Daniel Ellsberg: Snowden Kept His Oath Better Than Anyone in the NSA
That sort of civic courage should inspire other Americans to follow suit, he said.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/07/daniel-ellsberg-snowden-honored-his-oath-better-than-anyone-in-the-nsa/375031/
Daniel Ellsberg, the celebrated leaker of the Pentagon Papers, said in a conversation last weekend with National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden that every human sometimes bites their tongue when they witness something that they know to be wrong—and blood often flows as a result. Due in part to lies during the Vietnam War, he said, millions of people were needlessly killed. At home, tobacco executives successfully hid the cancerous nature of their products. More recently, as GM customers died in their cars, the company kept mum about a defect.
The standard he'd like to see set instead? "Snowden was the one person in the fucking NSA who did what he absolutely should have done," he said. "How many people should've done what you did! We all took the same oath to protect and defend the Constitution. There are people who violate it all the time. There are people who are against it, like Cheney and some others. But when it comes to upholding that oath, no one in the U.S. military services, including the commander in chief, has fulfilled her oath to defend and support the Constitution like Chelsea Manning. And no one in the executive branch, or in any branch, has fulfilled the oath to uphold and protect the Constitution as well as you, so thank you."
Snowden and Manning should inspire other Americans to speak out upon seeing what they know to be wrong, Ellsberg argued, even when doing so entails personal sacrifice. The remarks came at the end of a monologue during Hope X, a hacker conference in New York City. The whole part on "civic courage" is worth a read.
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