German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel has said the U.S. government threatened to stop sharing intelligence with Germany if Berlin gave asylum to the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden or otherwise arranged for him to travel there.

British police claim a criminal investigation they launched into journalists who have reported on leaked documents from Edward Snowden has to be kept a secret due to a possibility of increased threat of terrorist activity. Following Snowden's disclosures from the National Security Agency in 2013, London s Metropolitan Police and a lawyer for the United Kingdom government separately confirmed a criminal probe had been opened into the leaks.

Agents from New Zealand s national police force ransacked the home of a prominent independent journalist earlier this month who was collaborating with The Intercept on stories from the NSA archive furnished by Edward Snowden

Sarah Harrison, an editor at WikiLeaks who has also worked with NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, won t return to her home country of England because she fears prosecution under terrorism laws for seeking to influence her government. Harrison s fear comes straight out of the language of the U.K. Terrorism Act of 2000. Writing in The Guardian, Harrison reports the act defines terrorism as the use or threat of action [...] designed to influence the government or an international governmental organisation or which is made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause or is designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system. Elsewhere the act defines government as the government of any country, including the United States.

Once again powers that be - in order to distract attention from Snowden's actual revelations, from President Obama's ineffectual response to those revelations, or the possibility that if those revelations forced even the president of the United States to go through the motions of reviewing them, assessing them and responding to them by at least pretending to change the policies revealed by those revelations, then maybe the person who brought the revelations to the public isn't a treasonous traitor, after all.