From Daniel Ellsberg to Edward Snowden | The New Yorker

Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning: two men who tried to counter war through leaks. For Ellsberg, it was Vietnam. For Manning, it was primarily Iraq. Now there appears to be a third man in this group, Edward Snowden, for whom it is the war on terror. Each was, in his time, denounced by the right and hailed by the left. Ellsberg and Manning were declared psychologically unstable; Snowden likely will be soon, too. They have been called heroes, patriots, and traitors. Ellsberg and Manning acted out of what both described as a kind of idealismand Snowden has said something similar. Ellsberg avoided prison. Manning will learn his sentence soon. Snowden is in Hong Kong waiting for whatever comes next.

Leaks, leak investigations, and war go together. War abroad has a way of turning into war at homeas the government seeks to ferret out who is giving secrets to whom in the press. War also alienates young men and women in government. People come to work for candidates who promise peace. In power, the same leaders start wars, or at least join them. This was as true of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon as it has been for Bush and Obama.

All three men served in the military and became disillusioned. Ellsberg was a Marine turned civil servant who ended up working for a government contractor, RAND, with access to lots of documents. Manning was an Army sergeant. Snowden enlisted in the Army, with the hope, he says, of joining the Special Forces. Eventually, like Ellsberg, he ended up at a contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton in Snowdens case, that helps store our nations secrets.

For Ellsberg, the transition into disillusionment, and the decision to leak, took years: he spent time in Vietnam and gradually turned against the conflict. He began to think about how he could stop it. And then, one day, he heard a speech from a young college student who proclaimed that prison was his only hope to help stop the war. I left the auditorium and found a deserted mens room. I sat on the floor and cried for over an hour, just sobbing. And I was thinking, my country has come to this. That the best thing a young man can do is go to prison. Soon, he went to RANDs safe and then to the modern device of his day, the Xerox machine.

For Manning, the path was similar but quicker. In the log of a chat with the hacker Adrian Lamo, Manning explains his growing frustration about his country. At one moment, he explains how he felt after learning that fifteen detainees taken by the Iraqi Federal Police were simply critics of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Manning writes:

i immediately took that information and *ran* to the officer to explain what was going on he didnt want to hear any of it he told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding *MORE* detainees everything started slipping after that i saw things differently i had always questioned the things worked, and investigated to find the truth but that was a point where i was a *part* of something i was actively involved in something that i was completely against

We dont know nearly as much about Snowdenat least not yet. But he, too, seems to have gone through a period of growing disenchantment. Here he is, talking with the Guardian: Over time that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up and you feel compelled to talk about. And the more you talk about the more youre ignored. The more youre told its not a problem until eventually you realize that these things need to be determined by the public and not by somebody who was simply hired by the government.

There are important differences between the three men. Ellsberg was forty when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, quite a bit older than Manning, who was twenty-two at the time of his leak, and Snowden, who is twenty-nine. Ellsberg knew exactly what he was doing, and he moved more slowly. There was a year and a half between the time he copied the documents and when he sent them to the press. Manning sent his immediately. Snowden leaked PowerPoint slides from a presentation in April. Ellsberg was a veteran who had spent nearly a decade thinking about his war. Manning and Snowden were more impulsive: they took files and dumped them. This morning, Ellsberg published a piece praising Snowden.

Manning and Snowden, meanwhile, are both a pair and opposites. Mannings quest was to show that the government couldnt keep secrets from the people. Snowden seems more concerned about letting the people keep secrets from the government. Manning was battling opacity; Snowden, a panopticon. Manning has said that he was dissatisfied with his lifehe was dealing with issues of gender identity and lost love. Snowden seems to have worried about being too content: he was, after all, a young man with a G.E.D. earning two hundred thousands dollars a year in Hawaii.

Some of what Snowden says sounds too absurd to be true. His claim that he, personally, could get access to the private data of the President of the United States seems somewhere between bravura and baloney. Theres also the peculiar question about his decision to flee to Hong Kong, which is, after all, part of the most heavily monitored country on earth.

Theres another question we dont know the answer to: Did recent reports on the Obama Administrations crackdown on leaks have anything to do with Snowdens decision to come forward now? Did the stories about the Department of Justices investigation into the action of reporters at Fox and the Associated Press have any effect on his sense of the mounting awareness of wrongdoing? The general surveillance of civilians is different from the surveillance of journalists and government officialsbut the issues and the tools used are related.

And, here, its instructive again to go back forty years. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were obsessed by leaks: in 1969, the first year of the Administration, they began tapping the phones of reporters and government officials, hoping to determine who was leaking information about bombings in Cambodia. Then, in June of 1971, Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and Washington Post; two months later, Nixon assembled his White House plumbers, whose first task was to break into the office of Ellsbergs psychiatrist. It was John Ehrlichman, a Nixon aide, who later called it The seminal Watergate episode. The pattern went like this: war, leaks, war on leakers, more leaks, more war on leakers.

Barack Obama and Richard Nixon are very different people, and they operate at very different moments in history. There is a lesson to be learned, though. Information gives you power, and surveillance gets you information. But theres a risk in going too farand theres a danger of disillusionment and backlash, as more and more people think the country you lead isnt living up to its ideals.

Above: Photograph of Daniel Ellsberg in the nineteen-seventies. Hulton Archive/Getty.

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From Daniel Ellsberg to Edward Snowden | The New Yorker