Why You Russian, Snowden? | Bradley Manning Will Go To Iron College!

American fugitive granted asylum in Russia. Edward Snowden leaked NSA and CIA information to anti-Obama critic Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian. Snowden has caused a rift between Russia and The United States on how they handle espionage.

A twofer.

Two controversial figures in the leaking of classified information get to find out their fates.

Private Bradley Manning, the Army specialist who leaked information to Wikileaks has been found guilty of stealing federal documents and wire fraud. He was charged with espionage. He was acquitted of the most serious charges of treason (via aiding and abetting an enemy).

Manning will probably suffer a long time in the potato brig (The Military Federal Prison at Leavenworth).

Edward Snowden spent a long time in a Russian airport terminal. Now it seems like a deal was reach to grant this NSA leaker temporary asylum in the Russian Federation.

Snowden's asylum has pissed off President Barack Obama. He and the Russian president Vladimir Putin aren't on the best of terms these days. The American relation strain started from the missile shield in Poland.

Also abusing arranged Russian children and wives isn't helpful either.

The worst thing in particular is the issue over Syria. Russia wants no part of the Syrian civil war and they're supplying the weapons for the government.

This is a complete snub in the face of Obama. There's suppose to be a meeting of the big leaders this coming month. Will the president show grace or throw his gauntlet?

Bradley Manning will be sentenced for leaking secrets.

Snowden is the country's most wanted man for leaking out classified information from the National Security Administration. The NSA wiretapping of phones has been the topic of the kookspiracy movement.

Some cheer this as a way of exposing the government. Others say this is treason and this guy should be sent to the iron college.

I don't have an opinion of it. I think of this as a sign of the times. Since September 11, 2001, the nation has grown more Islamophobic and paranoid about a possible terrorist threat.

Right now the United States State Department has ordered the shutdown of many embassies in Asia, Europe and Africa. They have the signs of a potential threat coming from the al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula.

What do you think of Edward Snowden?

What do you think of Bradley Manning?

Do you believe they've blown the whistle or made it more dangerous for the espionage agencies in the United States?

Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is an American fugitive who leaked details of several top-secret United States and British government mass surveillance programs to the press.

Snowden is a former technical contractor for the United States National Security Agency (NSA) and a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Snowden leaked the information, primarily to Glenn Greenwald of Britain's The Guardian, in spring 2013 while employed as an "infrastructure analyst" at NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. The Guardian in turn published a series of exposés in June–July 2013 and revealed programs such as the interception of US and European telephone metadata and the PRISM, XKeyscore, and Tempora Internet surveillance programs.

Snowden's disclosures are said to rank among the most significant NSA security breaches in United States history.

On June 14, 2013, United States federal prosecutors charged Snowden with espionage and theft of government property.

Snowden fled the United States prior to his first disclosures and as of August 1, 2013 was in Russia under temporary asylum.

Snowden's leaks have been a subject of great controversy. Some have referred to Snowden as a hero and a whistleblower, while others have described him as a traitor. Snowden has defended his leaks as an effort "to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them."

Government officials have condemned his actions as having harmed U.S. interests and its position in the War on Terror.

Meanwhile, the media disclosures have fueled debates in the United States and elsewhere over mass surveillance, government secrecy, and the balance between national security and information privacy in the Post-9/11 era.

Bradley Edward Manning (born December 17, 1987) is a United States Army soldier who was arrested in May 2010 in Iraq on suspicion of having passed classified material to the website WikiLeaks. He was ultimately charged with 22 offenses, including communicating national defense information to an unauthorized source and aiding the enemy.

He was convicted in July 2013 of most of the charges, including several violations of the Espionage Act, but was acquitted of aiding the enemy, the most serious charge.

Assigned to an army unit based near Baghdad, Manning had access to databases used by the United States government to transmit classified information. He was arrested after Adrian Lamo, a computer hacker, told the FBI that Manning had confided during online chats that he had downloaded material from these databases and passed it to WikiLeaks.

The material included videos of the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike and the 2009 Granai airstrike in Afghanistan; 250,000 United States diplomatic cables; and 500,000 army reports that came to be known as the Iraq War logs and Afghan War logs. It was the largest set of restricted documents ever leaked to the public. Much of it was published by WikiLeaks or its media partners between April and November 2010.

Manning was held from July 2010 at the Marine Corps Brig, Quantico, Virginia, under Prevention of Injury status, which entailed de facto solitary confinement and other restrictions that caused international concern. In April 2011 he was transferred to Fort Leavenworth, where he could interact with other detainees.

He pleaded guilty in February 2013 to 10 of the 22 charges.

The trial on the remaining charges began on June 3, 2013, and on July 30 he was convicted of 17 of the original charges and amended versions of four others. The trial moved to the sentencing phase on July 31.

Reaction to Manning's arrest and disclosures was mixed. Denver Nicks, one of his biographers, writes that the leaked material, particularly the diplomatic cables, was widely seen as a catalyst for the Arab Spring that began in December 2010, and Manning was viewed as a 21st-century Tiananmen Square Tank Man by some and as an embittered traitor by others.

Several commentators focused on why an apparently very unhappy Army private had access to classified material, and why security measures did not prevent his unauthorized downloading.