Snowden Leaks: Act of Treason or Act of Conscience?

What’s
Wrong Today:


“If we desire respect
for the law, we must first make the law respectable” – Justice Louis D. Brandeis

When
Edward Snowden leaked classified information about US intelligence programs
this month, he became either a criminal, a conscientious citizen, or maybe both,
depending on your viewpoint and to some degree, your politics.


He is also
the gift that keeps on giving: The NYT
today reports on a new disclosure by Snowden:


The March 2004 confrontation in the hospital room of
Attorney General John Ashcroft — a dramatic point
in the Bush administration’s internal debate over warrantless surveillance —
was apparently set off by a secret National Security
Agency program that was vacuuming up “metadata” logs of Internet
communications, according to a draft of a 2009 NSA inspector general report obtained by the British
newspaper The Guardian.


The
Times says that the report is the latest document given to the Guardian by Snowden. It
may clear up a long-running mystery over which program White House officials
wanted Mr. Ashcroft and other Justice Department officials to sign off on when
they went to his Washington hospital room.


Snowden’s saga is
very useful for one reason: It’s forced us to think about how (or if) we strike
a balance between privacy and security. It’s a conversation long overdue; as
our lives become ever more digital and electronic, there’s an inevitable and
corresponding loss of privacy. We’ve mutely acquiesced to turning ever greater
quantities of our personal information over to entities who do with it…well,
who knows what?


That the National
Security Agency (NSA) is sitting on a treasure trove of cell phone metadata is
hardly surprising. The question is what they’ll use it for, and if this
represents the beginning of a descent down a slippery slope: today, cell phone
metadata; tomorrow, listening to our phone calls?


From Bloomberg:


Snowden’s
location and motives are interesting to speculate about, but they shouldn’t
distract attention from what really matters in all this:


  • Twelve
    years after the Sept. 11 attacks (and two years after the killing of Osama bin
    Laden) the security apparatus created in response is growing, not shrinking.


  • The
    US government is monitoring its citizens’ communications on a scale that was previously unknown and is
    without precedent.


  • The
    Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) has declined just 11 of the government’s
    more than 33,900 surveillance requests.


  • The
    legal interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which is used by that
    court to rule on government requests for information, is classified. So the laws that enable this
    surveillance are themselves, in effect, secret.


  • The
    group meant to guarantee appropriate privacy safeguards, the Privacy and Civil
    Liberties Oversight Board, was authorized by Congress in 2007, but didn’t get a
    full-time chairman until last month, and has met with President Barack Obama
    exactly once.


Bloomberg
continues:


Even more important, though, is that Snowden’s revelations have thrown a
spotlight on a balance between security and liberty that the government has
been striking largely in secret. Snowden started a debate Obama now says he wants. So do we. That’s the discussion that counts.


We can understand
that we can’t have people disclosing secrets left and right, but what happens
when/if our government oversteps? It’s easy to demonize a whistleblower, but
how else would we know if our government is engaged in activities that run
counter to preserving and protecting democracy?


The
reaction of our mainstream media to the NSA leaks, by disparaging leaker Edward
Snowden, has exposed cable news and other mainstream media outlets as government
mouthpieces that have allowed very few points of view to be aired.


Consider
Andrew Ross Sorkin, a writer the Wrongologist follows: After Snowden made it
out of Hong Kong to Russia, Sorkin expressed his frustration:


“We’ve
screwed this up, to even let him get to Russia.”  By “we,” he meant the US
government. Last time we checked, Sorkin worked for the New York Times, not the government.  


Sorkin declared on CNBC that maybe Glen Greenwald should be arrested:


I told you this in
the green room—I would arrest him [Snowden] and now I’d almost arrest Glenn
Greenwald, who’s the journalist who seems to be out there, almost, he wants to
help him get to Ecuador.


If these
were independent journalists, they would be dissecting the impacts of NSA
surveillance on privacy rights, trying to separate fact from fiction. But, the US
news media are obsessed with questions like: How much damage has Snowden caused? How can he be brought to justice? Is Putin the winner vs. Obama?


Many pundits, after a
few days of vague discussion, think they have heard enough to strike the
balance between liberty and security. Many seem confident that the government
is doing nothing more than relieving Verizon, AT&T and Facebook of their data storage problems.  So what if government agents can, on
occasion, sift through years of phone and Internet records if they need to find
a contact with a suspicious foreigner?


Americans want to accept
assurances that specific conversations are only rarely exhumed and only when
allowed by the FISA court. Such sifting and warrants — in unexplained
combination with more conventional intelligence efforts — are now said by
President Obama and his team, to have prevented several dozen potential
terrorist attacks, with elliptical references to threats against New York
City’s subways and Stock Exchange.


From Max Frankel in
the NYT: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)


Even
if true, these assurances are now being publicized only because this huge data-gathering effort can no longer be denied.
Whatever the motive for Snowden’s leaks, they have stimulated a long-overdue
public airing. Although the government’s extensive data-hauling activity was
partly revealed by diligent reporters and a few disapproving government sources
over the last seven years, the undeniable proof came only from Mr. Snowden’s
documents.


Until Snowden, the
very existence of the enterprise was “top secret” and publicly denied, even in
Congressional hearings. Even now, the project remains secret in every important
respect.


Frankel, who was at
the Times for the Pentagon Papers: (emphasis
by the Wrongologist):


As
those of us who had to defend the 1971 publication of the secret Pentagon
Papers about the Vietnam War have been arguing ever since, there can be no mature discussion of national security policies without
the disclosure — authorized or not — of the government’s hoard of secrets.


How do you balance
security and privacy? When does the collection of data violate the 4th
Amendment? If we don’t have this
conversation now, we’ll soon live in a country we no longer recognize.
If we continue to mutely acquiesce to the idea that government knows best and
should be allowed to do what it thinks needs to be done to keep us safe, we’ll
become proof of Benjamin Franklin’s belief that those who would sacrifice
liberty for security deserve neither.


Franklin was ahead of
his time, because modern-day America is proving his thesis to be spot-on.


Can we trust our
government? Should we trust our government? The answer to those questions have
never been more important.


Errol
Flynn (playing Robin Hood) in The Adventures of Robin Hood when asked if he
blamed Prince John for England’s problems, said:


No,
I blame King Richard or any man that would leave the defense of England to
outlaws like me! 


It’s
sad that Americans have to depend on outlaws like Snowden and other
whistleblowers for the truth.


 

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