Volokh Conspiracy: Edward Snowden’s impact

A lot of readers have seen John Olivers amusing interview of Edward Snowden. If you havent seen it yet, its worth a watch. One of Olivers themes is that Snowden actually hasnt had a major impact on American politics. Surveillance law is too complicated, Oliver suggests, and Snowden doesnt have a simple message. But I think there are other reasons why Snowden hasnt had a big impact on American public opinion and also reasons that probably doesnt matter for achieving Snowdens goals. Here are some tentative thoughts on this big topic. Ill hope to follow up later, with more firm views, in light of comments and responses.

Ill begin with public opinion. Although the Snowden disclosures have impacted public opinion about government surveillance in some ways, they havent caused a major shift. Different polls are worded in different ways and suggest different things. But my overall sense is that public opinion has long been roughly evenly divided on U.S. government surveillance and continues to be roughly evenly divided post-Snowden. For example, in 2006, a poll on NSA surveillance suggested that 51% found NSA surveillance acceptable while 47% found it unacceptable. Shortly after the Snowden disclosures began, public opinion was equally divided about the Section 215 program. And just a few weeks ago, a Pew Research poll from last month found public opinion pretty evenly divided again:

Overall, 52% describe themselves as very concerned or somewhat concerned about government surveillance of Americans data and electronic communications, compared with 46% who describe themselves as not very concerned or not at all concerned about the surveillance.

The polling questions arent asking identical questions, so any conclusions have to be tentative. But on the whole, I dont think the Snowden disclosures have caused a major shift in how the public thinks about national security surveillance.

The question is, why?

As I see it, a significant reason is that the message of the Snowden disclosures was muddled by their diversity and volume. The disclosures started with a legitimately huge story. Unbeknownst to the public, the innocuous-seeming Section 215 law had been interpreted, very implausibly, to allow a program of almost-universal collection of telephone records. That was a really big deal. That one program impacts most people in the U.S., and it is based on a surprising and secret interpretation of the law. The existence of this program was troubling on a lot of fronts. I have to speculate about a counterfactual, which is always fraught with difficulty. But I would guess that just leaking this one program could have significantly changed public opinion about NSA surveillance.

But thats not what happened. Instead, Snowden apparently took over a million classified documents and passed the full set off to like-minded journalists. The various journalists have then gone through the trove and have picked out what they think should be published, resulting in long strings of stories over time.

This muddled the message for a few reasons. First, the rest of the Snowden disclosures never packed the punch of the initial Section 215 disclosures. A lot of the Snowden stories just filled in details about programs that we already knew about. Sure, the stories were written to create an impression of scandal. But a lot of times they just told us that the NSA was doing pretty much what you would have guessed they were doing.

Consider last falls story in the German newspaper Der Spiegel, based on internal NSA documents taken by Snowden, on which forms of encryption the NSA can decrypt readily and which ones it cant. The NSA was established in large part to crack encryption schemes. Its hard to see the scandal in the NSA doing what the NSA was created to do.

Second, the volume and diversity of stories made it hard to foster a coherent response. A single narrative can lead to a single focused reaction. But hundreds of different stories, which may or may not suggest a problem in each depending on your perspective, and which describe different aspects of different programs well, what do you do with that? Snowdens supporters envision each story as adding more more fuel to the same fire. But I think it came off to a lot of people as hundreds of pockets of smoke each of which might or might not, upon investigation, end up being caused by a fire that were hard to get a sense of as a whole.

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Volokh Conspiracy: Edward Snowden’s impact