The Reality Versus The Imaginary”: Does It Matter If Edward Snowden Is A Russian Spy?
We already know that Edward Snowden is dependent on the Russian government to keep him out of reach of the American justice system. But accusations have recently been made that Snowden’s relationship with the Kremlin goes much deeper than we previously suspected.
On Sunday, House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) strongly suggested that Edward Snowden stole NSA secrets with help from Russia, though Rogers declined to provide any evidence to back that suggestion.
The following day, The New Republic‘s Sean Wilentz published a harsh profile chronicling the backgrounds of Snowden and his muckraker allies Glenn Greenwald and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, discerning a common thread of “paranoid libertarianism” that has paradoxically intertwined these self-proclaimed defenders of human rights with a brutal Russian autocracy.
And while Wilentz stops short of accusing Snowden of espionage, Business Insider‘s Michael Kelley also explored Snowden’s ties to Russia, eventually asking, “Is the fact that his life is now overseen by a Russian security detail more than an extraordinary coincidence?”
It bears repeating: No one has produced evidence that Snowden was on Russia’s payroll when he stole the NSA’s secrets. But suppose he was — would it matter?
To answer that question, we need to separate two different controversies surrounding the world’s most famous whistleblower.
First, to resolve the debate over whether Snowden deserves some form of clemency, his motivations and actions are integral. If it is found that he passed national security secrets to Russia or China, that would completely outweigh whatever benefits he has provided to Americans in better understanding the scope of NSA surveillance. Since that question is far from resolved, the New York Times editorial board and others are premature in promoting clemency.
Indeed, Slate‘s Fred Kaplan, in his argument against clemency, flagged that Snowden has not leaked “any documents detailing the cyber-operations of any non-allied countries, especially Russia or China,” even though he presumably would have had access to NSA information regarding their operations. He even leaked information about American operations against the Taliban, which, as Wilentz noted, has nothing to do with protecting American civil liberties, but instead helps Snowden and his allies “damage their bugaboo national security behemoth.”
As Wilentz argued, Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange possess an extreme libertarianism, driving them to undermine American foreign policy. The three, wrote Wilentz, “have unleashed a torrent of classified information with the clear intent of showing that the federal government has spun out of control…an imperial power, drunk on its hegemonic ambitions.”
On the flip side, if Snowden could somehow prove that he is an American-as-apple pie idealist who simply wants to share information with his fellow citizens, the argument for clemency gains more weight.
However, to resolve the debate over what forms of surveillance are constitutionally sound and effective at counter-terrorism, Snowden’s motivations are fundamentally irrelevant. One could simultaneously believe that Snowden deserves the electric chair for aiding foreign powers, and that the NSA’s bulk collection of metadata violates the Fourth Amendment. Or, that Snowden acted in good faith, yet what he uncovered merely shows an NSA properly focused on terrorism and operating within the bounds of the Constitution.
Yet the latest revelations about Snowden may help clear a path to having a more rational debate about the NSA. The latest reporting suggests that his motivations are at least ideologically suspect and possibly unpatriotic, which makes it easier to sideline Snowden and simply focus on the NSA itself.
Most Americans, regardless of their views on the NSA, don’t possess the reportedly extreme views of Snowden, and don’t see America’s actions on the global stage as deserving of more scorn than Russia or China.
Much is at stake, both in terms of our liberty and our security, as we discuss whether President Obama’s NSA reforms are either appropriately mild or insufficiently drastic. It is in our interest to premise the discussion on what the NSA is doing — not what is being imagined by political extremists, or just possibly, anti-American spies.
By: Bill Scher, The Week, January 23, 2014
“Bad History And Bad Policy”: The Hidden Consequences Of Snowden’s NSA Revelations
There is more than a little hypocrisy to the outcry that the government, through the National Security Agency (NSA), is systematically destroying Americans’ right to privacy. Edward Snowden’s revelations have been stripped of their social, technological and historical context. Unless you’ve camped in the Alaskan wilderness for two decades, you know — or should — that millions upon millions of Americans have consciously and, probably in most cases, eagerly surrendered much of their privacy by embracing the Internet and social media.
People do not open Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram accounts because they wish to shroud their lives in secrecy. They do not use online dating services or post videos on YouTube because they cherish their anonymity. The Internet is a vehicle for self-promotion, personal advertising and the pursuit of celebrity.
The Pew Research Center’s surveys confirm that these behaviors are now entirely mainstream. In 2013, 85 percent of Americans used the Internet. Of these, almost three-quarters (73 percent) belonged to social media sites (the biggest: Facebook). Almost one-fifth of adult Internet users have posted personal videos, many hoping, says Pew, that “their creations go viral.” Among people “single and looking” for mates, nearly two-fifths (38 percent) used online dating.
If Americans think their privacy is dangerously diminished, there are remedies. They can turn off their PCs, toss their smartphones and smash their tablets. Somehow, this seems unlikely, even though another Pew survey finds that “86 percent of adult Internet users have taken steps . . . to avoid surveillance by other people or organizations.”
To these conscious sacrifices of privacy must be added murkier, collateral losses that are orchestrated by the world’s Googles, Facebooks, service providers and “data brokers,” writes Alice Marwick of Fordham University in the New York Review of Books. They scan users’ digital decisions (sites visited, products and services purchased, habits and hobbies favored) to create databases, often merged with other socio-economic information. These target advertising, improve political appeals — President Obama’s campaign excelled at this — and influence hiring decisions, as Don Peck notes in the Atlantic.
The NSA’s damage to privacy is dwarfed by the impact of market activity. The sensationalism surrounding Snowden’s revelations obscures this. Case in point: The disclosure that U.S. telephone calls are open to NSA monitoring. Suddenly, Big Brother looms. In our mind’s eye, we see the NSA’s computers scouring our every phone call. We’re exposed to constant snooping and the possibility that the government will misuse the information it finds.
The reality is far more limited. The NSA is governed by legal restrictions. It does not examine the full database. It searches individual numbers only after it has determined there’s a “reasonable, articulable suspicion” that a number might be linked to terrorist groups. In 2012, there were 288 of these findings. After one is made, the NSA can retrieve three items about the number: the dates of calls made and received for five years; the other phones’ numbers; and the calls’ length. The NSA is not entitled to listen to conversations, but it can order similar searches on the other numbers involved. Thousands of calls are caught in the dragnet, but the total is puny compared with the untold billions of annual calls.
Whether these searches are effective in fighting terrorism is disputed. The NSA says they’re valuable. A panel of experts appointed by Obama concluded that the monitoring “was not essential to preventing attacks.” But more important for civil liberties and privacy, the panel found that present practices don’t approach past abuses. During the Vietnam War, the panel noted, the CIA investigated 300,000 anti-war critics. The government also sought to “expose, disrupt, and neutralize their efforts to affect public opinion.”
By all means, let’s debate the NSA. Some policies seem suspect, spying on the heads of friendly governments topping the list. It’s also important to recognize that government can coerce and punish in ways that private markets cannot. The potential for abuse is greater. But let’s also keep the debate in perspective.
In a digitized world, spying must be digitized. Then there’s cyberwarfare. Our electronic systems remain vulnerable, as the recent theft of data from millions of credit and debit cards at Target demonstrates. Government and the private sector need to collaborate more closely to protect vital systems. But these “efforts are as good as dead for the foreseeable future,” says Dmitri Alperovitch of CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm. The NSA controversy has “significantly damaged the trust between the private sector and government.” This may be the Snowden affair’s most insidious (and overlooked) consequence.
Vilifying the NSA — letting Snowden dictate the terms of debate — promotes bad history and bad policy. It’s bad history, because the most powerful assaults on privacy have originated in markets. It’s bad policy, because weakening the NSA leaves the United States more exposed to cyberattacks.
By: Robert Samuelson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 5, 2014
“They Elected Me, The Overseers”: No Clemency From Snowden’s Self-Importance
Eh, I suppose I could find myself coming around to what the New York Times editorial suggests the United States should do to Edward Snowden. That is, offer the Russia-residing national security leaker, “a plea bargain or some form of clemency that would allow him to return home, face at least substantially reduced punishment in light of his role as a whistle-blower, and have the hope of a life advocating for greater privacy and far stronger oversight of the runaway intelligence community.” Snowden should be held accountable in some way for stealing government secrets. What I don’t think I could stand is a public life of advocacy.
My views on Snowden are pretty clear. They were mostly negative views that were reinforced when I read his interview with The Post’s Barton Gellman published just before Christmas. No need for me to go into detail about what I thought because my colleague Ruth Marcus did it masterfully in the opening paragraphs of her Tuesday column.
Time has not deflated Edward Snowden’s messianic sense of self-importance. Nor has living in an actual police state given the National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower any greater appreciation of the actual freedoms that Americans enjoy.
Insufferable is the first adjective evoked by Snowden’s recent interview with Barton Gellman in The Post, but it has numerous cousins: smug, self-righteous, egotistical, disingenuous, megalomaniacal, overwrought.
“Let them say what they want,” Snowden said of his critics during the Moscow interview with Gellman. “It’s not about me.” A side-eye-worthy statement as it came near the end of a story that was one long aria of Snowden self-importance.
It’s not about him, but “I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA,” he said.
It’s not about him, but “That whole question — who elected you? — inverts the model,” he said. “They elected me. The overseers.”
And it’s not about him, but he said, “somebody has to be the first” since no one else felt as compelled as he to steal government secrets and violate an oath of secrecy to shed light on the activities of the National Security Agency.
With all the political enemies arrayed on Capitol Hill against President Obama, why didn’t Snowden take his ample concerns to Republican lawmakers? Lord knows, they are always casting about (unsuccessfully) for the latest “-gate” they believe will bring down the Obama administration.
Despite my dim view of the man and his actions, there is no denying that what Snowden revealed demands attention. That’s why one thing he told Gellman had me nodding my head.
“I don’t care whether you’re the pope or Osama bin Laden,” he said. “As long as there’s an individualized, articulable, probable cause for targeting these people as legitimate foreign intelligence, that’s fine. I don’t think it’s imposing a ridiculous burden by asking for probable cause. Because, you have to understand, when you have access to the tools the NSA does, probable cause falls out of trees.”
On Dec. 18, the president’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies issued its report on the government’s surveillance activities and offered recommendations on how to limit its vast scope and capabilities. At his year-end press conference two days later, Obama said, he would make a “pretty definitive statement” on it all upon his return from vacation this month.
No doubt, there is nothing the president could propose that would go far enough for most folks in curbing the excesses of the NSA. But, to borrow a phrase from Snowden, “somebody has to be the first” to try.
By: Jonathan Capehart, PostPartisan, The Washington Post, January 2, 2013
“No Clemency For Snowden”: His Behavior Is More About Promoting Himself Than Promoting Privacy
The word “whistle-blower” conjures up a certain kind of individual and circumstance. One imagines a workaday, dedicated employee who comes to realize that there is corruption or grave misconduct, dangerous to the public good, happening at his or her workplace. The employee may or may not go to superiors at the company or agency (depending on fears of losing one’s job). If that is not an option, the next move is a prosecutor (in case of illegal activity), oversight agencies and sympathetic members of Congress. If none of that works – and it’s nearly unfathomable that no one at any of those institutions would take an interest – the whistle-blower can go to the press.
This is not what happened with Edward Snowden. Snowden took an oath, when he joined the national security community, to keep national secrets secret. There is a legitimate argument to be had over whether too much is classified. But that is an argument someone with national security clearance can have internally. If you take the pledge, you take the pledge. Snowden broke it when he collected massive amounts of classified information and released it to the media.
Breaking the law would be more forgivable if it was both targeted and a last resort. Neither of those things is true in Snowden’s case. He told the South China Morning Post that he got a job with government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton for the purpose of collecting information on federal surveillance. This is like saying you took a job as a construction contractor so you could rob people’s homes.
Nor did Snowden make an effort to go to Congress with his concerns – an outlet where there are certainly members who would bring Snowden’s concerns to light in a responsible way. But that avenue would have made the issue about, well, the issue, and not about Snowden – which seems to be Snowden’s main concern.
Had Snowden gone into the national security business, become alarmed and disillusioned at what he saw as unwarranted invasion of Americans’ privacy, and then made efforts to expose that troubling practice in a targeted and responsible way, he would be a more sympathetic character. But what Snowden did – amass huge amounts of information, then leave the country as he watched U.S. officials squirm over how much Snowden knew and what he would tell – is proof that his behavior was more about promoting himself than promoting privacy. And piously warning New Year’s babies about the loss of privacy is pretty rich, considering that Snowden made his name by stealing secrets and making them public.
Blowing town doesn’t add to Snowden’s credibility. A real whistle-blower or practitioner of civil disobedience waits around and takes the fallout. They don’t hightail it out of the country and shop around for exile – most laughably, in places where civil liberties are not respected.
The New York Times editorial board has called on President Obama to engage in clemency talks with Snowden. That would be a reasonable suggestion if Snowden had made a very targeted release of information after first trying other avenues. It would be reasonable if Snowden had had the courage to stay in the country he purports to be protecting from tyranny and take the heat from his illegal behavior. But he didn’t. Clemency would just make national security oaths and laws a joke.
It’s a good thing that Americans know about the vast information-collecting the U.S. government has been doing on its own citizens (though there’s been something of an over-reaction by people who think the government is reading through everyone’s emails and listening to everyone’s calls). Congress – which, notably, gave intelligence-gathering authorities the right to do such data-mining in the hysteria after 9/11 – ought to re-examine what we allow our own government to do in the name of public security. But that’s not what Snowden’s behavior was about. It was all about Edward Snowden.
By: Susan Milligan, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, January 2, 2014
“No Hero’s Welcome”: Edward Snowden Can’t Expect To Be Welcomed Back From Russia
Edward Snowden wants the U.S. government to stop treating him like a defector. Then why did he defect?
Snowden, of course, is the former government contractor who released an enormous trove of classified information to news organizations detailing the data- and intelligence-gathering activities of U.S. security agencies. The disclosures were disturbing, and revealed the extent of spying on both U.S. citizens and allies.
Some of it should not be a surprise, considering the expansion of authority a spooked Congress gave to the intelligence community after 9/11. The upside of the disclosures is that it has caused a national discussion on what authority our government should have in monitoring its own citizens.
But Snowden still broke the law, and very deliberately so. He also did not carefully expose just one troubling element of the data-mining activities he knew of, nor did he first try to go to a member of Congress with his concerns. He dumped the classified information wholesale, and then got on a plane for Hong Kong – as sure a sign as any that he knew he had violated the law and would face serious consequences for it.
Snowden is now residing in exile in Russia, and apparently is already getting antsy. Through a German lawyer, Snowden released a letter appealing to the U.S. government to stop treating him like a traitor for what he called his “moral duty to act.” Said the letter:
My government continues to treat dissent as defection, and seeks to criminalize political speech with felony charges that provide no defense. Speaking the truth is not a crime. I am confident that with the support of the international community, the government of the United States will abandon this harmful behavior.
The problem for Snowden is that speaking the truth indeed can be a crime, especially when you sign a document pledging to keep national security secrets and then very deliberately violate that pledge. And Snowden obviously knew what he had done was wrong or at least, if he didn’t think it was morally wrong, illegal. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have high-tailed it to Hong Kong and then to Moscow to escape punishment.
People have gone to prison, sometimes for many years, in defiance of a law or policy they thought was unjust. Snowden has already managed to avoid that fate. It’s asking too much to expect the government whose secrets he illegally revealed to welcome him back as a hero.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, November 4, 2013
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