On June 9th 2013 Edward Snowden revealed himself to be the man responsible for leaking classified information from the National Security Agency to the news media. The rest of the story should be pretty familiar to everybody by now (although this clip from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver suggests otherwise).
If you are one of the unfamiliar, the website Mashable did an excellent write-up of some of the programs Snowden exposed titled, “The 10 Biggest Revelations From Edward Snowden’s Leak.”
Many of the activities Snowden exposed however had been public knowledge for years, or should have been. The cover story of the April 2012 issue of Wired magazine, for example was a revealing article by James Bamford titled, “Inside the Matrix.” It featured detailed descriptions of a massive surveillance center being built in the Utah desert to store “yottabytes” of data. (A yottabyte is about 500 quintillion full pages of text — that’s a 5 followed by 20 zeros.)
The article also featured the revelations of another whistleblower, William Binney, a senior NSA crypto-mathematician who warned that America was very close to becoming a “turnkey totalitarian state.”
Prior to this, numerous news stories had broken revealing the fact that the American government was involved in massive surveillance programs against its own people. Way back in January of 2006 Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! interviewed Russel Tice, a NSA whistleblower who was seeking to testify in front of Congress about what he knew of legally questionable practices at the NSA. The NSA ultimately denied him permission to testify on the grounds that members of Congress did not have high enough security clearance to hear what he wanted to tell them. (Orwellian and Kafkaesque, well played, NSA.) This interview is worth a watch, even if only to jog your memory about how much we really knew (or should have known) before Snowden’s leak. (You can also search Democracy Now!’s archives for related stories.)
Amy Goodman interviews Russell Tice on Democracy Now! January 3, 2006.
For me, one of the most interesting things about the whole Snowden affair was seeing the reactions of the people around me to the news. Even though so much had been exposed prior to Snowden most everyone I knew was still in denial that the United States of America would really behave in such a manner. Whenever I spoke with friends, co-workers or family about how the government is gathering our phone records, or snooping on our emails and texts, I was met with a certain disbelief. I felt I was coming across as some type of conspiracy theorist. It seemed people either didn’t really believe it, or didn’t believe it could really be as described.
Snowden changed that.
The reaction of those around me was instant and near unanimous — Snowden was a traitor who should be arrested and brought to justice, probably even killed. How dare he betray his country!
This was amazing to me. The people who, just days before, were denying that such programs even existed, ( this is America — we’re not like that ), were now perfectly fine with them ( I don’t care if the government is spying on me — I don’t have anything to hide ). They acted as though they were aware of the spying all along ( and that they were fine with it ) and Snowden was a traitor for betraying his employer, and his nation.
This tendency was so pronounced and so prevalent that it says something about our society. Where did they get these thoughts? Why did they internalize them and adopt them as their own? This, I believe, is a striking example of the mental processes of individuals who are alienated. They adopt the “proper” opinion out of a need to fit in. Fromm said such people are, “full of opinions, but lack all conviction.” I sometimes wonder if Edward Snowden’s greatest miscalculation was trusting such people to have his back.
I obviously cannot speak for Snowden or presume to know his mind, but if I were faced with the burden of choosing whether to go public with evidence of wrongdoing or continue to be silently complicit in it I might think that by going public the American people would understand why I did what I did and rally in my defense. This is not without precedent after all. Daniel Ellsberg, the celebrated leaker of the Pentagon Papers, is now widely regarded as a hero, as are many others who have had the courage to stand up for of their convictions.
But he did commit a crime, you say, and must be willing to accept his punishment. Perhaps, but consider this. Snowden was charged with two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917. These are his most serious charges. About 90 minutes into Citizenfour there is a scene in which an international team of attorneys is meeting to discuss Snowden’s case. Ben Wizner, a lawyer from the ACLU representing Snowden, explains the Espionage Act to those in attendance:
The Espionage Act does not distinguish between leaks to the press in the public interest and selling secrets to foreign enemies for personal profit. So, under the Espionage Act, it’s not a defense if the information that was disclosed should not have been withheld in the first place, that it was improperly classified. It’s not a defense if the dissemination was in the public interest, that it led to reforms, even if a court determines that the programs that were revealed were illegal or unconstitutional, that’s still not a defense under the Espionage Act. The government doesn’t have to defend the classification, it doesn’t have to demonstrate harm from the release — all that is irrelevant. So when we say that the trial wouldn’t be fair, we’re not talking about what human rights lawyers think of as fair trial practices. We’re saying that the law, the statute itself, eliminates any kind of defense that Snowden would be able to make.
So we have this law written in such a way that it is impossible to defend oneself against it. It says something about the society we live in that, when wrongdoing is exposed, we agree to crucify the whistleblowers and protect those who abuse their positions of power and privilege.
Which is the real threat to liberty and democracy? The whistleblowers who expose wrongdoing, those in government agencies who abuse their positions of power, or the public who can’t be bothered to care?
The movie Citizenfour is dedicated to “those who make great sacrifices to expose injustice.” To learn more about this Oscar-winning documentary please visit their website:
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