Edward Snowden, a figure we're used to seeing on small screens—like his grainy video chats from exile in Moscow—is officially coming to the big one this week. Director Oliver Stone releases his biopic of the NSA whistleblower on Friday, with actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing the role of the bespectacled former contractor who is now being charged with multiple counts of espionage under a World War I-era law.
The film's release has sparked a renewed call for President Obama to pardon Snowden for revealing the extent of the NSA's massive global surveillance network. Snowden's lawyer, Ben Wizner—also head of the Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project at the ACLU—says Snowden's actions, though illegal, are worth forgiving because of the public debate sparked and the reforms initiated by them.
"Ordinarily we depend on structural checks and balances to make sure that our executive branch officials are held accountable to the law. In this case, there was a comprehensive failure of our checks and balances," Wizner said.
Wizner pointed to his own experience as an ACLU lawyer attempting to challenge government-run surveillance programs as evidence of how drastically Snowden's revelations have changed the landscape.
"The ACLU was in the Supreme Court just before Snowden came forward, asking the court to review the legality and constitutionality of an NSA program," he said. "That case was thrown out, not because the court said the program was legal, but because the government argued and the court agreed that we had no right to be in court because we had no evidence that the surveillance program affected us. Look at how that changed when we had that evidence."
Wizner also says that Snowden has never denied that he broke the law, and has never asked for pity or sympathy.
"The Constitution gives the president pardon authority not for people who did not break the law, but for people who did break the law, but they're overriding national reasons where we might not want to enforce it to the full extent," Wizner said.
"I think this is really the paradigmatic case for which the pardon power exists," he said.
To hear more from Ben Wizner, tune in to Boston Public Radio above.
