Lesson plan, ENGL 103 Sec G36

Friday October 28, 2016

Objective
Students will consolidate skills of objective summary and begin evaluating sources for credibility and
reliability.

Background
On Wednesday, in lab, we worked through, in small groups and then individually, objective
summaries for two articles addressing the question, Should Wonder Woman be named U.S. girls
empowerment ambassador?

Warmup
(5 minutes) What is a whistleblower? What do we know about Edward Snowden?

Video
(10 15 minutes) Watch 12-minute Guardian video of 2013 Laura Poitras documentary on Edward
Snowden. https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblower-edward-
snowden-interview-video

If time, consider Lindsay Millss 2013 email to Snowden (attached). Who is Mills writing for? Can you
translate the message into normal English?
Objective summaries (small groups of 4-5)
(15 minutes) Read assigned article either pro- or anti-Snowden, in relation to the question, Should
President Obama pardon Edward Snowden? and work as group to create a summary in the form of
a two- or three-minute spoken performance for Obama and advisers. (See attached assignment and
group texts.)

Evaluative summaries (small groups & whole class)

(15 minutes) As individuals, students listen to the presentations, noting at least two questions
related to source credibility and reliability. They will also list two of the performances most credible
arguments.
Groups choose their best two to three questions from those that individual group members have
written down and the most persuasive pro- or anti-Snowden arguments that they heard.
Continue with large-group discussion, if time.

Follow-up
For class on Monday, Oct 31, students will complete objective and evaluative summary of another
article in another topic cluster.
Lets disassociate our metadata one last time, so we
dont have a clear record of your true name and our
final communication chain. This is obviously not to say
you cant claim your involvement, but as every trick in
the book is likely to be used in looking into this, I
believe its better that that particular disclosure come
on your own terms.
Thank you again for all youve done. So sorry again for
the multiple delays, but weve been in uncharted
territory with no model to benefit from.
If all ends well, perhaps the demonstration that our
methods worked will embolden more to come forward.
Should President Obama pardon Edward Snowden?

In your small group you are going to work together to produce an objective summary of the
essay you have been assigned related to the question above. Each group member will read and
annotate the article individually the technique that we used in lab on Wednesday before you
come together as a collective to create the summary.

Your summary will be performed, as a two- to three-minute briefing before President Obama
and key security advisers, in which you will:

Identify the author, along with the authors credentials for example, I am Lindsay
Mills, Edward Snowdens girlfriend for most of the past decade
Provide an accurate but brief statement identifying your arguments focus and the most
important supporting points, facts, statistics, ideas, testimony, and opinion. (This is the
objective summary that will also form part of your argumentative paper [essay 5].)

Use a few carefully selected quotations from your groups Snowden article to back up your
summary evaluation and to make it more convincing as a performance but, as a rule, use your
own words. Feel free as well to add other instances of ethos, pathos, and logos as you deem
appropriate.

The president is eagerly anticipating your briefing.

Should President Obama pardon Edward Snowden?

In your small group you are going to work together to produce an objective summary of the
essay you have been assigned related to the question above. Each group member will read and
annotate the article individually the technique that we used in lab on Wednesday before you
come together as a collective to create the summary.

Your summary will be performed, as a two- to three-minute briefing before President Obama
and key security advisers, in which you will:

Identify the author, along with the authors credentials for example, I am Lindsay
Mills, Edward Snowdens girlfriend for most of the past decade
Provide an accurate but brief statement identifying your arguments focus and the most
important supporting points, facts, statistics, ideas, testimony, and opinion. (This is the
objective summary that will also form part of your argumentative paper [essay 5].)

Use a few carefully selected quotations from your groups Snowden article to back up your
summary evaluation and to make it more convincing as a performance but, as a rule, use your
own words. Feel free as well to add other instances of ethos, pathos, and logos as you deem
appropriate.

The president is eagerly anticipating your briefing.

Edward Snowden is a saint, not a sinner
By Jimmy Wales
Friday, October 21, 2016
Source: http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/17/opinions/snowden-made-internet-safer-
wales/index.html
Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia and a board member of the Wikimedia
Foundation. In 2015, the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, sued the NSA
over the agency's mass surveillance of international communications.
Wikipedia is founded on a bedrock principle of neutrality, seeking to describe all
relevant sides without taking a political stance. As an individual, I, too, try to stay out
of most political debates -- except where they directly impact my personal passion for
the free flow of information. This is one of those times.
When I founded Wikipedia in 2001, the Internet was a place where ordinary people
could freely create and share with one another. Wikipedia emerged from that
egalitarian spirit, as a community committed to the free exchange of knowledge. Our
mission was and continues to be to collect the sum total of all human knowledge and
make it available to everybody in their own language.
Since its founding, Wikipedia has become one of the most popular websites in the
world. And we zealously guard the privacy of our users, both the 75,000 people who
write the encyclopedia and the half-billion people who read it. In 2013, when Edward
Snowden revealed the scope and scale of the system of mass surveillance that had
been built by the National Security Agency and other national security agencies, we
were horrified.
It is thanks to Snowden that we can now participate in an informed and democratic
debate about how the US government subverted the power of the Internet in the
name of mass surveillance. As a result of what he disclosed, people began to realize
their privacy had been massively eroded over the past decade, and not just by the
NSA. They recognized that their personal information was being collected, stored,
analyzed and shared. Text messages, emails and phone records they thought were
private were actually up for grabs, easily accessed by the US government either
directly from major tech companies or by tapping the cables and switches that
comprise the Internet's "backbone." And all of the surveillance was done without a
warrant.
That is why I've signed onto the campaign asking President Barack Obama to pardon
Snowden. Without him, ordinary people around the world would still know little of the
growing dragnet stifling the Internet's enormous potential for good.
As a result of Snowden's actions, the Internet has become safer and users are better
equipped to protect themselves. Since the disclosures began in 2013, the number of
websites moving to HTTPS to encrypt traffic has skyrocketed. (This includes Wikipedia
and US federal government websites.) Popular messaging apps like WhatsApp have
adopted end-to-end encryption, and apps like Signal, which was used only by the
highly privacy-sensitive, have become more popular.
Some of the world's biggest tech companies have stood up against government
attempts to enlist them in surveillance operations. Nowhere was that more clearly on
display than earlier this year, when Apple refused FBI demands that it insert malware
into an iPhone, which would have weakened its technology for everyone.
But what may be even more important than legal reforms and technical changes is the
public debate Snowden instigated. His disclosures brought about a change in
consciousness, reinstating privacy as a central value, and newly incentivizing the
protection of information activists and dissidents abroad. Young people in the United
States are more judicious in what they publicly share online. Activist groups like Black
Lives Matter are taking pains to protect their communications. And the United Nations
has recognized that encryption is vital to the protection of global human rights.
The many positive developments catalyzed by Snowden can't fully undo the harm
that mass surveillance has done to people's creativity and free exchange of ideas. We
know there has been a chilling effect. People's behavior online has changed, and
writers worldwide are engaging in unprecedented levels of self-censorship.
That said, a brave young American whistleblower has given us the most important
tool in our fight to reclaim the Internet: knowledge. Snowden acted out of a love of the
Internet and its promise as an open space for collaboration, sharing and
experimentation. I'd like to think that if I had been in his place, I would have done the
same thing. For his act of conscience, he deserves our overwhelming appreciation.
Edward Snowden, traitor
by James Kirchick
Sunday, June 1, 2014
Source: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/edward-snowden-traitor-article-
1.1811878
Edward Snowden represents the worst traits of the Millennial generation: self-
entitlement, moral equivocation and no sense of loyalty to ones country.
There was Snowden on Wednesday, chatting it up with NBC News Brian Williams, who
had traveled all the way to Moscow to meet with the fugitive National Security Agency
leaker. Americans suspicious of how Snowden wound up there, of all places, after
having divulged some 2 million secret U.S. government documents, are apparently
paranoid to think that he is somehow working for our friends, the Russians.
I have no relationship with the Russian government at all, he protested, Im not
supported by the Russian government. This is exactly what Russian President
Vladimir Putin uttered just a week before. Snowden is not our agent, and gave up no
secrets, he said.
And those little green men in Crimea are not Russian troops.
It took Oleg Kalugin, a retired KGB Major General, to bring us back to earth. The FSB
are now his hosts, and they are taking care of him, Kalugin told the site VentureBeat,
referring to the Russian security agency.
Snowden insists he did not bring his digital documents to Moscow and that the
Russians thus have no access to Americas national security secrets. But even if he
didnt carry the files with him, there remains plenty of classified information he could
have provided his hosts by other means.
And Snowden either doesnt care about, or is completely oblivious to, the propaganda
victory he has handed the Russians by allowing them to portray themselves as
gracious hosts to a courageous whistleblower exposing the ravages of Americas
national security state. For the deleterious effects this has had on the United States,
simply look at the conversation in countries like Brazil or Germany, where people talk
as if America were the only country in the world that engages in espionage.
Ah, but Snowden told Williams, he never intended to settle in Moscow. No, he really
wanted to land in Cuba or Venezuela, other paragons of free speech and individual
rights. It was only after big, bad Uncle Sam revoked his passport that he found himself
stranded in the transfer terminal at Sheremetyevo airport.
Unbelievable. Snowden breaks his oath, deceives his colleagues, filches top-secret
documents, flees to Red China, and then whines about how the people whom he lied
to and stole from tried to prevent him from getting away with it?
The situation determined that this needed to be told to the public, Snowden
declared, in the smug tone of the undergraduate drunk for the first time on post-
modernist theory. Situations do not determine the course of events. Individuals do.
And Snowden, the know-it-all Millennial, arrogated to himself the right to determine
what secrets, if any, our government should be allowed to keep.
A Pew poll found 57% of Americans age 18-29 believe Snowden served the public
interest almost an exact inverse of Americans over 65. Trust in him is highest
among those with no recollection of WWII or the Cold War.
Had Snowden limited his disclosures to the NSAs domestic surveillance programs,
which certainly deserve more scrutiny, we would be having an entirely different
conversation. But the minute he decided to expose Americas foreign intelligence
operations operations that are not constrained by the Constitution he so claims to
love and abscond to the capital of an authoritarian adversary, Snowden lost any
claim to the mantle of whistleblower.
At this point he became what Secretary of State John Kerry has now labeled him: a
traitor.
Thankfully, not all us Millennials are like Snowden, as evidenced by the young men
and women who have sacrificed so much over the past decade by serving their
country in the armed services or, indeed, the NSA. It is these people, whom he
betrayed, who indeed serve the public interest.
James Kirchick is a fellow with the Foreign Policy Initiative. A journalist and foreign
correspondent now based in Washington, he has reported from Southern and North
Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, Europe and the Caucasus.
Former CIA officer: President Obama should pardon
Edward Snowden
by Barry Eisler

September 15, 2016

Source: http://time.com/4495221/pardon-edward-snowden/

Barry Eisler spent three years in a covert position in the CIAs Directorate of Operations and is
the author of 12 novels, including The Detachment

This week, Edward Snowden, multiple human rights and civil rights groups, and a broad array
of American citizens asked President Obama to exercise his Constitutional power to pardon
Snowden. As a former CIA officer, I wholeheartedly support a full presidential pardon for this
brave whistleblower.

All nations require some secrecy. But in a democracy, where the government is accountable
to the people, transparency should be the default; secrecy, the exception. And this is
especially true regarding the implementation of an unprecedented system of domestic bulk
surveillance, a mere precursor of which Senator Frank Church warned 40 years ago could
lead to the eradication of privacy and the imposition of total tyranny.

That today we are engaged in a meaningful debate about whether such a system is desirable
is almost entirely due to the conscience, courage and conviction of one man: Edward
Snowden. Without Snowden, the American people could not balance for themselves the risks,
costs and benefits of omniscient domestic surveillance. Because of him, we can.

For this service, the government has charged Snowden under the World War I-era Espionage
Act. Yet Snowden did not sell information secretly to any enemy of America. Instead, he
shared it openly through the press with the American people.

For this service, Snowden has been accused of having blood on his handsthe same
evidence-free clich trotted out every time a whistleblower reveals corruption, criminality or
anything else the government would prefer to hide. That this charge is being aired by the very
people responsible for wars that have led to thousands of dead American servicemen and
servicewomen; hundreds of thousands burned, blinded, brain-damaged, crippled, maimed
and traumatized; and hundreds of thousands of innocent foreigners killed, is more than
ironic. Its also a form of psychological projection, or propaganda, intended to distract from
where true responsibility for bloodshed lies.

And for this service, the usual suspects have claimed Snowden has caused grave damage to
national security. As always, the charge is backed by nothing but air, and ignoresin fact, is
intended to distract fromthe real damage caused by metastasizing governmental secrecy.
This includes not only disastrous government mistakes and cover-ups (see the Bay of Pigs,
the missile gap, the Gulf of Tonkin, Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, etc.), but also the
ongoing strangulation of democracy itself. The nation is not made more secure, but is instead
more fragile, when the government knows more and more about the people and the people
know less and less about the government.

Even well-meaning media personalities fret over questions like: But what would happen if
every top-secret cleared intelligence employee decided what secret information to
unilaterally declassify? In fact, whistleblowing is extraordinarily rare, in part because of the
draconian penalties the government metes out to punish it. Whats rampantand realis
over-classification. An insistence on discussing a fantasy hypothetical of radical
transparency, when the world we actually live in is one of radical secrecy, seems a strange
way to frame a debate.

If leaks really are so terrible that the government conflates them with espionage (and even
with terrorism), why isnt the government prosecuting the thousands of leaks that insiders
dole out to favored reporters every day? Its almost as though leaking isnt really the
problem, but rather the nature of leakswith leaks that assist favored government narratives
encouraged, and ones that challenge those narratives prosecuted.

Its important to understand that Snowden violated no oath of secrecybecause there is

no such oath. The only oath is the oath to defend the Constitution. With regard to secrecy,
there is only an NDA. So anyone who suggests that Snowden violated an oath of secrecy is
either ignorant or lying. Faced with a choice between an oath on the one hand, and an NDA
on the other, Snowden chose the oaththe real oath, the only oathand alerted the
American people to what the government was concealing from us.

In other words, Snowden followed his conscience. Authoritarians might condemn such a
choice. Americans should celebrate it. After all, in his seminal essay Civil Disobedience,
Henry David Thoreau wrote, It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as
for the right. And indeed, if people were intended to only and always obey the law, why
would we have been given the powerand burdenof conscience? Similarly, if the president
were intended always to hew to the law even at the expense of justice, why would the
founders have vested the office of the president with the power of pardon?

Without question, history will vindicate Edward Snowden as it has Daniel Ellsberg. President
Obama has a chance to be on the right side of that history. In doing so, he would do his
legacy, and his country, a great service.
No pardon for Edward Snowden
By the Editorial Board, The Washington Post
September 17, 2016
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/edward-snowden-doesnt-
deserve-a-pardon/2016/09/17/ec04d448-7c2e-11e6-ac8e-
cf8e0dd91dc7_story.html?utm_term=.8d54f4ac77bc
EDWARD SNOWDEN, the former National Security Agency contractor who blew the
cover off the federal governments electronic surveillance programs three years ago,
has his admirers. After the inevitably celebratory Oliver Stone film about him appears
this weekend, he may have more. Whether Mr. Snowden deserves a presidential
pardon, as human rights organizations are demanding in a new national campaign
timed to coincide with the film, is a complicated question, however, to which
President Obamas answer should continue to be no.
Mr. Snowdens defenders dont deny that he broke the law not to mention oaths
and contractual obligations when he copied and kept 1.5 million classified
documents. They argue, rather, that Mr. Snowdens noble purposes, and the policy
changes his whistle-blowing prompted, justified his actions. Specifically, he made
the documents public through journalists, including reporters working for The Post,
enabling the American public to learn for the first time that the NSA was collecting
domestic telephone metadata information about the time of a call and the
parties to it, but not its content en masse with no case-by-case court approval. The
program was a stretch, if not an outright violation, of federal surveillance law, and
posed risks to privacy. Congress and the president eventually responded with
corrective legislation. Its fair to say we owe these necessary reforms to Mr. Snowden.
The complication is that Mr. Snowden did more than that. He also pilfered, and
leaked, information about a separate overseas NSA Internet-monitoring program,
PRISM, that was both clearly legal and not clearly threatening to privacy. (It was also
not permanent; the law authorizing it expires next year.) Worse far worse he also
leaked details of basically defensible international intelligence operations:
cooperation with Scandinavian services against Russia; spying on the wife of an
Osama bin Laden associate; and certain offensive cyber operations in China. No
specific harm, actual or attempted, to any individual American was ever shown to
have resulted from the NSA telephone metadata program Mr. Snowden brought to
light. In contrast, his revelations about the agencys international operations
disrupted lawful intelligence-gathering, causing possibly tremendous damage to
national security, according to a unanimous, bipartisan report by the House
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. What higher cause did that serve?
Ideally, Mr. Snowden would come home and hash out all of this before a jury of his
peers. That would certainly be in the best tradition of civil disobedience, whose
practitioners have always been willing to go to jail for their beliefs. He says this is
unacceptable because U.S. secrecy-protection statutes specifically prohibit him from
claiming his higher purpose and positive impact as a defense which is true, though
its not clear how the law could allow that without creating a huge loophole for
leakers. (Mr. Snowden hurt his own credibility as an avatar of freedom by accepting
asylum from Russias Vladimir Putin, whos not known for pardoning those who blow
the whistle on him.)
The second-best solution might be a bargain in which Mr. Snowden accepts a measure
of criminal responsibility for his excesses and the U.S. government offers a measure of
leniency in recognition of his contributions. Neither party seems interested in that for
now. An outright pardon, meanwhile, would strike the wrong balance.