Sarah Harrison of WikiLeaks controls the narrative, barring journalists or NGOs from taking photos and asking hard questions of Snowden. Photo by Polona Frelih.

Russia has granted defector and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden one year asylum.

Human Rights Watch has surely tarnished its brand — and indeed caused enormous brand confusion for the entire international human rights movement — by accepting Snowden's invitation to associate themselves with him in Moscow and defending this choice  on national television. aligning itself with this unethical hacker and the gang of duplicitious and manipulative anarchists at WikiLeaks. The leading international human rights group — as large and powerful and resourced as a country with embassies everywhere — undermines not only their own credibility now, they undermine the long term prospect for human rights organizations to serve as honest monitors of human rights as such rights are increasingly violated not by states, but non-state actors like hackers and terrorists.

As I explained the day they turned themselves into mouthpieces for WikiLeaks and Snowden in the manipulated "meeting with lawyers and human rights activists" stage-managed by figures close to Russian intelligence, Human Rights Watch isn't just advocating for the right to asylum that indeed every human being should have. Let's not pretend this is about the right to apply for asylum.

Rather, they are making politicized judgements by claiming — falsely — that Snowden has no other choice but to go to Russia — without ever asking why he didn't go to Venezuela or Ecuador in the first place and leak from there, nor why he didn't stay in Hong Kong, a place he said was in fact free.

They are claiming — without any actual fact-finding or reporting of their own or anyone else's except on Snowden's say-so — that he has uncovered human rights violations.

They have claimed — without any basis — that the US overzealously punishes whistle-blowers and has created a hostile climate whistle-blowing — although Human Rights Watch has not adopted a position adversarial to the court martial of Bradley Manning, has never declared Bradley Manning a "prisoner of conscience" (the issue of his mistreatment in solitary is a separate one), nor has it ever exonerated his leaks as "human rights work". That's because it's not.

In a debate on MSNBC moderated with Chris Hayes yesterday, Dinah Pokempner claimed — without any fact-finding whatsoever by her own organization — that Edward Snowden "revealed massive privacy violations" even though she acknowledges that "he did break laws". 

Yet the tech media  and blogosphere has widely refuted Glenn Greenwald's initial claims (merely repeating Snowden) that Internet providers and social media gave "direct access" to the NSA (they didn't). The Washington Post's was forced to substantially correct this false information in their coverage of the sensational story. Following these often-overlooked developments, the debate has indeed raged with good reason as to whether capturing metadata from phone calls and emails and filtering it against known information about terrorist or other criminal activity is in fact legally or even technically a privacy violation. This has not been proven. Indeed, a class action suit to try to make this claim was rejected by a judge who found the lawfaring groups had no status.

It's not just that NSA continues to maintain that it does not violate privacy or that all subsequent revelations of Snowden's — piped through Green Glenwald — have also been challenged strenuously, it's that neither HRW or any other supposedly independent party has found any actual person's rights to be violated. It's hugely theoretical, and owes a great deal to the extraordinary propensity that hackers have for amplifying their hysterical edge-cases into manufactured crises that succeed at their damaging effect long after their nonsense has been debunked.

They don't have a single case. They cannot point to a single person who was snooped on, and as a result falsely incriminated, let alone charged or jailed. Snowden's "suspected hacker's girlfriend" whose cell phone was snooped has yet to materialize anywhere or be named by him or WikiLeaks.

And no fair claiming that FISA courts act in secret so "we may not know"; lawyers know when evidence from FISA is used on clients, and they do challenge it as they did in the Muhtorov case — and usually unsuccessfully, because the government does take care to make its cases. Ken Roth cannot point to a single case otherwise. And it's no good claiming there's some sort of putative blanket violation of all our rights under the Bill of Rights, or that we shouldn't have to wait for a court to prove a human rights violation before protesting it. HRW knows that to have credibility on such things, you need real individuals, real people whose cases you can show — you cannot be abstract, like revolutionaries and oppressive governments are.

Astoundingly, Pokempner adds, "the lack of whistleblower protection" in the US — a notion HRW has never proven by in fact adopting as prisoners of conscience any of the hackers — "do tend to give him a claim". Tend to? Or do? That's lawfaring talk, not solid human rights work.

"The standards are international; they derive from a convention," Pokempner intones. Yet surely she knows that those self-same international standards of refugee law do in fact contact rational restrictions and exceptions; you cannot expect asylum to be granted if you have committed "a serious non-political crime". She knows perfectly well that if there weren't reasonable exceptions like this, then every money-launderer and narcotics dealer would whine that they were a persecuted dissident.

In fact, espionage is such a serious non-political crime and you can't pretend deliberate exposes of national security are legitimate freedom of expression just because the hacker has a political perspective. The jurisprudence at the UN for interpreting the meaning of "serious non-political crime" doesn't involve exonerating espionage of liberal democratic states. I would challenge Pokempner to come up with one such case anywhere that any treaty body has commented upon. Better yet — I would challenge HRW to submit the case of "the mass violations of human rights" found by Snowden to a UN treaty body for adjudication as to whether this hilariously overbroad concept gets any traction — even in bodies where the Russians and Chinese hold sway.

Pokempner is cleverly not claiming that Snowden hasn't committed in fact a serious crime — espionage. She hasn't even claimed that there is something politicized about the application of the actual law in his case, where he has deliberately hacked and made unauthorized disclosures by his own admission.

Instead, she is vaguely and misleadingly invoking some sort of putative "climate" of persecution in the US to rationalize the flight to Moscow.

John Schindler endeavored to explain that there was a universal understanding in the intelligence community that a person who works for another country's intelligence agency is indeed a defector when he goes over to another country. But the universality Schindler invokes which is indeed the practice of sovereign states internationally as they enforce their legitimate laws doesn't sustain that virtual realm that Pokempner inhabits where non-governmental groups trump states with their self-righteous self-styled application of abstract law.

While Pokempner is a modest and dedicated person who has devoted her entire life to Human Rights Watch's hallowed cause, she chuckles like a cynical l337 haxxor in the IRC channel when she rationalizes defection and quips — in response to Schindler's objection that Snowden has damaged the transparency cause by hooking up with the wily Assange — "WikiLeaks is the most experienced in dealing with the NSA pursuit right now."

Yeah. I'll say. WikiLeaks, plus the Kremlin, which has been right beside Assange throughout this entire arc of his anarchy directed only at the United States, and never at the world's real tyrants. Yes, that's an unsupportable judgement by HRW that the NSA is a human rights violator —
without facts — and that the group trying to bring down the US
government is nobly pursing human rights — without criticism.

That Pokempner could speak in this fashion isn't just a function of the witlessness liberals have about the real agendas and activities of unethical hackers antithetical to all of our human rights; it's a signal of the insular and self-serving climate the HRW inhabits on this and other subjects where it believes it knows best.

What will penetrate this wall of smug self-righteousness? HRW isn't going to wait for the damage to occur and any lessons have to be learned, it's already busy spinning the story in the opposite direction just in case, as I will explain in my next post.