If some of the key picks for President Donald Trump’s cabinet have their way, Edward Snowden might finally get pardoned.
Administrations have been coming and going over the past more than a decade in the US. Still, Snowden, an NSA whistleblower who opened the eyes of Americans – and the rest of the word – to the shocking scale of mass surveillance and personal data collection perpetrated by the agency, is still in exile.
That’s because in his country, instead of being honored like, say, Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers, Snowden is still treated as a fugitive from justice.
Snowden has been indicted as a “spy” and is considered to be one by many, even though the revelations from the leaked documents were not handed to another country, but publicly released to benefit the rights of the citizens of his own.
This is something that Donald Trump clearly took into consideration when he was “close” to pardoning Snowden near the end of his first stint in office. However, that eventually didn’t happen, but now, a number of figures likely to hold top positions in the new US administration think the time has come.
Among them is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who Trump wants as his Health and Human Services secretary. Another is Donald Trump Jr., who is also in favor of pardoning several other whistleblowers, and a candidate for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who has long espoused a similar stance.
The man who originally helped Snowden publish his revelations, lawyer, and journalist Glenn Greenwald, thinks it makes perfect sense for Trump to this time go ahead and pardon Snowden, not least since some of the abuses the whistleblower exposed in 2013 have in the meantime affected the president as well.
“And if Trump’s goal is to bring transparency to those agencies there is no one who has done that more bravely and honestly than Snowden,” said Greenwald, who in 2013 worked with several major newspapers in the US and around the world to bring the Snowden files to the public.
Some of those newspapers – the Washington Post and the Guardian even won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
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“Authorities have attacked, detained, prosecuted, and in some cases killed critics, broken up peaceful protests, closed media outlets, and enacted vague laws criminalizing speech that they claim threatens public health”
Didn’t give much thought to freedom until four years ago, at age 63. Freedom was just there, like the water surrounding a goldfish. And then the Covid-19 pandemic blew in, the world locked down, and admonitions to “stay the ‘$^#&’ home” blazed through social media. No freedom was too important to discard in the name of public safety: jobs, family businesses, artistic endeavours, public meetings, social connections that kept despair at bay, all took a backseat to the grim business of saving grandma (who ended up getting Covid anyway). No discussion of moral or practical trade-offs, no pushback from the press, nothing. It felt wrong to me on a cellular level.
Apparently I was the only one in my middle-class liberal circle to harbour misgivings about this astonishing new world. If I tried, ever so timidly, to articulate my concerns on Facebook or Twitter, the online warriors shot back with a string of epithets. “Go lick a pole and catch the virus,” said one. “Crawl back into your cave, troglodyte,” said another. And my all-time favourite: “You’re nothing but a mouth-breathing Trumptard.”
From the get-go, I perceived Covid as more of a philosophical problem than a scientific one. As I wrote on more than one occasion, science can inform our decisions, but not dictate them. What ultimately powers our choices are the values we hold. I saw Covid as a morality play, with freedom and safety cast as the duelling protagonists, and it looked like safety was skipping to an easy victory.
It was a heady time for the health bureaucrats, whose increasingly arcane rules betrayed a naked impulse to control: the Canadian high-school students required to use masks on both their faces and their wind instruments during band practice, the schoolchildren forced (for hygiene reasons) to study on their knees for hours in an Alaska classroom, the “glory-hole” sex advised by the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control. The lack of public pushback against these absurdities heightened my awareness of the fragility of our freedoms.
One of the earliest memes to surface during the pandemic was “muh freedumb.” The locution became a shorthand for a stock character – a tattooed man wearing camo gear and a baseball cap, spewing viral particles while yelling about his rights. A selfish idiot. The memes kept coming: “Warning, cliff ahead: keep driving, freedom fighter.” “Personal freedom is the preoccupation of adult children.” Freedom, for centuries an aspiration of democratic societies, turned into a laughing stock.
Eventually, pro-freedom voices began trickling into the public arena. I wasn’t alone, after all. There were others who understood, in the words of Telegraph writer Janet Daley, that the institutional response to Covid-19 had steamrolled over “the dimension of human experience which gives meaning and value to private life.” Lionel Shriver decried how “across the Western world, freedoms that citizens took for granted seven months ago have been revoked at a stroke.” And Laura Dodsworth brought tears to my eyes when she wrote, in her 2021 book A State of Fear, that she feared authoritarianism more than death.
Once the vaccines rolled out, the war on freedom of conscience went nuclear. If you breathed a word against the products, or even the mandates, you were “literally killing people.” The hostility towards the “unvaxxed” culminated in a Toronto Star front page showcasing public vitriol, splashed with such sentiments as: “I honestly don’t care if they die from Covid. Not even a little bit.”
This, too, felt viscerally wrong. I knew several people who had refused the vaccine, and they all had well-articulated reasons for their stance. If they didn’t fully trust the “safe and effective” bromide recycled by all government and pharmaceutical industry spokespeople, I could hardly blame them. (And I say this as someone who writes for Big Pharma and got five Covid shots.)
One of the most deplorable casualties of Covid culture was freedom of expression, a core principle in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Experts speaking publicly about the harms of lockdown faced systematic ostracism from mainstream media, especially left-wing news outlets. By early 2021, Human Rights Watch estimated that at least 83 governments worldwide had used the Covid-19 pandemic to violate the lawful exercise of free speech and peaceful assembly.
“Authorities have attacked, detained, prosecuted, and in some cases killed critics, broken up peaceful protests, closed media outlets, and enacted vague laws criminalizing speech that they claim threatens public health,” the group wrote in a media release. “The victims include journalists, activists, healthcare workers, political opposition groups, and others who have criticized government responses to the coronavirus.”
But what about misinformation? Doesn’t it kill people? Newsflash: misinformation has always existed, even before TikTok. It’s up to each of us to sift the credible folks from the cranks. The best defence against misinformation is better information, and it’s the policy wonks’ job to provide it. Modern science itself depends on this tug-of-war of ideas, which filters out weaker hypotheses and moves stronger ones ahead for further testing.
Besides, misinformation comes not just from cranks, but from “official sources” – especially those tasked with persuading the public, rather than informing it. Remember when Rochelle Walensky, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US, asserted that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus?” Or when Anthony Fauci maintained that getting vaccinated makes you a “dead end” in the chain of transmission? I rest my case.
The marketplace of ideas is like a souk, with a lot of hollering and arguing and the odd snatched purse – and that’s exactly how it should be. It’s an ingenious and irreplaceable process for getting to the truth. There are few ideas too sacrosanct to question or too ridiculous to consider. That’s why, unlike just about everyone in my left-leaning circle, I take no issue with Elon Musk’s shakedown of the old Twitter, now the Wild West of X.
Under Musk’s algorithms, my feed has become a true philosophical souk, with wildly disparate views smashing into each other, leaving me to sift through the rubble in search of a gold nugget or two. Love him or hate him, Musk offers a much-needed counterweight to the ideological lockstep in much of the mainstream media. And when it comes to free speech, Musk has put his money where his mouth is: when media personality Keith Olbermann recently hopped on X, where he boasts a million followers, to call for Musk’s arrest and detainment, Musk made no move to censor him. Works for me.
While the “old normal” has thankfully returned to our daily lives, save the odd mask in a shopping mall or subway car, the stench of censorship that blew in with the pandemic has yet to dissipate. An obsession with disinformation permeates the zeitgeist, spurring lawmakers in several Western countries to censor the flow of thoughts and ideas that gives a free society its pulse.
We cannot excise personal freedom from a democratic society, even in the interests of the “public good,” without poisoning the roots of democracy itself. Article 3 of UNESCO’s 2005 Universal Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights states this plainly: “The interests and welfare of the individual should have priority over the sole interest of science or society.” In our post-pandemic reality, the statement seems almost quaint. Nonetheless, it expresses an enduring truth: that a democracy must never discard the idea of freedom – even in a pandemic.
Freedom desperately needs a comeback from its current incarnation as an expendable frill. In my own small way I’m trying to make this happen: never much of an activist before Covid, I’m now part of a small group preparing to launch a Free Speech Union in Canada, modelled after the highly successful one in the UK. The organisation will offer legal advice to individuals facing censorship, cancellation, or job loss because of their words. I look forward to supporting people caught in this anti-freedom web, including those whose words I heartily disagree with.
My newfound respect for free speech is also what propels me to keep talking about Covid. The response to the pandemic exceeded the bounds of public health, and we need to expose the forces that drove it. Here’s Daley again: “The world went crazy. There is no other way to account for what was an almost nihilistic dismantling not just of particular liberties and rights, but of the very idea of liberty.” We can’t let it happen again.
Gabrielle Bauer is a Toronto health and medical writer who has won six national awards for her magazine journalism. She has written three books: Tokyo, My Everest, co-winner of the Canada-Japan Book Prize, Waltzing The Tango, finalist in the Edna Staebler creative nonfiction award, and most recently, the pandemic book BLINDSIGHT IS 2020, published by the Brownstone Institute in 2023
Like law enforcement in some repressive virtual regimes, Meta is introducing the concept of re-education of “citizens” (users), as an alternative to eventually sending them to “jail” (imposing account restrictions).
But this only applies to “first-time offenders,” that is, those who have violated Meta’s community standards for the first time, and if that violation is not considered to be “most severe.”
The community standards now apply across Meta’s platforms – Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Threads – while the new rule means that instead of collecting a strike for a first policy violation, users who go through “an educational program” can have it deleted.
There’s also “probation” – those who receive no strike for a year after that will again be eligible to participate in the “remove your warning” course. This applies to Facebook profiles, pages, and Instagram profiles.
Meta first introduced the option for creators last summer and is now expanding it to everyone. In announcing the change of the policy, the tech giant refers to “research” that showed most of those violating its rules for the first time “may not be aware they are doing so.”
This is where the “short educational program” comes in, as a way to reduce the risk of receiving that first strike, and Meta says the program is designed to help “better explain” its policies.
Some might say that having clear policies instead of broad and vague ones would go a long way toward better understanding them – but the company has chosen the route of punishing users and then allowing them to complete its “training course.”
Meta says that the results it has at this time, concerning creators, are “promising” since 15 percent of those who received their first strike and had it removed in this process said they “felt” they understood the rules better, as well as the way the rules are enforced.
Meta does not extend the new policy to users posting sexual exploitation content, as well as using its platforms to sell “high risk” drugs – or glorify whatever the giant decides is a “dangerous organization or individual.”
But, Meta is not, as it were, innovating censorship here; YouTube already has a similar option.
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