The fact that there isn't a guarantee that the U.S won't kill Snowden or put him in a hole forever and ignore his rights as a citizen is a testament to the degradation of the rule of law in the U.S.

When Ellsberg was arrested for leaking the Pentagon papers (to no less than 17 different newspapers), he was released on recognizance and allowed to speak to the media. His charges were eventually dropped because the FBI had used an illegal wiretap on him. Today, the FBI would get a rubber-stamped wiretap, and he would be thrown in a hole forever like Bradley Manning. Ellsberg wrote an editorial in the Washington Post saying that fleeing the country was the right choice.

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-07-07/opinions/40427...

Naomi Wolf has argued that the first step to an authoritarian state is to conjure a terrifying internal and external enemy, such as "terrorists". Cameron Stewart seems to have bought into this idea of an eternal enemy in stating, "[US citizens] are willing to pay that price to maintain security in the era of terrorism."

An era implies a distinct period of history with a particular feature or characteristic: it has a beginning and an end. As Bruce Fein (of the American Freedom Agenda) noted, "there will be no defined end"... to terrorism, in part due to the expansion of the definition of terrorism itself.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-wolf/ten-steps-to-close-...

Looking from high above, spying is an act of distrust. Distrust divides. I believe humanity should seek to unify its nations; we have much untapped potential, and spying will only delay us from reaching the stars.

People seem to forget that at present time humanity has no backup.

I'm sure a summation of "he hasn't thought things through" is a bit unfair. I'm sure he thought long and hard about everything he did and I think we should be glad that he took the steps he did. Let's face it, there's no way of really protecting yourself if you openly take the action he's taken. You're a target for somebody, somewhere.

I don't quite understand why you would want him back in the states for trial. It has been said that these matters are above the DOJ and therefore held in a secret court. Is that really fair? Do you honestly believe that the US would allow for a fair and open trial?(lets say something as televised as Trayvon Martin case)

To answer the several questions in this thread by answering this particular question of yours, yes, I think Edward Snowden will receive a fair trial according to the law if he stands trial in the United States, which I hope he does. (Federal trials and the trials in many states are NOT televised, as a default, but they are public except in very extraordinary circumstances. I have walked into trials in various places just because I can, as a member of the general public.)

In general, as I have said in other recent comments here on Hacker News, I can be appalled by several of the recent allegations about NSA activity without applauding Snowden's actions. I took my wife and my two younger children along with a home-made protest sign ("We support the Bill of Rights") to the lightly attended Restore the Fourth protest in Minneapolis. I did that openly and in full view of law enforcement authorities and news cameras because freedom is precious to me, and I don't think my freedom should be abused on any rationale, even the rationale of fighting terrorist networks. That said, I find that whenever I get out of the Hacker News hivemind, and deal with any of my friends from around the world who have actually lived and worked in multiple countries, and especially those friends who have children of their whose futures the friends are working for, there is remarkably little regard of Snowden as a hero or a freedom-fighter. It's not clear that he really has the technical chops to make a "dead man's switch" work as he intends against all possible attack surfaces, and it's not clear that all of his allegations about United States government activities are factually true, and it's especially clear already that Snowden's recent statements, with the ghost-writing help of Wikileaks, represent a badly unbalanced view of which countries in the world are the greatest enemies of human freedom, which is a cause I cherish all over the world.

> In general, as I have said in other recent comments here on Hacker News, I can be appalled by several of the recent allegations about NSA activity without applauding Snowden's actions.

I think this needs some further explanation. Without explanation it seems hypocritical to me, since you would not know about those NSA activites without Snowden.

> That said, I find that whenever I get out of the Hacker News hivemind, and deal with any of my friends from around the world who have actually lived and worked in multiple countries, and especially those friends who have children of their whose futures the friends are working for, there is remarkably little regard of Snowden as a hero or a freedom-fighter.

It's obvious that you do not have friends from Germany. Having suffered through multiple surveillance states in the past, Germans are very much aware of the dangers that are caused by massive surveillance. New technologies enable surveillance in an amount that has never been seen in history before. If your friends do not seem to care, they just haven't realised that there is a sword dangling right above their heads. Why do you think that every single constitution of "free countries" (and also the human rights) have passages about the confidelity of spoken words, the confidelity of messages and so on. This is no coincidence. So many people paid with their lives for it. It is the only way of making sure that a democracy stays a democracy. You cannot organize an opposition, if the current rulers know all your moves, all your communications and all your contacts. This has been proven in history again and again, yet this is vital for a healthy democracy. Yet people seem to forget, because they "have nothing to hide" or their "life is not affected". But guess what, once you are affected, it is already too late and nothing can be done anymore. I would not want my children to live in a fascist surveillance state and I am very grateful for Snowden actions. Please talk to your friends and try to raise awareness. It's their children or their children's children who will have to pay the price. I know it's a little abstract, that's exactly why people fall for it again and again.

> I hope that the most sensitive secrets that he is in a position to disclose stay undisclosed

Why? This is like a married person saying "I hope that the affairs my spouse has had stay secret." Which, I suppose, some would agree with...

It's pretty unfair to criticize some speculation of how the system might work.

It might release the documents to selected people who may be required to use their judgement on what to release. It may require cooperation from several individuals to decrypt. It may be enough of a bluff for someone to think twice

Maybe a script could be set to release a random subset of the documents and delete another random subset, i.e.

    if snowden_has_not_logged_in_for_7_days():
        for doc in documents:
            if random.choice([True, False]):
                release(doc)
            else:
                permanently_delete(doc)

Then all parties have something to lose (either undesired leak of some document, or losing the chance to learn the contents of a document) if Snowden dies.

The comments on the source point out the same mechanism that aims to keep the US from killing him could also been seen as incentivizing the US protecting him from people who want everything released right away.

I hope, for everyone's sake, you are the minority.