Demonstrators holds up banners with the photo of Edward Snowden during a protest outside of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on Saturday, Oct. 26, 2013.
An Oregon man decided to openly troll President Obama, in an act of protest against the treatment of political exile Edward Snowden. Kristopher Ives is a software programmer who taunted President Obama to come arrest him for openly breaking the law and violating an executive order that bans people from sending donations to Snowden.
Snowden, you will recall, was the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked classified files to journalists back in 2013. He later fled the U.S. and was granted temporary asylum in Moscow.
Kristopher Ives only sent Snowden 33 cents worth of bitcoin, assuming that it would in fact be intercepted by the government. But for him, it was a statement, more than a donation that he expected to land in the electronic purse of Snowden.
“It’s not much but it’s the principle of the matter,” Ives posted all of this on Reddit, writing: “Please come arrest me. I live in Oregon and my name is Kristopher Ives and you can reach me at 503-383-1047.”
Ives said in an interview with The Oregonian that this was timed with Obama’s executive order being announced on the Internet on Friday.
“I don’t want to play the tin foil-hat person,” Ives said, explaining that at first he thought the news of the prohibition was a joke, “but it just seemed so odd to (sign an executive order) on April Fools.”
But Ives looked it up on the Federal Register, and sure enough, it was very real.
The order reads: “Blocking the Property of Certain Persons Engaging in Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities.”
Specifically, Ives explains, this seems to prohibit Americans from sending Edward Snowden bitcoin donations.
Ives said that Snowden is this generations “Deep Throat“, the FBI official who leaked information about the Watergate scandal to The Washington Post, leading to President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation.
The business technology website ZDNet agreed with Ives’ reading of the executive order. They published a piece on Friday as well that noted that the order “effectively rules out donations to Edward Snowden.”
“In a post on Reddit’s Bitcoin subreddit, members pledged to donate to the whistleblower’s relief fund, despite the wording of the new executive order suggesting that doing so was illegal,” ZDNet explained.
Ives told Oregon Live that nearly 1,000 donations worth $46,342.09 have made their way to Snowden’s Bitcoin account since the signing of the executive order on Wednesday.
The Reddit thread claims that the donors have used “Edward Snowden’s Official Legal Defense Fund” donation site launched by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (link).