Edward Snowden has succeeded in igniting a debate about the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), but he’s also turned off a lot of otherwise sympathetic participants in that debate. And so it remains a toss-up as to whether there can be any real change for the better, and this great big question mark is a direct result of how Snowden and, to a lesser degree, his media flack, The Guardian‘s Glenn Greenwald, have comported themselves from Day One.
In this regard, yes, the NSA Debate and the Snowden Drama are inseparable, but only because his naivete, his glaring contradictions and erratic grandstanding have made it that way. This story really didn’t need a sacrificial hero because the functioning of the government’s foreign intelligence apparatus is compelling enough on its own to spark a serious conversation about whether it’s out of control or whether it should be preserved and expanded.
Instead, Snowden’s actions continue to raise questions about his veracity and motives, practically on a day-to-day basis, leaving us wondering whether his interpretations of what he had observed within the intelligence community are objective and truthful, and therefore whether we’re conducting this debate using honest, rational terms. Likewise, we’re also justified in determining whether Snowden is a crusader for the greater good of the United States, or whether his goal is to burn down the village in order to save it — whether he’s just an angry, megalomaniacal nihilist-hacker who wants to punish America for its sins.
If the more dubious options are indeed the case, we need to be extraordinarily cautious about feeding this juggernaut, considering where it could lead us, because it’s one thing to debate and reform the system (which I fully support), but it’s another thing entirely to light a match and perform an action movie slow-mo walk away from the mega-explosion. Specifically, the goal should be to improve government, not to indiscriminately undermine the broader functioning of the United States. There are have been so many indications that Snowden is doing the latter, given his leaks about the G20, the hacking operations in China and so forth. What’s next?
We recently learned that in conjunction with seeking asylum in Russia, a move that, itself, is a serious head-scratcher, Snowden has also retained a Russian lawyer: a man named Anatoly Kucherena… [READ MORE]