obama.ives.collage.jpg

President Obama was in Utah on Friday, and Kristopher Ives was in Oregon asking him to "come arrest me."

(Rick Bowmer/AP, courtesy of Kristopher Ives)

An Oregon software programmer is publicly taunting President Obama to come arrest him after he openly defied an executive order that appears to prohibit Americans from supplying cyber-currency to Edward Snowden.

Kristopher Ives, who lives in Lafeyette, sent Snowden about 33 cents worth of bitcoin in defiance of the presidential order.

"It's not much but it's the principle of the matter," Ives wrote on the social networking and news site Reddit: "Please come arrest me. I live in Oregon and my name is Kristopher Ives and you can reach me at 503-383-1047."

Ives told The Oregonian on Friday that he was on Reddit on Wednesday, April 1, when news of Obama's executive order hit the Internet.

At first, he thought it might be an April Fools' Day prank.

"I don't want to play the tin foil-hat person," he said, "but it just seemed so odd to (sign an executive order) on April Fools."

So the 28-year-old self-professed "nerd and gamer" hunted up the executive order on the Federal Register. And there it was.

The order - "Blocking the Property of Certain Persons Engaging in Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities" - struck Ives and many other observers as a way to stop Americans from sending Snowden bitcoin.

Edward Snowden, you'll recall, is the former National Security Agency contractor who walked off with troves of classified files in 2013 and leaked them to journalists. Snowden fled to Moscow, where he was granted temporary asylum.

The public is divided on Snowden, who is characterized as a turncoat by the U.S. government, which has charged him with espionage. Snowden supporters describe him as a hero who blew the whistle on -- among other things -- a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order that allowed the NSA to collect the telephone data of millions of ordinary Americans.

Ives falls into the Snowden-as-hero camp.

He said in Friday's interview that he thought Snowden was this generation's Mark Felt, the FBI official known as "Deep Throat" who leaked information about the Watergate scandal to The Washington Post. President Richard M. Nixon resigned amid those revelations.

Ives believes that the executive order prohibits Americans from sending bitcoin to Snowden's relief fund, and he's not alone. The business technology website ZDNet published a piece Friday noting that the online community has seized on the loose wording of the presidential order and is riled up because it "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 noted.

While many people are convinced the executive order forbids sending bitcoin to Snowden, that seems likely at present, according to a published account on Motherboard.

Ives said that he made his contribution to the Snowden fund knowing that the penalty for violating the executive order was the potential seizure of his property.

He noted that he's not alone: So far, Ives said, nearly 1,000 donations valued at $46,342.09 in U.S. dollars have poured into Snowden's Bitcoin "wallet" since the executive order was signed on Wednesday.

-- Bryan Denson

503-294-7614; @Bryan_Denson