Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The collection of a significant amount of words and communications of people in Europe is a matter which the Irish State is going to be obliged to address. Privacy is not what it used to be but what one gives away voluntarily is very different from what an organisation or state might take from one. There was a time when privacy was the defining quality of a free people. In that context, alarm bells should be ringing. I do not believe President Obama's defence of what occurred is going to go down well. I watched him on television last night and he did not look comfortable trying to defend what happened. I was interested in the comments made by Edward Snowden yesterday who stated:

In the end the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised...

There has been an attempt to silence whistleblowers in order to stop the flow of important information to the public. We had a couple of whistleblowers of our own of late during the penalty points episode. The Garda Commissioner was not afraid of those whistleblowers but he was certainly afraid of the information relating to the abuse of the penalty points system getting into the public domain. It is from there that the fear comes.

Marjorie Cohn, professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, has stated there is another rule of law, international law, that may give the 30 year old systems analyst, Edward Snowden, a path to political asylum. Cohn said Snowden could cite "a well-founded fear of persecution" based on the mistreatment of fellow whistleblower Bradley Manning. If what Professor Cohn has said is anything to go by, then we could be forgiven for thinking that if Mr. Snowden is returned to America, he is unlikely to have a great time. There is also a provision in the Convention against Torture that forbids extradition of a person to a country where there are substantial grounds to believe he would be in danger of being tortured, as was the case with Bradley Manning. The Americans have been quick to claim that terrorist attacks were thwarted by the massive dragnet of surveillance exposed by Snowden. However, Senators Mark Udall and Ron Wyden, who have been on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence which has examined this classified information for many years, say that this is not true. The intelligence that is the most useful for foiling terrorist plots is traditional in nature and does not involve dragnet surveillance whereby the authorities listen in to people's telephone phone calls and track the sites they visit on the Internet.

Douwe Korff, a Dutch lawyer, writing in The Guardian has observed:

It is time that these activities - by all the states involved - are brought within the rule of law. It is what the rule of law is about: that all activities of the state which in one way or another impinge on anyone's rights are subject to legal and democratic constraints; that the agents of the state... are not granted excessive discretion; and that there is proper democratic oversight and control.

I am of the view that Amnesty International should urgently consider taking a case to the European Court of Human Rights on this issue.

I would like the Government to make a statement in support of what Edward Snowden did. I am of the view that Mr. Snowden took the action he did for the right reasons. It is outrageous that his passport has been taken and we should offer him travel documents. The latter is the act of an authoritarian state. I would like people to support Mr. Snowden. It is interesting that a poll carried out in the US last week shows that 53% of the American people think what he did was right. In addition, some 70% of those between the ages of 18 and 34 indicated that they thought what he did was right. Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, Aaron Swartz and Jeremy Hammond sought not to liberate land or people, but information. The authorities have sought to criminalise them as spies. Their aim was neither to enrich themselves nor aid foreign powers but to make countries more transparent, knowledgeable, accountable and honourable. The western world has always prided itself on the idea that individuals can make a difference. Clearly, they do so at their peril.

See this speech in context