Hero, Patsy, Rube or Egomaniac — Why It Ultimately Doesn’t Matter What Edward Snowden Is
Who is Edward Snowden? Is he a traitor? A spy? A patriot doing his duty to expose the overreach of the modern American intelligence community? In all honesty, I’m not too sure myself. I find myself supporting his leaking efforts completely, but I can’t get behind how he’s behaved since he made his first revelations a couple weeks ago. What Snowden did in confirming to the world what we’d sort of all assumed and even joked about being the case — that the NSA has very broad and sweeping powers of surveillance — was to to force our government into having a dialog with the American people over just how much of our liberties we are willing to sacrifice in the name of security. For that, Mr. Snowden deserves a hero’s welcome back to the States. That said, he’s since made some decisions that range from baffling to outright taunting of the United States, all the while not submitting to the very same due process he proclaimed to be defending by leaking the information he did.
First, there’s the fact that he ran at all. Daniel Ellsberg, the man who released The Pentagon Papers, didn’t run. He knew he was going to face trial. The administration he was exposing was the Nixon Administration, not exactly a group of men to be trifled with in the slightest. Regardless though, Ellsberg stood tall, subjecting himself to the very system he was trying to protect, knowing full-well he broke the laws to do what he most certainly had to to do. That’s the thing, I’m not in any way suggesting that Snowden’s actions in leaking the details of the program were “wrong,” but they were illegal under current law, and in this country, the only way you can change laws is through challenging them legally. Instead of submitting to that process though, Snowden took the chance to flee the country, understandably so since the United States doesn’t like national security leaks. It’s whose arms he ran into that raise eyebrows though. Running to China (by way of Hong Kong,; let’s be real here) and Russia, who both have just as many if not far more human rights violations — fucking CHECHNYA anyone? — as the U.S. has doesn’t exactly make him look smart or very intellectually honest.
Fleeing to countries like Russia and Chinese-influenced Hong Kong makes him look less like a defender of the American way, and more like someone with his own political ax to grind. His motivations start coming into question, and at that point you have to start separating the leaker from the leak. The leak itself will go down as one of the most important in our history, especially if it eventually ends up forcing the U.S. to drastically stand down from it’s post-9/11 surveillance tactics. Snowden, though, is now being shielded by Russian President Vladimir Putin himself. It’s kind of gross that Snowden would put Putin in a position to goad and chide the U.S., especially considering how far completely uninterested in protecting the civil rights and liberties of his own people Putin has been. Maybe Edward Snowden should ask the women of Pussy Riot how much their government cherishes their ability to think and speak for themselves.
Then there’s the fact that Snowden admitted to taking the NSA position specifically to expose the U.S. government, and the Obama Administration specifically. Again he made a move that looks far more politically charged than someone blowing the whistle for the good of all of humanity. In fact, the bottom line here is that proponents of privacy, civil liberties and due process would do well to distance themselves from Snowden as quickly as possible. As each day goes by, and as he cozies up with countries that are just as shady, if not more so than the U.S., he pushes himself further into the spotlight as a hypocrite. The truth is he knows he has to hang out in countries that are frosty with America right now, because any other country that believes in the rule of law would extradite him post-haste.
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