Edward Snowden, who fled to Russia after he exposed the NSA was collecting meta data from American cell phones which included locations, duration, calls, etc.
| Trump considering pardon of Edward Snowden |
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President Donald Trump said Saturday that he’s considering a pardon for former national security specialist Edward Snowden, who has been trapped for years in Russia, evading charges of leaking information on a National Security Agency cellphone meta-data collection program called PRISM.
Snowden leaked the information to American journalists, using members of Wikileaks’ team as go-betweens, back in 2013, revealing that the NSA was collecting “meta-data” — location, duration, and other information not specific to calls themselves — from Americans’ cellphones, creating a massive database designed to reveal terror threats.
The PRISM program never really yielded results. According to most recent reports, although the Trump administration, like the Obama administration before it, has routinely re-authorized the program, the bulk data collection and analysis program was too cumbersome to be valuable. Back in 2019, the program fell into disuse according to the New York Times, and, at this point, appears to be out of operation.
Trump told reporters late last week that “there are a lot of people that think that [Snowden] is not being treated fairly” and followed up on Saturday with comments suggesting he and his administration are considering a pardon — though Snowden technically has not yet faced charges.
“I’m going to start looking at it,” Trump said.