[cabalamat]

> You think it is attractive to accept a lifetime of exile

If I lived in an oppressive state then a lifetime of exile would not be too unwelcome.

During the cold war, the USA was somewhere persecuted people fled to. Now it's somewhere persecuted people flee from. While it is not yet as bad as the USSR was, it seems to me that it is sleepwalking to authoritarianism.

[btilly]

The thing is that the USA remains a prosperous pleasant place to live..as long as you do not challenge authority. We even remain outwardly tolerant of random criticism of authority so long as there is no actual threat to power structures.

Those facts are unlikely to change until we are much farther down the road to authoritarianism than we currently are.

[noonespecial]

The thing is that the USA remains a prosperous pleasant place to live..as long as you do not challenge authority.

That's just spooky. That is exactly the same thing my friend who moved to Shenzhen said of that part of China.

The only thing left to figure out is if its "worse" in China or just different (in regards to how authority is "threatened").

[embolism]

Snowden is not a persecuted person. He's someone who deliberately lied in order to gain access a government spy agency and then stole state secrets which he is selling to the press.

No government would consider that to be acceptable.

Note: This is no defense of the NSA. However it is dishonest to claim that people who criticize the US government are persecuted and need to flee.

The US is not chasing Snowden because he criticized them. They are chasing him because of the stolen documents.

[marvin]

This is obviously much bigger than the leak of some classified documents that expose secret surveilance programs. The reaction of the US government (in this case, the decisions are probably made by Obama himself) is a lot bigger than a random criminal prosecution.

Just look at the measures taken in order to intimidate or capture Snowden: In effect, the US government grounded the private jet of a foreign head of state. If a similar action was done against the US, it would be considered an act of war. A persecution is exactly what this is, under the plausible (even legal) guise of criminal proceedings.

[embolism]

Nobody is saying this is a random criminal prosecution. He's being pursued for fraudulently obtaining a security clearance and stealing classified state secrets.

[laureny]

> The thing is that the USA remains a prosperous pleasant place to live..as long as you do not challenge authority.

Tens of thousands of Americans question authority on a daily basis and nothing happens to them. America is still a place where your rights and freedoms are respected quite a bit more than other countries.

What do you think would happen if you questioned authority in, say, Venezuela?

[btilly]

There is an important distinction between questioning authority, and challenging it. To give an extreme, it is the difference between commenting on a site like this one that the NSA is a fundamental threat to our freedom, and becoming a whistleblower like Snowden.

In short, if the action in question does not affect the powers that be from operating as they want to operate, there are no consequences from doing it. If the action challenges the powers that be then - no matter how wrong their actions - the consequences are real.

Those in power will respond to challenges. And shrug off questions.

And yes, that is indeed better than many other countries. (Though I personally felt that the rights and freedoms which I cared about were better protected when I lived in Canada.)

[jeltz]

> What do you think would happen if you questioned authority in, say, Venezuela?

I am pretty sure that tens of thousands of Venezuelans question authority too. The difference is that it takes less to make the Venezuelan government feel threatened than it takes in the US.

[PavlovsCat]

Tens of thousands of Americans question authority on a daily basis and nothing happens to them.

Or to said authority, for that matter.

[ricardobeat]

You'd probably find Singapore or the UAE very pleasant places to live.

[tome]

> Now it's somewhere persecuted people flee from.

No it's not. That's very melodramatic. A single person who hasn't even been persecuted yet has flown from the US. Maybe he (and others) think he will be persecuted if he returns, but that's something very different from what happened in the eastern bloc during the Cold War.

[stefantalpalaru]

You don't think that suspending his passport and strong-arming various countries in refusing him political asylum or even air transit amounts to persecution?

[tome]

No, I don't think it amounts to persecution by the standards of what happened within the eastern bloc during the Cold War.

[embolism]

Snowden is not being persecuted for his views or criticism of the government.

He is being chased because of his intentional theft of classified government documents. Can you name a country in which that would be legal?

[btilly]

The USA on May 11, 1973. (OK, the ruling was not exactly innocent. But Daniel Ellsberg walked free after intentional theft of classified government documents.)

Sorry to have a somewhat real answer to a rhetorical question.

[embolism]

It's an informative answer. Ellsberg remained on US soil and handed himself in to a US court. The court acquitted him.

Now consider how he would have been viewed by the US if he'd instead flown to Moscow and applied to Brezhnev for asylum.

[btilly]

Obviously. We were in an acknowledged but undeclared global war with the Soviet Union. We're not with Russia.

To me the more interesting change is that Ellsberg believed (correctly!) that a story like his could go to US media and would get out. Today nobody trusts the US media to report critically on the USA. (Hrm. If the 2000 election were to happen today, once the Guardian began digging up evidence of concrete, massive, and clearly illegal suppression of black turnout in Florida, would that get reported in the NY Times? Or on something that big would they maintain silence again until it was a mere footnote months later about the state of Florida having admitted to it, been sanctioned, and having promised to not do it again?)