Edward Snowden’s Flight to Moscow

What piece of paper or paragraph was missing from the Obama Administration’s request that Hong Kong hold Edward Snowden, the N.S.A. leaker, on a provisional warrant pending an extradition? Hong Kong decided that the submission was “incomplete,” and let Snowden get on a flight to Russia, another place he may not stay long. There was mention, early Sunday, of Cuba and Venezuela, or maybe Ecuador and Iceland—there were reports of the diplomatic cars of various nations meeting his plane on the tarmac in Moscow, and Sarah Harrison, a legal aide for WikiLeaks, is flying with him. (The Guardian has a comprehensive live blog.)

But it is probably too much to blame the paperwork: you can always find some slip if you want to, and Hong Kong, it appears, wanted to let Snowden go. Maybe it was to save itself the diplomatic trouble, or maybe it had something to do with this passage in its statement on the departure:

    the HKSAR Government has formally written to the US Government requesting clarification on earlier reports about the hacking of computer systems in Hong Kong by US government agencies. The HKSAR Government will continue to follow up on the matter so as to protect the legal rights of the people of Hong Kong.

It is also notable that the U.S. charged Snowden not only as a thief of classified information but under the Espionage Act—as a spy. This has been the Administration’s preferred tool for prosecuting leakers and watching the journalists they talk to, and it is a flawed one. It may also have triggered reservations in Hong Kong about whether Snowden was being sought for a political crime—a complication, in terms of the extradition treaty.

There is a good deal of scrambled blame in this story, and any number of distractions. WikiLeaks, in its own statement, talked about how Snowden was headed for a “democratic” country, which signaled Venezuela (as opposed to Cuba) for some people and just made others mad. (That included Mike Rogers, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, and Senator Charles Schumer.) Despite all the talk of telephony metadata and servers, we were suddenly back in the seventies, with Cold War characters and the image of someone shouting that this plane was going to Cuba. There is a long history of flamboyant breaks for the island: Joanne Chesimard, who now goes by the name Assata Shakur and was recently added to the F.B.I.’s Ten Most Wanted List, has been there for close to thirty years.

The episode also seems to confirm WikiLeaks serious, as opposed to rhetorical, entry into this story. It raises the question of whether the two personalities of Snowden and Assange will form a binary solar system subject to gravitational collapse, or will illuminate what might be WikiLeaks’s essential mission: as a clearinghouse for information that ought to be open and source of sound (or at least effective) legal advice for leakers. Or even better: as an emerging media organization with a decent legal department. That last item is something Bradley Manning, the Army private who is now being court-martialled for giving the group documents, perhaps could have used.

I’ll add to this post as we learn more—perhaps just which diplomats got out of those cars on the Tarmac. [Update: the answer may be Ecuador.] Justice Department lawyers are undoubtedly reviewing the terms of a half-dozen extradition treaties now. But Snowden’s flight may itself be the biggest distraction of all. What lies he may or may not be telling himself about the figure he cuts are far less interesting than the lies our government demonstrably told the American public. One can say that because of the documents Snowden exposed; now he has exposed himself, with planes and cars and a chase across countries in motion, and everyone watching.

Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: Amy Davidson