and Julian Assange exposed criminality with documentary evidence, Mr. Snowden’s beacon of light has pierced a thick cloud of deception. And, again like them, he has been denied some of the freedoms that whistleblowers have every right to enjoy.
Mr. Snowden was also aware of the cruel indignities to which other courageous officials had been subjected — whistleblowers like Sam Adams Award honorees (ex aequo in 2011) Thomas Drake and Jesselyn Radack — when they tried to go through government channels to report abuses. Mr. Snowden was able to outmaneuver those who, as events have shown, are willing to go to ridiculous lengths to curtail his freedom and quarrel with his revelations. We are gratified that he has found a place of sanctuary where his rights under international law are respected.

Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, a Sam Adams ‘Awardee Emeritus,’ has asserted that Mr. Snowden’s whistleblowing has given U.S. citizens the possibility to roll back an ‘executive coup against the Constitution.’ This is a mark of the seriousness and importance of what Mr. Snowden has done.
Like other truth-tellers before him, Edward Snowden took seriously his solemn oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. He was thus legally and morally obliged to let his fellow Americans know that their Fourth Amendment rights were being violated.
The past few years have shown that courage is contagious. Thus, we expect that still others will now be emboldened to follow their consciences in blowing the whistle on other abuses of our liberties and in this way help stave off ‘turnkey tyranny.’

Presented this 9th day of October 2013 by admirers of the example set by the late CIA analyst, Sam Adams.”

Related Articles

Should Edward Snowden Get His Passport Back?

By Charles S. Clark, March 25, 2014
On Wednesday, an alliance of pro-whistleblower activists is set to deliver petitions containing more than 100,000 signatures to the State and Justice Departments demanding that former National Security Agency contractor-turned-leaker Edward Snowden have his passport reinstated so that he can end his current exile in Russia.

The petitions are addressed to Secretary of State John Kerry and Attorney General Eric Holder. They call Snowden, who formerly worked with highly classified telephone metadata in the Hawaii office of Booz Allen Hamilton, “a whistleblower who has educated the public about threats to our privacy and precious constitutional rights.” The petitions urge officials “to make an unequivocal public commitment not to interfere with [Snowden’s] travels or political asylum process.”

The push comes as President Obama has given some ground to critics and prepared a proposal to reform the controversial NSA domestic surveillance program to limit its scope. (More here.)

Obama’s ‘Snowden reform’ of NSA spying won’t help Edward Snowden

“President curbs metadata gathering, but still wants to charge whistleblower Snowden” By Neil Macdonald, CBC News Posted: Mar 26, 2014
Try to find some logic here, if you can. Most Americans disapprove of the blanket electronic eavesdropping carried out by the vast apparatus of U.S. security organs. It is, they tell pollsters, an infringement of their privacy and liberty.

Yesterday, President Barack Obama sympathized: “I think the fears about our privacy in this age of internet and big data are justified,” he told reporters in The Hague. More here.

Snowden supporters want his passport returned and right to asylum

By Sam Sturgis, McClatchy Washington Bureau, March 26, 2014
Advocates for Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower pressed for the return of his U.S. passport and his freedom to seek political asylum. Snowden, whose revelations about a National Security Agency program to collect Americans’ phone data rocked the intelligence community, is currently in Russia. Read more here.

Edward Snowden’s Moral Courage

Last Thursday Chris Hedges opened a team debate at the Oxford Union at Oxford University with this speech arguing in favor of the proposition “This house would call Edward Snowden a hero.” The others on the Hedges team, which won the debate by an audience vote of 212 to 171, were William E. Binney, a former National Security Agency official and a whistle-blower; Chris Huhne, a former member of the British Parliament; and Annie Machon, a former intelligence officer for the United Kingdom. The opposing team was made up of Philip J. Crowley, a former U.S. State Department officer; Stewart A. Baker, a former chief counsel for the National Security Agency; Jeffrey Toobin, an American television and print commentator; and Oxford student Charles Vaughn.

I have been to war. I have seen physical courage. But this kind of courage is not moral courage. Very few of even the bravest warriors have moral courage. For moral courage means to defy the crowd, to stand up as a solitary individual, to shun the intoxicating embrace of comradeship, to be disobedient to authority, even at the risk of your life, for a higher principle. And with moral courage comes persecution.  See rest of Chris Hedges’ opening remarks here.

Dan Ellsberg expresses joy at Edward Snowden’s election as rector at University of Glasgow

Students at Glasgow University have elected American whistleblower Edward Snowden as their new rector.

Read the full article here.