CPAC vs SXSW : Edward Snowden becoming the Face of Leadership in America

Edward Snowden called into a panel at South by Southwest today. He was somewhere in Russia, still on the lam from a United States government that views him as a traitor and wants him imprisoned for it, and he was answering questions from the public, on camera, for the first time.

A CNN/ORC International survey released Monday morning indicates that 52% of the public disapproves of Edward Snowden's actions, with 44% saying they approve of the leaks by the former government contractor who worked for the National Security Agency.

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"Younger Americans are less likely than older Americans to call for the U.S. government to prosecute Snowden," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "More than half of Americans over the age of 34 think Snowden should be extradited and prosecuted, but younger Americans are evenly divided. There are no major age differences on the question of whether Americans approve of Snowden's actions, so it seems that there is a generation gap on punishment, but not on the leaks themselves."

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/06/17/cnn-poll-majority-give-snowden-thumbs-down/

There is little disagreement on the matter across party lines. Majorities of Democrats (59 percent), Republicans (56 percent) and a plurality of independents (48 percent) said Snowden should be charged.

Wizner calls Snowden’s case “the work of a lifetime.” “I had spent ten years before this trying to bring lawsuits against the intelligence community,” says Wizner. But he was often prevented from doing so in courts, in some cases because he or his clients didn’t have “standing,” or proof that their rights had been violated.


“In my first conversation with Snowden, one of his first questions for me was, ‘Do you have standing now?’” says Wizner. “The first document from the Guardian was about Verizon handing over the metadata for millions of its customers. One of its customers was the ACLU and he gave us a ticket to federal court. A lot of the work I’d done pointed to this moment, led up to this meeting of Snowden and the ACLU. We’ve been banging our head against the wall for nine years and now the wall’s not there.”

Wizner calls this an “unusual legal representation.” The legal team also includes Jesselyn Radack, a well-known advocate for whistleblowers; Wolfgang Kalek in Europe; as well as criminal attorneys and experts in asylum law. “We have had to balance all along what’s best for Edward Snowden in terms of his being able to live freely and participate in this debate, and also what will facilitate and not interfere with the democratic debate his disclosures have set off,” says Wizner. In the last week, Snowden appeared virtually at South by Southwest to talk to techies in Texas and submitted testimony to the E.U. Parliament.

In Washington D.C., Sarah Palin delivered the keynote address to the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday.

She literally read a children’s book to adults to raucous applause. It was a modified Dr. Seuss book that she got from an email chain letter.