Bush and Obama Spurred Ed Snowden to Spill U.S. Secrets

The whistleblower started out as an idealistic booster of the national-security state. Illegal and immoral behavior he witnessed on the inside turned him into an outsider.

Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

Before Edward Snowden joined Daniel Ellsberg and Chelsea Manning in the annals of American whistleblowers, he was a young man who witnessed the attacks of September 11, 2001, and enthusiastically volunteered to join the national-security state. Back then, he believed in the wisdom of the War in Iraq, saw the National Security Agency as a force for good, and hoped to serve within the system. Since his first interview with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, we've known that he gradually lost faith in the federal government, believed it to be engaged in illegal, immoral acts, and decided to gather and leak some of its secrets.

One of the most comprehensive narratives of what specifically prompted his transition from insider to conscientious objector appears in the recently published interview he granted to James Bamford, author of several books on the NSA. Whether one believes Snowden's leaks to be salutary or deeply regrettable, it's useful to understand and grapple with what prompted him to act as he did, especially as the Obama administration works to make future leaks less likely. One method for preventing leaks that hasn't been discussed: Run a federal government that carries out fewer morally and legally objectionable actions in secret.

According to the interview, Snowden was disillusioned and influenced by what he saw during his time at the CIA and the NSA, as many Americans would've been:

Elsewhere, Snowden has noted his disillusionment at the treatment of previous NSA whistleblowers, as well as his amazement that James Clapper and Keith Alexander were allowed to lie or mislead in congressional testimony without consequences.

Snowden's account raises a question for Americans who want classified information kept secret. Would they rather have a national-security state run by employees who are inclined to speak out publicly when they witness years of immoral or illegal behavior? Or would they prefer them to keep quiet to avoid revealing sensitive information to adversaries? I submit that a system that conducts mass surveillance on Americans, tortures abroad, destroys the lives of innocents in intramural competitions to accrue CIA assets, ponders using pornography to discredit non-terrorists, and passes the private information of Americans to foreign governments is particularly dangerous if staffed entirely by people who are not sufficiently troubled by all that to let the public know what is going on.

George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and the most prominent members of their teams feel differently, of course, which helps explain why Snowden became a whistleblower in the first place. The national-security state is its own worst enemy, doing more to undermine its own legitimacy than its critics ever could.

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Bush and Obama Spurred Ed Snowden to Spill U.S. Secrets