Edward Snowden: History Will Be Kind To Him (Guardian UK Editorial)

[Purveyor]

Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago, was smeared and denounced at the time

Editorial
The Guardian, Tuesday 25 June 2013 16.54 ED

No government or bureaucracy loves a whistleblower. Those who leak official information will often be denounced, prosecuted or smeared. The more serious the leak, the fiercer the pursuit and the greater the punishment. Edward Snowden knew as much before contacting this newspaper to reveal some of the things that troubled him about the work, scope and oversight of the US and British intelligence agencies. He is unlikely to be surprised at the clamour to have him locked up for life, or to have seen himself denounced as a traitor.

It was also quite predictable that Snowden would be charged with criminal offences, even if there is something shocking in the use of the 1917 Espionage Act – a measure intended to prevent anti-war speech in the first world war by treating it as sedition. On the available evidence Snowden's almost certain motive for speaking out was far removed from anything resembling espionage, sedition or anti-Americanism. His attempts to stay beyond the clutches of US law may involve travel to countries with a poor record on freedom of expression. But his choice of refuge does not, of itself, make him a traitor. As Buzzfeed's Ben Smith has written ("You don't have to like Edward Snowden&quot : "Snowden's personal story is interesting only because the new details he revealed are so much more interesting. We know substantially more about domestic surveillance than we did, thanks largely to stories and documents printed by The Guardian. They would have been just as revelatory without Snowden's name on them."

America is blessed with a first amendment, which prevents prior restraint and affords a considerable measure of protection to free speech. But the Obama administration has equally shown a dismaying aggression in not only criminalising leaking and whistleblowing, but also recently placing reporters under surveillance – tracking them and pulling their phone and email logs in order to monitor their sources for stories that were patently of public importance.

There is a link to the material Snowden has leaked, and to his stated motive for doing so. In a world of total monitoring – where intelligence agencies aspire to collect and store every single email, text message and phone call – serious investigative reporting becomes difficult, if not impossible. Normal interchanges between sources and journalists cannot take place in such a world. Officials who were once willing to talk are already chilled. In future they would be silenced. Thanks to Edward Snowden we are beginning to glimpse what another NSA whistleblower, Thomas Drake, has described as "a vast, systemic institutionalized, industrial-scale Leviathan surveillance state that has clearly gone far beyond the original mandate to deal with terrorism".

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/25/editorial-edward-snowden-history?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

[msongs]

1. snowden's not the one standing on a pile of the corpses his policies created nt

[warrant46]

4. But certain sitting officials

Oh well, the descendants and successors to Cheney et al----

[usGovOwesUs3Trillion]

2. No doubt. n/t

[quinnox]

3. K&R. And I'll keep saying it - he deserves the presidential medal of freedom

And I don't care what names are thrown around - traitor, satanist, commie, terrorist. The authoritarians and their name-calling are frankly, irrelevant and of no consequence.

[Purveyor]

6. The louder they squeal, the more certain I am that he is doing good work, indeed. eom

[grasswire]

9. ayep

We've seen this gambit time after time. They always over reach and must be increasingly shrill.

[uponit7771]

5. Doubt it, he's more bent on embarrassing US then advancing 4th amendment issues...

...and I don't believe for a split second he didn't know the Russians would thumb their nose at the Obama admin

[marions ghost]

7. Already chilled...

"where intelligence agencies aspire to collect and store every single email, text message and phone call – serious investigative reporting becomes difficult, if not impossible. Normal interchanges between sources and journalists cannot take place in such a world."

And they were never going to tell us they were doing this.... I still can't quite get over the level of duplicity.

[Luminous Animal]

8. K&R

[xiamiam]

10. k and r

Snowden turned 30 years old on the day that he flew from Hong Kong to Moscow. I'm sure he would have preferred to be doing something else. At least its on the table and up to us to demand that the constitution is not violated.. no matter what the authoritarian among us think.

[msanthrope]

11. Bit self-serving of the Guardian..already proclaiming what history is going to say about their

scoop.

[Kahuna]

12. I doubt that. nt