Or, alternatively, it means that the offer of amnesty is a lie, and just being posed as an attempt to capture Snowden and the documents.
That's not even untenable at this point either -- he's just enough outside of the public eye that it would be easy to manufacture another crime that he's also guilty of for which he could be separately arrested. Capture him during the exchange, wait a couple of weeks, then announce that he was arrested on some completely unrelated matter for which he will be tried and sentenced, secretly, in a tribunal, behind closed doors.
It's not like we haven't established clear precedent.
This isn't even the most pessimistic of equally plausible scenarios -- we could just opt to kill him.
The cynic in me likes this interpretation, but "the documents" aren't capture-able any longer because they're not all in one place. Several people have access to them, some of whom are not stupid (Bruce Schneier, etc.) and can operate redundant distributed cryptosystems. The cat is out of the bag on this one and it's never going back in. This doesn't stop them from wanting to arrest/torture/kill/* Snowden, but the government isn't dumb enough to imagine they'll ever get their papers back.
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Or, alternatively, it means that the offer of amnesty is a lie, and just being posed as an attempt to capture Snowden and the documents.
That's not even untenable at this point either -- he's just enough outside of the public eye that it would be easy to manufacture another crime that he's also guilty of for which he could be separately arrested. Capture him during the exchange, wait a couple of weeks, then announce that he was arrested on some completely unrelated matter for which he will be tried and sentenced, secretly, in a tribunal, behind closed doors.
It's not like we haven't established clear precedent.
This isn't even the most pessimistic of equally plausible scenarios -- we could just opt to kill him.
The cynic in me likes this interpretation, but "the documents" aren't capture-able any longer because they're not all in one place. Several people have access to them, some of whom are not stupid (Bruce Schneier, etc.) and can operate redundant distributed cryptosystems. The cat is out of the bag on this one and it's never going back in. This doesn't stop them from wanting to arrest/torture/kill/* Snowden, but the government isn't dumb enough to imagine they'll ever get their papers back.
Well, apparently the amnesty wasn't approved by the White House, who says that it's not under consideration either way.
http://reason.com/blog/2013/12/16/white-house-says-there-wil...