[PAULYPOKER]

Leak inquiries reveal how wide a net US has cast




Even before the F.B.I. conducted 550 interviews of officials and seized the phone records of Associated Press reporters in a leak investigation connected to a 2012 article about a Yemen bomb plot, agents had sought the same reporters’ sources for two other articles about terrorism.

In a separate case last year, F.B.I. agents asked the White House, the Defense Department and intelligence agencies for phone and e-mail logs showing exchanges with a New York Times reporter writing about computer attacks on Iran. Agents grilled officials about their contacts with him, two people familiar with the investigation said.

And agents tracing the leak of a highly classified C.I.A. report on North Korea to a Fox News reporter pulled electronic archives showing which officials had gained access to the report and had contact with the reporter on the day of the leak. They studied one official’s entrances and exits from the State Department, obtained his Yahoo e-mail information and even searched his hard drive for deleted files, documents unsealed this month showed.

The emerging details of these and other cases show just how wide a net the Obama administration has cast in its investigations into disclosures of government secrets, querying hundreds of officials across the federal government and even some of their foreign counterparts.

The result has been an unprecedented six prosecutions and many more inquiries using aggressive legal and technical tactics. A vast majority of those questioned were cleared of any leaking. NY Times


FACTS & FIGURES


President Obama has ordered a review of the Justice Department’s procedures for leak investigations involving reporters, saying he was concerned that such inquiries chilled journalists’ ability to hold the government accountable. But he made no apology for the scrutiny of the many officials whose records were searched or who had been questioned by the F.B.I. NY Times

The Obama administration has brought six cases against people suspected of leaking classified information, which AP described as being more than under all previous presidents combined. The Guardian

Attorney General Eric Holder personally signed off on the warrant that allowed the Justice Department to search Fox News reporter James Rosen's personal email, NBC News' Michael Isikoff reported on May 23. Huffington Post

The seizure of the AP phone records by the Justice Department has drawn sharp criticism from the AP and news media groups as over-reaching by the government. WSJ




ARA/ARA

[PAULYPOKER]

Rendition Project maps US global kidnapping program




A team of academic researchers has launched the world’s largest database to detail the U.S. government’s kidnapping and rendition program around the globe.

The Rendition Project, an interactive online project between Dr. Ruth Blakely, a senior lecturer at the University of Kent, and Dr. Sam Raphael from Kingston University in London, tracks some 11,000 flights made by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agencies (CIA) to transfer terrorism suspects to other countries for extra-legal interrogation and torture.

Many of the flights associated with the CIA rendition operations might have transported suspects to the notorious U.S.-run prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, reports say.

“The Rendition Project has begun an ambitious initiative to 'map' the global rendition system, providing a detailed analysis of its component parts and a clearer understanding of how they fit together,” reads a statement on The Rendition Project’s homepage.

“The focus has been on tracking the movement of CIA flights around the world, and individual detainees as they have been transferred between secret prisons for continued detention and torture,” the release adds.

The study reveals that a “surprising number” of countries facilitated the CIA rendition program by opening up their airports to CIA flights.

In their latest discovery, the project’s researchers said they have uncovered “conclusive” evidence that planes with links to the CIA operation landed regularly on Scottish airports.

They concluded that 13 CIA planes touched down at Wick, Aberdeen and Inverness airports.

This is however the tip of the iceberg in the United Kingdom’s logistical support for the CIA kidnapping program. The Guardian previously reported that aircraft associated with extraordinary renditions landed at British airports more than 1,600 times.

The UK government has now come under pressure to examine the findings, amid reports that its collaboration was much deeper than has previously been suggested.

United Nations human rights chief Navi Pillay strongly criticized the U.S. government's anti-terrorism policies namely the Guantanamo Bay detention center, extraordinary rendition and assassination drone programs.

In a speech delivered at the opening of the spring session of the U.N.'s Human Rights Council, Pillay slammed many European countries as complicit in U.S. government’s global kidnapping and rendition programs.

“I am dismayed by the continuing failure of many European States to undertake public and independent investigations of past involvement in the U.S. renditions program, under which terrorist suspects were captured and delivered to interrogation centers without regard for due process. Some of them still languish in Guantanamo,” she said.

Extraordinary rendition began to be used regularly under former President Bill Clinton and was expanded dramatically under the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

HJ/HJ

[PAULYPOKER]

Florida school district scans students' irises without parents' permission



Parents are outraged after learning a Florida school district scanned students’ irises last month without obtaining permission, WFTS-TV reports.

Polk County School District installed eye-scanning cameras on school busses at three locations-an elementary school, middle school and high school. The technology was put in place as part of a pilot security program, but many parents didn’t learn about it until children brought up the scanners at home.

"I thought it was kind of creepy, it's kind of like big brother looking after your kids," Emily Palmer, a Polk County parent, told WFTS.

The school district partnered with Stanley Convergent Security Solutions to try out its EyeSwipe-Nano technology.

Rob Davis, director of support services for Polk County Schools, said the program is designed to track student movement as they get on and off the bus. Illustrating this rather dystopic vision, Davis explained, “Within seconds, we could tell parents, 'Yes, they got on bus No. 0750. They got on the bus at the high school at 2:05; they arrived at their bus stop at 2:45.”

Parents received a letter on May 24 announcing the EyeSwipe-Nano program, adding that students would need to obtain permission from the principal to opt out. Oddly enough, the letter announced a launch date from the past, May 20. By the time families received the letter, students on 17 school busses already had their eyes scanned.

Irate parents tried to call the school, but had to wait through a long Memorial weekend to get answers. Polk County Schools issued an apology Thursday, and put the program on halt. Meanwhile, representatives from Stanley Security Solutions say the company destroyed all the information obtained without parents’ permission.

"I would have had the same questions, so I apologize to those families because that was not our intent. The intent was not to cause chaos or confusion with the parents," Davis told WFTS.

Meanwhile, the community took to social media to express their discontent.

“It seems like they are mostly focused on this program, like the program was the problem,” wrote one parent in a widely-circulated Facebook post. “It’s not, it’s the invasion of my family’s Constitutional right to privacy that is the problem, as well as the school allowing a private company access to my child without my consent or permission. This is stolen information, and we cannot retrieve it.”

The Polk County “security” program bears resemblance to initiatives in other school districts that ignite debates of security versus privacy. This classic debate draws particularly passionate arguments when it comes to the nation's schools, where a spate of Orwellian programs has recently been launched in name of “protecting our children.” Last year, a Texas school district came under fire after a high school student objected to RFID (radio frequency identification) chips planted in her student ID, the same technology used by the Department of Agriculture to track livestock.

AN/ISH

[pronk]

[PAULYPOKER]

Bradley Manning trial 'dangerous' for civil liberties




The trial of Bradley Manning, the U.S. soldier who leaked a trove of state secrets to WikiLeaks, could set an ominous precedent that will chill freedom of speech and turn the internet into a danger zone, legal experts have warned.

Of the 21 counts faced by the army private on Monday, at his trial at Fort Meade in Maryland, by far the most serious is that he knowingly gave intelligence information to al-Qaida by transmitting hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the open information website WikiLeaks. The leaked disclosures were first published by the Guardian and allied international newspapers.

Manning is accused of "aiding the enemy", in violation of Article 104 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. By indirectly unleashing a torrent of secrets onto the internet, the prosecution alleges, he in effect made it available to Osama bin Laden and his cohorts, for them to inflict injury on the U.S.

Laurence Tribe, a Harvard professor who is considered to be the foremost liberal authority on constitutional law in the U.S. and who taught the subject to President Barack Obama, told the Guardian that the charge could set a worrying precedent. He said: "Charging any individual with the extremely grave offense of 'aiding the enemy' on the basis of nothing beyond the fact that the individual posted leaked information on the web and thereby 'knowingly gave intelligence information' to whoever could gain access to it there, does indeed seem to break dangerous new ground."

Tribe, who advised the department of justice in Obama's first term, added that the trial could have "far-reaching consequences for chilling freedom of speech and rendering the internet a hazardous environment, well beyond any demonstrable national security interest."

"Aiding the enemy" carries the death penalty. Though the U.S. government has indicated it will not seek that ultimate punishment, Manning still faces a maximum sentence of life in military custody with no chance of parole.

Daniel Ellsberg, who in 1971 was subjected to an aborted trial for leaking the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War to the New York Times, said that the Manning prosecution was far tougher than anything that he had endured.

"This is part of Obama's overall policy of criminalizing investigative reporting on national security," he said. "If the government has its way, it will become very hard in future to expose official corruption or disclose information in the public interest other than leaks made by the administration itself."

Manning's trial, which is slated to last three months, opens against a backdrop of mounting unease about the increasingly aggressive stance the U.S. government is taking against official leakers. The Obama administration has launched six prosecutions under the Espionage Act, twice as many as all previous presidencies combined, of which only Manning's has gone to trial.

The Department of Justice is already under fire for its controversial secret seizures of phone records of Associated Press reporters and of a Fox News reporter, James Rosen, investigating North Korean nuclear tests.

In the course of pre-trial hearings, military prosecutors have outlined the basic skeleton of their case against Manning. They will seek to show that Osama bin Laden personally instructed an aide to download elements of WikiLeaks, including the Afghan war logs, on to digital storage devices so that he could read them.

The court will hear – either in person at a secret session of the trial, or in an affidavit – from an anonymous witness called only "John Doe", who is believed to be one of the 22 U.S. Navy Seals who killed Bin Laden in a raid on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan in May 2011. The witness will testify that he retrieved from the compound three items of digital media that contained WikiLeaks material.

The prosecution will present evidence to the court that the items retrieved from Bin Laden's compound included a letter written by the al-Qaida leader to an aide, asking for them to download U.S. defense information from WikiLeaks. The same al-Qaida operative then replied to Bin Laden attaching the Afghan war logs and department of state information released by WikiLeaks.

Colonel Denise Lind, the judge presiding over the court martial in the absence of a jury, has ruled that for Manning to be found guilty of "aiding the enemy" the prosecution must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he knowingly gave helpful information to al-Qaida, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and a third terrorist group whose identity remains classified. The route by which Manning communicated with al-Qaida can be indirect, through Wikileaks, the judge has directed, though the soldier must have had a "general evil intent in that he had to know he was dealing with an enemy of the United States".

A defense motion calling on all reference to al-Qaida to be ruled inadmissible on grounds that it was irrelevant and prejudicial was denied by Lind in an earlier hearing.

Manning has already pleaded guilty to lesser offences, that he transmitted classified information to WikiLeaks carrying a possible maximum sentence of 20 years. Between November 2009 and May 2010 he downloaded massive files, stored in secure U.S. intelligence databases, from his computer at an army operating base in Iraq, where he was working as an intelligence analyst. He then transmitted the files to an encrypted whistleblower channel set up by WikiLeaks.

Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project, who represented two of the six leakers who have been prosecuted – National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake and former CIA operative John Kiriakou – said the broad legal implications of Manning's trial were frightening. "If Osama bin Laden or any other suspected terrorist happens to have read a New York Times article on the internet, the government can now go after the paper for 'aiding the enemy'. That's a big problem."

In the course of legal argument in pre-trial hearings, one of the prosecution lawyers was asked whether Manning would have been prosecuted in the same way had he leaked to the New York Times as opposed to WikiLeaks. The prosecutor replied: "Yes."

Radack said that the case has sent a chill through investigative reporting. Several potential whistleblowers have approached her in recent weeks, she said, expressing great trepidation about leaking to any news outlets because "they fear they will become the next Bradley Manning".

AHT/AGB

[PAULYPOKER]

A bad month for privacy rights



Justice Louis Brandeis once called the right to privacy “the right most valued by civilized men.” Sadly, it has become increasingly clear that, despite pronunciations about “change” and “transparency,” the Obama administration is continuing down the path so dangerously started by former President George W. Bush.

First, the Supreme Court decided that it is not a violation of the Fourth Amendment if police collect DNA from people who have merely been arrested, not convicted, of a crime. Although the Court specified that this practice, already occurring in more than half of the states, should only be done to those who are arrested for “serious” crimes, no definition of what constitutes a serious crime was provided. I wonder whether we should begin preparing ourselves simply to open our mouths whenever a police officer approaches. Whether you are rightly or wrongly arrested, your DNA from that cheek swab will go into the database and, as far as we know, remain there in perpetuity.

While defenders maintain that the practice will help exonerate innocent persons, the risks are huge. Ultimately, the power goes to police, a scary kind of power in the hands of those who do not always use it fairly. In January, President Obama signed into law the Katie Sepich Enhanced DNA Collection Act, which creates grants to help states pay for the expanded DNA databases, and thus we can expect that more will indeed do so. Once again, we have put our faith in a technology at the expense of civil liberties. Further, DNA evidence is only as good as the people collecting, maintaining and analyzing it.

Then, the Guardian broke the story that the FBI has been granted the power to obtain from Verizon information from all calls made within the U.S. and between the U.S. and other countries from April 25 and July 19 of this year. Supposedly a tool to keep us safe from terrorism, the authorization for this type of spying on citizens who have done absolutely nothing was granted by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court through the USA Patriot Act’s “business records” provision. While actual conversations are not covered, details including the phone numbers, location, duration, time and other identifiers about the callers are included in the order. Verizon has close to 100 million customers. We also have no way of knowing whether the NSA or FBI has sought similar orders of other phone companies, as all are prohibited from disclosing.

Just days later, the Guardian revealed that the NSA has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants. Under a program called PRISM, the NSA collects our search histories, the content of our emails, file transfers, live chats and more.

These types of blanket surveillance are not only an invasion of privacy but also ineffective to do what the government claims. Someone has to analyze the tremendous amount of data collected from these records, the vast majority of which will be completely innocuous. Not a smart use of resources, I would argue.

Clearly, poet John Perry Barlow had it right: “Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.” Those interested in a more peaceful and just world must become even more vocal advocates for privacy, what Justice William O. Douglas called “the beginning of all freedom.”

[PAULYPOKER]

Ex-NSA director: US surveillance ‘expanded’ under Obama



The former director of the U.S. National Security Agency, who presided over the creation of a secret surveillance system, has said the U.S. surveillance program expanded under the presidency of Barack Obama.

While defending the U.S. government for collecting metadata of Americans’ phone calls, former director of the NSA Gen. Michael Hayden has said that the U.S. spy agency has more powers than the time he was in charge.

“We've had two very different presidents pretty much doing the same thing with regard to electronic surveillance,” Hayden said on Sunday.

“NSA is actually empowered to do more things than I was empowered to do under President Bush's special authorization,” he added.

On Wednesday, June 5, British newspaper The Guardian published a copy of a secret court order which required one of the largest telecoms providers in the U.S., Verizon Communications, to provide the NSA with data on phone calls made by all of its customers on an “ongoing, daily basis”.

Two days later on Friday, The Guardian reported that it had obtained a top secret document showing the NSA has access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple, and other U.S. internet giants.

A former NSA employee turned whistleblower, William Binney, told Democracy Now on Thursday that the NSA surveillance program did not just target the customers of Verizon as the spy agency is “just continuing the collection of this kind of information of all U.S. citizens”.

Still on Sunday, The Guardian revealed that according to top-secret documents it had acquired, an NSA powerful tool, called “Boundless Informant”, enables the spy agency to record and categorize intelligence it secretly collects form countries across the globe.

The U.S. government began its secret surveillance of Americans shortly after the September 11 attacks.

However, it was first revealed in 2006 that the Bush administration had set up a secret program to collect information on Americans’ long-distance and international calls.

One year later, the U.S. government placed the program under the supervision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and in 2008, the U.S. Congress introduced changes to FISA which allowed both foreign and domestic surveillance “as long as the intent is to gather foreign intelligence”.

In December, U.S. President Barack Obama signed into law a five-year extension to FISA which “allows federal agencies to eavesdrop on communications and review email” with a warrant from the secret FISA court.

Now according to Hayden, who served as the head of the NSA from 1999 to 2005, the spy agency has more powers than when George W. Bush was the U.S. President. New evidence, emerging on almost a daily basis, seems to be fully supporting Hayden’s remarks.

ISH/ISH
PressTV

[PAULYPOKER]

It’s worse than you thought:
NSA spying and the Patriot Act



“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.” Never has Joseph Heller’s observation from Catch-22 been more apt than today, as news spreads that the National Security Agency has been using the USA PATRIOT Act to sweep up phone call data on every Verizon Business Network customer in the nation-and presumably on residential and cell phone customers as well.

On Wednesday, The Guardian published a secret court order, issued under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, that requires Verizon Business Network Services to provide “on an ongoing daily basis” phone records for all “communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”

The data to be provided includes the numbers called, the length and time of calls and other routing information, but does not include the actual content of the calls. But the government can learn an awful lot about an individual simply by tracing whom he or she is calling, how often and for how long.

This is a stunningly broad order, and there’s every reason to believe that similar orders exist for other phone providers in the United States. Verizon itself is not the focus of the investigation, so Sprint, AT&T and others almost certainly are under similar orders. An expert interviewed by the Washington Post said the order appeared to be a routine 90-day renewal of what has effectively been a standing order for all such data. In other words, the federal government is apparently sweeping up records on every phone call any of us makes, without any specific basis for suspicion about any of us.

How can it do so? The Supreme Court long ago ruled that such information enjoys no Fourth Amendment protection, on the theory that when one shares information with a third party, one has no “reasonable expectation of privacy” with respect to the government obtaining information from the third party.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has suggested that this doctrine needs to be reconsidered, but until that happens there are no constitutional impediments to such wholesale vacuuming up of data without any individualized basis for suspicion.

Congress has placed some limits on the gathering of such data, but as this order reveals, they are largely meaningless. A controversial provision of the USA PATRIOT Act, Section 215, allows the government to demand “business records” from any business, so long as they are “relevant to an authorized investigation … to obtain foreign intelligence information … or to protect against international terrorism.”

Section 215 orders are granted in secret, as this one was, and until now little was known about how extensively the government relied upon them, or how “relevant” was interpreted. By this single order, however, the NSA has been given access to records on literally millions of customers, without suspicion about any of them. We don’t know the government’s theory, but it appears that it may be arguing that in order to protect against international terrorism, it is “relevant” to sweep up phone call data about all of us all of the time.

Last year, Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall warned, in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, “We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of….these secret court opinions. As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows.” Count me as one of those stunned. The leak of this secret court opinion certainly narrows the gap in our knowledge that secrecy permitted. But it does so by confirming that those most paranoid about government spying were right after all.

AHT/AGB

[PAULYPOKER]

Surveillance USA



Ever since The Patriot Act came into being, the body of liberties citizens cherish have been chipped away by a bloated security state keen to find nourishment. When rights and liberties are deferred to the voyeurs, the monitors, and the paranoid, a bill of rights starts looking like a bill of words, easily sidestepped and disregarded.

A series of outlets have been chasing up the story that the NSA has been keeping track of every single U.S. Verizon customer’s phone activity since the Boston bombing. Complicity with tech companies in this enterprise is also rampant - Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple - have been recipients of tapping efforts by the NSA and FBI, something they have been doing since 2007.

More specifically, The Guardian has managed to secure access to records of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court about the specifics of Verizon’s networks and government access. In the document, the NSA compels Verizon to hand over “an electronic copy of the following tangible things: all call detail records or ‘telephony metadata’ created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.” The document further states that disclosure of that fact - that the FBI and NSA sought or obtained such “tangible” things under the order - is prohibited except to appropriate authorities. Gagging is de rigueur.

The classified program under which such activities are taking place is called PRISM, which involves the security agencies extracting audio and video chats, photographs, documents, e-mails, and connection logs (The Washington Post, Jun 7). What is troubling about the program is that it was the devil spawn of something equally insidious - the warrantless surveillance of the Bush administration. Given that such behavior earned the judicial ire of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the new presidency sought other sources to legitimize mass surveillance programs.

As is typical with the Obama administration, the law is something to twist and turn, a matter of rhetorical play rather than substantive realities. Legality is the spice of the new surveillance state. The Protect America Act of 2007 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 were olive branches to the new presidency, affirming that data mining was well on its way to becoming standard practice.

The document which wound its way to The Washington Post reveals the existence of what many have feared - that the government is merrily going about its business of keeping tabs on you in virtually every conceivable way. The document itself features “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, PayTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” The Guardian has similarly obtained access to the 41 PowerPoint slides of the leaked NSA document detailing the PRISM program in all its inglorious intrusiveness.

Corporations from the Silicon Valley set have denied being free with the information of their users when it comes to the spooks and the analysts of the NSA. A spokesman for Apple claimed that the company had “never heard of PRISM. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers and any agency requesting customer data must get a court order” (The Guardian, Jun 7). Similarly, an emphatic Joe Sullivan, chief security officer for Facebook, claimed that, “We do not provide any government organization with direct access to Facebook servers.”

Being high and mighty about legality, as we know, is not necessarily Facebook’s forte. For years now, the company has been at the forefront of a social media revolution that has one vital pitch: privacy is dead and deeply buried. Despite this, Sullivan is clear that any request for data and information “about specific individuals” is carefully scrutinized within the framework of the law. We can all rest easy that Mark Zuckerberg is not playing second fiddle to the American empire and the security perverts.

Constitutions are often needed to guard against political excess, the conscience of a state when its representatives have ceased to have any. The responses from the Washington elite suggest the anaesthetized state they have fallen into - liberties need to be shredded to protect liberties; legality demands bouts of illegality and so forth. Nothing to be surprised about, claimed Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga). “This has been going on for seven years under the auspices of the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] authority, and every member of the United States Senate has been advised of this” (Forbes, Jun 6).

Even more striking of the amoral numbness of such surveillance activities is Chambliss’ remark that “we have not had any citizen who has registered a complaint relative to the gathering of this information, and it’s simply what we call ‘meta data’.” Give it a cryptic, functional label, and people are bound to go along with it. That’s if they even know about it.

Senator Diane Feinstein, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has again made it clear that the mass surveillance of public chatter and communications is entirely appropriate. The Republic is besieged by enemies external and internal. “As far as I know, this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been in place for the last seven years.” The message: This is normal. Stop being so wet about it.

AHT/ISH

[PAULYPOKER]

Hong Kong likely to extradite US whistleblower




As American whistleblower Edward Snowden say he may seek asylum in Hong Kong to avoid a possible trial at home, reports say the Asian country has an extradition treaty with the United States.

The former National Security Agency contractor, who identified himself to The Guardian after disclosing sensitive documents on U.S. government’s electronic surveillance of American people, is now staying in a hotel room in Hong Kong.

The Department of Justice has launched an investigation into the “unauthorized” disclosure of classified information.

Snowden hopes to find a safe shelter in Hong Kong but the country, which is one of the two Special Administrative Regions of the People's Republic of China, has had an extradition treaty with the U.S. since 1998, though the agreement gives Hong Kong the right to decline an extradition request from the U.S. on national security ground.

Some people in China are now suggesting that Beijing should not extradite Snowden because Washington failed last year to extradite a Chinese anti-government activist who had taken refuge in the U.S. embassy in Beijing.

Chen Guangcheng was eventually transferred to the United States, where he was given asylum despite China’s call on Washington to stop interfering in its domestic issues.

"Snowden is a real human rights activist! He is now in China’s territory, we must protect him. We should contribute to the world's human rights by resisting the pressure from the U.S.," Wang Xiaodong, a prominent Chinese writer, said as reported by the LA Times.

Yet, observers do not expect that China wants to get involved in protecting the whistleblower in this particular case, according to the report.

U.S. citizens don’t require a v*i*s*a* to enter Hong Kong, and are usually given stays of 90 days and but it is possible that Snowden would face extradition once his stay has expired.

AN/ARA