By Peter Swire

Published: January 30, 2014

Is Edward Snowden a whistle-blower or a traitor? There is a vast cultural divide between Silicon Valley and Washington on this issue, and the reasons reveal much about the broader debates about what to do in the wake of his leaks.

In terms of my own perspective, I have written about privacy and the Internet for two decades, working closely with both civil liberties groups and Internet companies. On the government side, I first worked with intelligence agencies in the late 1990s when I chaired White House task forces on encryption and Internet wiretap laws.

As a member of President Barack Obamas Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, I spoke with numerous people in the intelligence community. Not one said that Snowden was a whistle-blower. The level of anger was palpable.

Part of the anger arises from the daily routine of working with classified materials. Merely carrying a cellphone into a secure facility by mistake amounts to a security violation. Thousands of security officers enforce the rules, and people can and do get fired when they are not scrupulous with classified materials.

Intelligence officers see Snowden as a serial destroyer of classified secrets. He plotted for months to violate the law on a massive scale. He has tipped off foreign adversaries about numerous programs that will require countless hours of work to revise; many will not regain their previous effectiveness.

Even though Snowden rejected all the existing options for a whistle-blower including congressional committees or avenues within the National Security Agency the view from Silicon Valley and privacy groups is much different. Last fall, I asked the leader of a Silicon Valley company about the whistle-blower-vs.-traitor debate. He said that more than 90 percent of his employees would call Snowden a whistle-blower.

Part of that reaction is based on the view that this robust national debate about NSA programs would not be happening had Snowden not leaked what he did.

The Silicon Valley concern about the NSA arises to some extent from a philosophy of anti-secrecy libertarianism. A well-known slogan there is that information wants to be free.

See the article here:
Why Silicon Valley sticks up for Snowden

WASHINGTON Insiders like Edward Snowden who leak secrets about sensitive U.S. intelligence programs pose a potentially greater danger to national security than terrorists, Americas spy chiefs warned Wednesday in their annual report to Congress on global security risks.

For the first time, the risk of unauthorized disclosures of classified material and state-sponsored theft of data was listed as the second-greatest potential threat to America in a review of global perils prepared by the U.S. intelligence community. The risk followed cyberattacks on crucial infrastructure but was listed ahead of international terrorism.

U.S. officials previously have said it will cost billions of dollars to repair or revamp communications surveillance systems in the wake of the disclosures by Snowden, a former contract employee at a National Security Agency listening post in Hawaii who began leaking classified documents to the media in June and who later fled to Russia.

Appearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said the leaks represent the most damaging theft of intelligence information in our history. He urged Snowden to return the material, saying he made the nation less safe and its people less secure.

Weve lost critical foreign intelligence collection sources, including some shared with us by valued partners, Clapper said. Terrorists and other adversaries of this country are going to school on U.S. intelligence sources, methods and tradecraft, and the insights that they are gaining are making our job much, much harder.

Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who directs the Defense Intelligence Agency, said the leaks had endangered the lives of intelligence operatives and troops. Matt Olsen, heads of the National Counterterrorism Center, said they had made it tougher to track al-Qaida and its affiliates.

What weve seen in the last six to eight months is an awareness by these groups of our ability to monitor communications and specific instances where theyve changed the ways in which they communicate to avoid being surveilled, Olsen said.

Investigators believe Snowden copied 1.7 million documents from NSA servers, the largest breach of classified material in U.S. history, although only a fraction have been disclosed so far. Last summer, a military judge sentenced Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning, who was born Bradley Manning, to 35 years in prison for sending 750,000 classified diplomatic cables, military field reports and other material to WikiLeaks.

Both Snowden and Manning have been condemned by critics as traitors and hailed by supporters as whistle-blowers who exposed government wrongdoing.

Only critics spoke at the hearing. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said the classified documents Snowden downloaded, if printed out, would form a stack more than three miles high.

More here:
Report puts Snowden-like leaks as No. 2 threat to US security