Iceland Denies Snowden's Bid For Citizenship

So much for Iceland's bid as the world safe haven from government (and intellectual status quo) persecution. The tiny country that was such a vocal supporter of Julian Assange, and which originally was speculated as being the final destination of Snowden upon his departure from Hong Kong, has just opined on his request for Icelandic citizenship, and the answer is a resounding no, following the country's "parliament voted not to debate it before the summer recess" Reuters reports.

It was none other than chess legend Bobby Fischer who was granted Icelandic citizenship by parliament in a comparable procedure after he got into trouble with the United States over tax evasion and breaking sanctions by playing a match in Yugoslavia in 1992. Apparently Snowden's was not worthy enough for comparable treatment.

In doing so, Iceland effectively washes its hands of Snowden's fate, and the vote leaves the whistleblower with one option less as he seeks a country to shelter him from U.S. espionage charges. How much longer Snowden's limbo state in the Moscow transit terminal continues is unclear, but according to media reports, Putin is getting increasingly displeased with the lack of resolution which may mean that sooner or later, Snowden will have no choice but to head back to the one country's whose massive internal espionage aparatus he revealed for the entire world to see.

From Reuters:

Six members of parliament tabled a proposal late on Thursday to grant Snowden citizenship after they received a request from him via WikiLeaks, opposition parliamentarian Birgitta Jonsdottir said.

But a majority of parliamentarians voted late on Thursday against allowing the proposal to be put on the agenda, a day before parliament went into summer recess. It does not reconvene until September.

"Snowden has formally requested citizenship. But nothing is now going to happen. We could not even vote on it," Jonsdottir told Reuters.

In a letter dated July 4, posted on Jonsdottir's blog, Snowden wrote that he had been left "de facto-stateless" by his government, which revoked his passport after he fled the country and leaked information about U.S. surveillance operations.

He has sought asylum in a number of countries, but most, including Iceland, say he must be on their soil for his application to be accepted.

His request for citizenship was a different tack, hoping that Iceland would give him a passport, as it has done in at least one similar case in the past.

"I appreciate that Iceland, a small but significant country in the world community, shows such courage and commitment to its higher laws and ideals," he wrote in the letter.

Under Icelandic law, parliament can grant citizenship to foreigners, which can otherwise usually only be gained through naturalization after a period of residence.

Chess master Bobby Fischer was granted Icelandic citizenship by parliament after he got into trouble with the United States over tax evasion and breaking sanctions by playing a match in Yugoslavia in 1992.

After years living abroad, he was detained in Japan, where he applied for and was awarded Icelandic citizenship in 2005. He spent his last years in Iceland before dying in 2008.

Iceland's recently elected center-right government is seen as far less willing to engage in an international dispute with the United States than the previous government, even if it will want to maintain the country's reputation for promoting Internet freedom.

"It is a disappointment that he is facing limited options," WikiLeaks Icelandic spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson told Reuters. "I am not optimistic that the new conservative government will take steps of courage and boldness to assist Mr Snowden.

Comments

[samsara]

"We now know we are subjected to 100% information capture, control, and manipulation. globall"

and

"this means one thing: Everything is rigged. Everything is controlled."

I believe that to be true. If people would only understand that the is no "FAIR" elections any longer.

They can blackmail every Congressman, every senator, all of them, coming up the ranks..

[Peter Pan]

Dear Edward,

You have already earned assylum in every decent person's conscience.

May God protect you because no one else will.

PP.

[put_peter]

I think i still have an option to blow my head off if things get rough. I guess this is option is not available for Mr Snowden.

[GMadScientist]

Let's all chip in and buy a shitload of Snowden masks...then we can surround him and they can all play fucking "Where's Waldo?" and watch the facial recognition lock-up in an infinite loop.

[Dangertime]

My country, 'tis of thee,

Sweet land of liberty,

Of thee I sing;

Land where my fathers died,

Land of the pilgrims' pride,

From ev'ry mountainside

Let freeeeeeedom riiiiiiing

[GMadScientist]

Snowden, hint: don't try any country that receives dollars from the IMF.

[Dewey Cheatum Howe]

This may or may not tie to the Snowden, Morales fiasco.

http://reason.com/blog/2013/07/05/ecuador-reveals-who-bugged-their-embassy

Earlier this week, Reason reported on a scandalous discovery made by the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Staff at the embassy found microphones planted in one of the offices. Ecuador said it would announce on Tuesday who was responsible for the bugging.

“We have reason to believe that the bugging was carried out by a company called the Surveillance Group Limited,” said Ricardo Patino, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, at a press conference in Quito, Ecuador. According to Patino, the company is “one of the UK's biggest private investigation and undercover surveillance companies.” The minister presented photographs of the devices and explained that they could be turned on remotely with a cell phone. Patino also requested that the British government join Ecuador in conducting an investigation to determine the extent of the surveillance.

Timothy Young, the CEO of Surveillance Group Limited, denied Patino's claims. A press release posted Thursday on the Surveillance Group's site states:

We have this morning heard an accusation the source of which is apparently Ricardo Patino, the Ecuadorian Foreign Minister suggesting that we have bugged the Ecuadorian Embassy. This is completely untrue. The Surveillance Group do not and have never been engaged in any activities of this nature. We have not been contacted by any member of the Ecuadorian Government and our first notification about this incident was via the press this morning. This is a wholly untrue assertion.

The Worcester-based company boasts elsewhere on its site that it “combine[s] the practices, skills and experience of Special Forces, Police and commercial surveillance to create an entirely new form of surveillance. They also lay claim to a worldwide network of surveillance teams: “We employ teams in cutting-edge surveillance work across the UK and with teams strategically placed in Europe and Canada.”

The microphones were discovered in electric outlets in the office of Ana Alban. Although they were found in Mid-June during a diplomatic visit, Patino previously explained that the Ecuadorian government decided not to make the information public until this week in order to avoid further confusion and tension. His traveled to the embassy to meet with Julian Assange, who received political asylum from Ecuador and has been living in the London embassy for over a year. Patino also met with British Foreign Minister, William Hague, to discuss potential ways of resolving the tensions that have been growing between Ecuador and the UK over the last year because of Assange's presence. London maintains a constant police presence around the embassy and intends to arrest and extradite Assange if he sets foot on British ground.

[Divine Wind]

This kid must have a MASSIVE bag of cash on him.

I can't imagine he is using plastic.

- Plane flights halfway around the world.

- Hotel

- Meals

- Laundry

I wonder who is picking up the tab on all this?

[Aurora Ex Machina]

He's American; he's running it all on his Credit Cards, and then Store Cards and then Loyalty Cards.

By the National Average, I'm sure he's got 50% ammo left.

[trader1]

i can believe he used plastic (perhaps not in his own name) for the hawaii - hong kong flights, but you don't think that the banks haven't already been instructed to cut his credit lines?  

after all, he does have a wikileaks crew with him to take care of travel expenses...

[bunnyswanson]

Ed is busy writing a Best Seller.  He has an open tab.

[goldenbuddha454]

Grand Cayman.  600 Banks, 55,000 people, no taxes, sun, fun, clear clean water, Rum.  That's where he should go apply for asylum.

[Golden1182]

Tyler, 

where are the pictures of Snowden in the Moscow airport?  How can he be chilling in the Moscow airport with no photos published?

Seems very odd.

has anyone seen any?

[Aurora Ex Machina]

There's a press pack stationed there. No-one ain't seen nothing. Take it two ways:

1) Stop focusing on the shitty boring part of this story like a good dog <SQUIRREL!>

2) He's on the Moon

Hint: It's about the impact, not the actor. If you've not noticed the huge MSM spin to "WHO IS TYLER DURDEN?!". Sorry, "WHO IS EDWARD SNOWDEN (AND IS HE A GLITTERING VAMPIRE?)" then you need to grow up.

p.s. Spooky kids. Fucking around with misplaced characters O and Q is kiddy level stuff. I've already told you I'm immune to this level of bullshit, so stop it. Same goes for the copy/paste fuckery. No, seriously; do a GREP: if you need anyone to think I'm crazy, that ship has already sailed. The technique is called "spiking the barrel" you fucking slow 1.0 cunts, and we all already know that a Win machine is already compromised, so you could be downloading child porn all over this machine already (and there's a penalty for that).

Woo-woo, you fuckers are SLOW. Don't make me give you a lesson. Oh, and I don't like ice-cream, I wanted an ice lolly, slow assed motherfuckers. Singing bin-men make me happy. You fuckers really don't understand 4D spaces. There's a lesson about poking bears, haven't you learnt it yet? [Note: this is meaningless to most, so learn to ignore it. Fnord.]

[ebear]

"I don't like ice-cream, I wanted an ice lolly"

El mio es un 99

[Aurora Ex Machina]

[ZH wants me to cut the crap, so I will]

You brought it upon yourself: play nice, we play nice; fuck around, we fuck around.

Since your moral scope is so fucked, we thought we'd keep it on the simpler scales that you monkeys understand.

QM weaponry. I'd advise looking into the U.N. and start using those Laws you all love.

[trader1]

...

The implications of quantum mechanics, which unnerved even Einstein, leads to such mind-blowing possibilities as a cat being both alive and dead at the same time and the ability to teleport – yes, teleport as in the transporter device from Star Trek – matter from one place to another. Applied to computers, it would allow the construction of computers vastly more powerful than anything conceived of today outside the realm of science fiction.

This is because superposition would allow transistors, which record data as a series of ones and zeros, to be both one and zero at the same time – exploding the processing power of traditional digital computers. Entanglement would, in turn, make space irrelevant as transistors would not have to be in near proximity with one another to interact as a whole.

What might this mean? Imagine, for instance, the computer processing power of the most powerful computer in existence today contained in something the size of today’s iPhone. Combined with increasingly sophisticated software that, like humans, learns from experience, this could mean the development of powerful artificial intelligence systems capable of undertaking the most complex of tasks, tasks which might also involve understanding and reacting to human emotions in real time.  

...

For those keeping track, the future is thus likely to see three things simultaneously; increasingly powerful and sophisticated machine intelligence, cheap, easy-to-make weapons that can be manufactured secretly and in situ and a planetary biosphere that is under increasing stress from humanity’s collective economic activities.

[Cavanaugh, 2013]

Bearden has an interesting explanation for the nuclear disaster in Russia which made hundreds of square miles of Russia uninhabitable. “I believe that in 1958 the Soviet nuclear catastrophe near the Urals was the result of an attempt to transmit a nuclear explosion through hyperspace (the peculiarity of a transmitter tuning failure would have resulted in an explosion emerging from the nearest large nuclear waste storage, and that apparently happened).

Kyshtym disaster

Quantum entanglement is used for instant virtual communication across an entangled pair of photons. By utilizing the Uncertainty Principle, military communications become permanently altered as channels are secure and are capable of picking up when someone interferes with the stream of information to eavesdrop on their messages.

Spookyweapons: Quantum Warfare of the Future?

As K. Eric Drexler stated, nanotechnology can "bring the ultimate tools of destruction," but it is not inherently dangerous. With proper guidance, Drexler predicted we could use nanotechnology to "build the ultimate tools of peace." Although the benefits of nanotechnology tempt one to allow it to grow unrestricted, we must take heed of the potential risks such a powerful tool promises. Since almost anything can be built-and matter can be almost completely controlled-if nanotechnology lives up to its reputation, it seems obvious to conclude that nanotechnology must be regulated. But how?

Current treaties such as the BWC and CWC are inadequate because they are outdated and were drafted without a major development like nanotechnology in mind. Institutions like the BWC and CWC are already set and cannot be easily adapted to accommodate new advances in technology. In addition, the uses and purposes of nanotechnology are expected to be so diverse that existing regimes cannot properly discern harmful from helpful uses.

A new regulatory system must be set up with all potential uses in mind so that the advantageous uses can come to fruition while the harmful uses can be prevented and proscribed. Because this regime will be adopted before the technology fully takes off, it does not have to worry about already existing intellectual property rights or privacy concerns. It will take a "create at your own risk" type of approach that can disregard trivial concerns and focus on safety measures and the proper maturation of the technology. Thus, if a new treaty can be crafted having learned the lessons from the deficiencies of the BWC and CWC, it should be able to handle nanotechnology however, whenever, and wherever it develops.  [Pinson, 2004, PDF]

How we will know the Earth has been killed? Those events have different speeds: black holes, observed in the cosmos, cause a fast big-bang explosion, which we will hardly notice before becoming part of it. Strangelets should be slower. They should fall to the center of the Earth eating it from inside out. In that case, the process will be signaled by an increase in Earthquakes and volcano activity. The final proof will be the existence of a series of +8 earthquakes in the Richter scale. Yet the LHC might already be causing earthquakes, as we anticipated years ago, given the fact that it is the strongest magnetic field on Earth today, when working at full potency, and Earthquakes are caused by butterfly effects due to disturbances on Earth’s magnetic fields… This year is in fact the second year on number of big >7 Richter scale earthquakes on record, after the carpet bombing of II World War, during the pacific campaign that bombed the ‘ring of fire’ – also a man-made year of earthquakes.  

[Sancho, 2013]

 The Age of the Singularity, the IV Cycle of Evolution of machines, dominated by robots, solar Industries and China. Scientists call the arrival of Artificial Intelligence, the Singularity moment, when robots, which can use solar energy to become autonomous will complete the evolution of machines as organic forms, automating factories & expelling most human workers and soldiers from labor and war fields, as previous revolutions did with obsolete III World non-technological humans, unless we forbid legally their evolution. Money will become then the digital informative, ‘genetic code’ that organizes their reproduction in those automated company-mothers.  [Sancho, 2013]

It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment. -Freeman Dyson, 1979

[ParaZite]

Just an odd idea, but why doesn't Snowden get a taxi in Moscow, and have them take him to the edge of the "nuclear" zone near the outlaying towns near Chernobyl? The radiation is fairly benevolent in most of the outlaying cities, and for the most part, he could literally vanish in that area, with no one the wiser. Granted the radiation might kill him, in the long run, but let's face it... if the US gets their hands on him, he's a dead man anyway. I'd take my chances in the wastelands. He should be able to get a decent supply of camping gear in Russia. There are plenty of deserted houses to choose from, and maybe someone in Russia would just meet him at the station and give him a motorcycle to make the trek on his own? Then again, the Russian Mafia might find a good use for such a skillful programmer with a good knowledge of the US's security systems. Someone, independant of the state of Russia, needs to make a play / power move, and help Snowden disappear off the radar, before the US just makes him "disappear". 

[Loose Caboose]

Snowden should accept the offer from the Russians. The whole world has hung him out to dry.  He should forget about future leaks (unless Putin wants them) since the world he risked everything to enlighten doesn't want to know.  He's up against the globalists - he can't win.  None of us can.  Mr. Snowden, you did your best - now save yourself.

As for the nations who rejected his plea for asylum?  A big "fuck you" to you all and good night.

[Kirk2NCC1701]

What Ed is doing is fantastic and heroic, but...

At some point he'll have to stop trying to commandeer the world stage from the Big Boys -- if he wants asylum.  Best to make a quiet deal behind the scene, while he's "outing" all these fake Asylum countries and exposing them as US/Fed bitches for all to see.

Real Diplomacy is done behind the scenes, not via news headlines.  You've had your 120 minutes of fame.  Time to roll the Credits and 'Exit Stage Right'.

Don't cut off your Exit Route, i.e. don't piss off or embarrass your Host.

[bunnyswanson]

What would bring a man to put himself into the position of life in Gitmo or assassination?  Hmmm...let me think.....the knowledge of the murder of a couple hundred million people?  Yep.  That would be about it. 

[ken]

Because he is a shill, duh. The best way to control dissent, is to LEAD IT, and Snowden is a beacon for dissent, even though he is one of "THEM," I betcha.

[ken]

Because he is a shill, duh. The best way to control dissent, is to LEAD IT, and Snowden is a beacon for dissent, even though he is one of "THEM," I betcha.

[ken]

Snowden = No Uprising = No Change in the bitchification of We the People.

[ken]

Snowden = No Uprising = No Change in the bitchification of We the People.