At a public event last week, Edward Snowden argued that the NSA has developed a culture of impunity, that its people are not villains, but they think they can do anything because it is for a just cause. John DeLong, an NSA Director, responded that the idea that NSA activities were unauthorized is wrong, its wrong in a magnificent way.

The two came as close as possible to a live debate at the Privacy in a Networked World symposium at Harvard University Institute for Applied Computational Science where Snowden had a wide-ranging discussion via a video link with security expert Bruce Schneier. John DeLong (Harvard Law, former Director of Compliance at the NSA, current Director of the NSAs Commercial Solutions Center), immediately followed with his talk about privacy, insisting he did not want to turn it into a point-by-point, Oxford-style debate.

Indeed, the specific details about this surveillance program or that particular law are far less important than the answer to a single question: In defending your country, do you do the right thing or do you do things right?Do you do whats morally right or do you just follow the rules (or make sure it looks like you follow the rules)?

I think Snowden won the debate hands-down because I much prefer his view of the good people of the NSA. Snowden sees them as thinking humans, aware of the values of the country they are trying to defend, and capable of making difficult decisions and weighing all the ramifications of their actions. They went wrong because they got carried away by their mission. DeLong, in contrast, views NSA employees (himself included) as no different from the machines they work with, capable only of following unquestionably rules that are handed down to them by others, rules that can be (and should be) codified into machine language. They havent done anything wrong, because they have never broken the law.

As you can see in thisvideo, most of the Snowden-Schneier discussion revolved around the familiar themes weve seen since the 2013 revelations: The solution to governments intruding into our lives is technology or the encryption of all communications; mass surveillance has exploded because its cheap and easy but it has never stopped a terrorist attack; the technical advantage the NSA used to have over the bad guys has been all but eliminated; the NSA has shifted its focus and a much larger proportion its effort is in offence, not defense.

But about 35 minutes into the conversation, Schneier brought up what I think is the crux of the matter by pointing out the distinction between Are we following the rules? and Are these the right rules? He suggested that the way you get this greater oversight is these discussions of what makes sense, what is moral in our society, what is proper.

Unfortunately, Snowdenin this casedidnt take the bait and responded by pointing out the financial cost of the NSAs actions in terms of the damage to the business of American high-tech corporations. Showing the photo of the NSA tapping into a Cisco router, he said: this has a real cost, not just legally, not just morally, not just ethically, but financially.

In his Wired interview with James Bamford, however, Snowden was quite eloquent about the moral and ethical costs (referencing Arendts Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil) and how a culture of impunity has developed at the NSA and other parts of our government:

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Edward Snowden Wins 'Debate' With NSA Lawyer