The Wrongologist

Time Magazine announced that it will name its Person of the Year (POY) tomorrow. It
offered 10 finalists who had the most influence on the news in 2013.
Their list includes: Bashar Assad, Jeff Bezos, Ted Cruz, Miley Cyrus, Pope
Francis, Barack Obama, Hassan Rouhani, Kathleen Sebelius, Edward Snowden, and Edith
Windsor, a gay rights activist.

Of course,
Time has also named Hitler and Stalin
(twice) as POY in the distant past, while, in 2002, it named
Whistleblowers,
including Coleen Rowley, an FBI agent who revealed mishandling of information about
the 9/11 attacks by the FBI.

The Wrongologist salutes another
whistleblower, Edward Snowden as Person of the Year. Snowden leaked an
estimated 200,000 files that exposed the extensive and intrusive phone and Internet
surveillance and intelligence gathering by the US, principally by the National
Security Agency (NSA). In his nomination, the Wrongologist joins The Guardian, who yesterday named Snowden their POY for
2013. They had named Chelsea Manning as POY in 2012, making it a 2-year run for
whistleblowers by The Guardian. From
their article:

We should
note that the Snowden affair was also a bonanza for The Guardian, since Snowden gave the data that he copied from US
government computers to their reporter, Glenn Greenwald. Last week, Alan
Rusbridger, the Guardian’s
editor, said that his paper has published only 1% of the
files that it received from Snowden.

By Snowden
downloading thousands of files from the NSA’s computers and handing them over
to journalists, we have seen a torrent of news stories about the NSA’s
surveillance activities. The Guardian and the WaPo published a
series of articles beginning last May, and the flow of documents continues.
Just last week, we learned that the agency is tracking hundreds of
millions of cell phones, gathering nearly five billion records a day. (See an
interactive timeline of the Snowden revelations here.)

Snowden has
opened the eyes of people around the world to how easy it is for governments to
monitor digital communications, and how complicit major technology companies
have been in these surveillance programs.

He has sparked a debate about how to
preserve privacy in the information age—and whether such a thing is even
possible. If Snowden hadn’t come forward, the steady encroachment of the
surveillance state would have continued, and most people might never have known
about the effort. Since Snowden shined a light on Big Brother and his enablers,
some of them may be forced to be more circumspect in their actions. On Monday, the
CEOs of AOL, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, and
Yahoo—published an
open letter
in which they said:

OK, but without
Snowden’s intervention, would the likes of Google’s Larry Page and Facebook’s Mark
Zuckerberg have signed a letter asking that the government rein in its stealth
data gathering? Previously, these companies had been helping the NSA, but since
Snowden blew the lid off the whole enterprise, they now have decided to try to do
something about it.

It was the same story for the Obama
Administration,
which before Snowden’s disclosures, had been issuing false statements about
what the NSA wasn’t doing. James Clapper, Obama’s Director of National
Intelligence (DNI), said that it wasn’t
true that
the NSA collected data on hundreds of millions of Americans, while General
Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA, denied at least fourteen
times
that the Agency intercepted any American’s e-mails, texts, and other electronic
communications. Both claims were false.

Disclosing
this secret information transformed Snowden’s life. He now lives in Moscow,
unable to leave Russia for fear of arrest. Without political asylum, he faces extradition
to the US and a prosecution that threatens a long jail sentence, if Chelsea Manning’s
term of 35 years is any yardstick. Snowden seems to have anticipated this. In an
interview
with Greenwald, he said: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

He has
forsaken his future and his liberty for the sake of democratic values,
transparency, and freedom.

The
official argument against Snowden is that his disclosures actually make it more
likely that the next terrorist attack succeeds. Responsible members of our
intelligence establishment have testified that terrorists are more able to
evade detection because they have learned, via Snowden, some of our “sources
and methods”. Most of their testimony is vague. And few specific
instances are cited in which Snowden’s information was harmful.

And
it all begs the central question of whether heroic efforts to minimize the risk of terrorist attack at home,
which comes with the steady erosion of individual rights, is worth the cost to
the American people. 

Our
government, probably with good intentions, has directed an unprecedented
expansion of the surveillance state, bending America’s laws and violating some
of our most deeply held values. Even after all of Snowden’s revelations, there is no assurance that anything
meaningful will be done by the Obama Administration to protect the zone
of privacy in which all (or most) of us believe we have the right to live. Here
is a brief reminder of the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution.
Please reread it and tell us who deserves to be in prison:

That
most Americans sit silently by and allow this to continue at the cost of their personal
liberty and ultimately, of that of their children as well, is a disgrace.

Naming
Snowden as POY won’t, by itself, change what happens in Washington and other
capitals. Particularly if it is only the Wrongologist and The Guardian that give him the honor.

Being
named Time’s POY would send a
message that the main stream American media recognize the contribution he has
made, and the importance of the issues he has raised.