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posted by LaminatorX on Saturday June 07 2014, @10:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the Blaming-the-Messenger dept.

Charles Cooper reports that venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has called former NSA contractor Edward Snowden a traitor for leaking national secrets about US surveillance practices and says that foreign nations may use the disclosures as an excuse to promote their domestic technology suppliers over American rivals. "Obviously he's a traitor," says Andreessen. "Like if you look up in the encyclopedia 'traitor,' there's a picture of Ed Snowden. Like he's a textbook traitor. They don't get much more traitor than that. I will say that I'm in the distinct minority out here. Most people in Silicon Valley would pick the other designation."

Andreessen added that NSA leaks may well wind up getting used as a cudgel by foreign governments against American companies that depend on overseas sales. "There's a big open question right now how successful our companies will be when they go sell products overseas," says Andreessen. "I think there are a lot of foreign companies that are very envious of Silicon Valley and America's domination of tech and wish that they could implement protection policies. And they are going to use this whole affair as a reason to do that ... as an excuse."

 
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  • (Score: 1) by basicbasicbasic on Saturday June 07 2014, @06:32PM

    by basicbasicbasic (411) on Saturday June 07 2014, @06:32PM (#52688)

    There's that odd wording "giving them aid and comfort". That, to me, looks like a way to make sure that just giving aid to your enemies not enough to qualify as treason. Because you can certainly say Snowden gave aid to the enemies of the US, but that's a very different thing to treason.

    Can anyone with some legal/historical knowledge shed light on why it's written that way?

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by dry on Saturday June 07 2014, @07:17PM

    by dry (223) on Saturday June 07 2014, @07:17PM (#52725) Journal

    It's basically a copy of the English High Treason law (1351), which besides things like screwing the Queen therefore calling into question the succession or killing the King has

    "if a man do levy war against our lord the King in his realm, or be adherent to the King's enemies in his realm, giving to them aid and comfort in the realm, or elsewhere"

    The 2 witnesses thing also comes from English law and was introduced due to abuse by the monarchy using treason as a catch all for things they didn't like.