Days after he exposed the U.S. government's massive phone and Internet surveillance programs, supporters of Edward Snowden created accounts on whitehouse.gov to push a petition demanding a pardon over the 100,000-signature threshold for official comment.

The whistleblower's supporters earned a response two years ago this week, but they're still waiting to receive it.

The Obama administration's online petition service, officially known as “We the People,” launched in late 2011 with lofty rhetoric about fostering democratic values and engaging citizens in government.

“We created We the People because we want to hear from you,” the White House gushed. “If a petition gets enough support, White House staff will review it, ensure it’s sent to the appropriate policy experts, and issue an official response.”

Some critics say the service has become a propaganda tool, with authorities answering softball demands or silly proposals – such as building an orbiting Death Star or deporting singer Justin Bieber – while ignoring those they find politically inconvenient.

“The White House petition website is just another politicized mechanism disguised as a hallmark of transparency,” says Jesselyn Radack, an attorney for Snowden.

“Ignoring petitions the administration doesn’t like, such as the one to pardon my client Edward Snowden, exposes the site as a propaganda tool, rather than a meaningful way of influencing government,” she says.

White House officials have said repeatedly the Snowden petition will eventually get a response, just like any other petition clearing the threshold for a response.

“Yes, we’ll be responding,” then-spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden told U.S. News in 2013, indicating the White House was not invoking an exception to avoid responding, as it reserves the right to do. “Response times vary," she said.

As the response time lengthened, an appeals court deliberated eight months before finding the bulk collection of call records exposed by Snowden illegal. Congress passed reform legislation after belabored debate sparked by his revelations.

The official White House line hasn’t changed, but a spokesperson declined to be quoted on the record.

Snowden currently lives in exile in Russia, where he was stranded when the State Department cancelled his passport. If he returns to the U.S. without a pardon or negotiated deal, he will face charges for allegedly stealing government property and violating the Espionage Act by downloading and distributing to journalists documents about surveillance programs.

Snowden supporters aren’t alone in waiting for a response. Other petitions that passed the signature threshold but present politically complicated requests have also been ignored.

A petition requesting support for a warrant requirement for emails older than 180 days has been waiting since December 2013. A petition asking that Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, convicted of attempting to murder U.S. troops, be returned to Pakistan has been waiting nearly a year.

"I think the White House probably does want to know what hundreds of thousands of people think," says Kathy Manley, an attorney for Siddiqui's family, which believes she was framed. "[But] I don't think there's a good excuse for not saying anything for a year when a response was promised."

Many petitions well under the threshold, meanwhile, have received official comment, such as requests to support pediatric cancer patients and the use of sign language, or to make the Lunar New Year a national holiday. An immigration petition with about 6,000 signatures recently received a 1,200-word response.

"The White House tends to reply to petitions that help them promote their agenda, or at least that cast them in a positive light," says George Washington University professor David Karpf, who studies the Internet and politics.

The Bieber petition, he says, allowed officials to talk about immigration policy "with a wink and a smile," while responding to petitions like the Death Star request "doesn't promote a specific agenda, but certainly makes the White House look good and generates some positive coverage."

"The petitions that don't get an answer are the particularly tough ones," he says. "I imagine responding to the Snowden petition doesn't fit with their general communications strategy."

The wait for Snowden isn't without parallel. Authorities took nearly two years to answer petitions that cleared an earlier 25,000-signature threshold demanding that Justice Department officials involved in prosecuting Internet activist Aaron Swartz be fired. Swartz killed himself after an allegedly overzealous prosecution for downloading academic articles. Authorities ultimately declined to comment on "personnel matters."

"The White House petition site is a venue for citizens to speak out to their government, [which] gives the government an opportunity to pick and choose the time, place and manner of their responses," Karpf says. "Inconvenient petitions are indefinitely avoided, while convenient ones are taken up right away. ... I suppose I'd call that 'strategic communications' or 'public relations,' rather than propaganda."

Two years ago, Eli Dourado noticed the White House site wasn't very transparent about long-delayed petition responses. So he spent a weekend setting up the website whpetitions.info to track petitions in need of a response to "nudge the White House to stay on top of their petition queue."

"I thought it would be a good project because the list of successful petitions that are awaiting a reply seems like a glaring omission from the We The People site," he says. "We The People displays petitions that are accumulating signatures and it shows responses to petitions, but in between there is a purgatory into which petitions that the White House doesn't want to answer can disappear."

Dourado says he's seen delayed responses for "a wide mix of topics," including some petitions he says "are plainly silly," such as a petition that asks President Barack Obama to spend an hour speaking with "fair tax" supporters.

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Karpf says the lack of response for some petitions likely undermines the site's appeal. The promise of an official response, he says, is the petition service's primary advantage over privately operated platforms such as Change.org and MoveOn.org.

"When petitions like the Edward Snowden pardon are ignored, it definitely undermines the promise of the site," he says. "The Obama administration ought to write a response to the Snowden petition, [even though it] probably won't be a response that the petitioners will like."

Radack says the decision to ignore certain petitions fits within a broader habit of the administration not living up to its stated commitments on transparency, protecting whistleblowers and expanding civic participation.