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Friday, August 2, 2013

Week 4 EOC: Edward Snowden

The Snowden case, yes, is about a NSA employee leaking classified information.  What is the core of the issue though? It is the fact that he breached his contract with the NSA. He did so by leaking the information. According to the textbook, Introduction to Business Law, the definition of a material breach is “a violation of a contract that defeats an essential purpose of the agreement.” (Beatty, 215)  The agreement was that Snowden, when hired, would not share secrets that he would learn while working at the NSA to anyone.  When he decided to leak the information, he immediately breached his contract.  His leaking of the secrets may not have physically damaged the NSA but what it has done is create a damage that could possibly affect the security of the nation. This would be considered direct damages, which “represent harm that flowed directly from the contract's breach.” (Beatty, 197)  Now the NSA wouldn’t be trying to get money from Snowden but what they could do is make it so he has been returned to the US and ends up locked up with no contact to the outside world or even other inmates at the location he would end up being locked up at. I think he should be brought back to the US so he can be tried for his crime, breeching his contract with the NSA.  Yes he shared secrets but that isn’t the legal issue.  Kremlin foreign-policy aide Yuri Ushakov, stated in the Wall Street Journal that “this situation is too insignificant to affect political relations.” (Sonne) So if this issue isn’t a deal breaker when it comes to the relations between the US and Russia, then it solely needs to be dealt with on a legal basis where he has to deal with the legal ramifications of his actions.


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