Why Edward Snowden Is a Hero | The New Yorker

Is Edward Snowden, the twenty-nine-year-old N.S.A. whistle-blower who was last said to be hiding in Hong Kong awaiting his fate, a hero or a traitor? He is a hero. (My colleague Jeffrey Toobin disagrees.) In revealing the colossal scale of the U.S. governments eavesdropping on Americans and other people around the world, he has performed a great public service that more than outweighs any breach of trust he may have committed. Like Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department official who released the Pentagon Papers, and Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli nuclear technician who revealed the existence of Israels weapons program, before him, Snowden has brought to light important information that deserved to be in the public domain, while doing no lasting harm to the national security of his country.

Doubtless, many people inside the U.S. power structurePresident Obama includedand some of its apologists in the media will see things differently. When Snowden told the Guardian that nothing good was going to happen to him, he was almost certainly right. In fleeing to Hong Kong, he may have overlooked the existence of its extradition pact with the United States, which the U.S. authorities will most certainly seek to invoke. The National Security Agency has already referred the case to the Justice Department, and James Clapper, Obamas director of National Intelligence, has said that Snowdens leaks have done huge, grave damage to our intelligence capabilities.

Before accepting such claims at face value, lets remind ourselves of what the leaks so far have not contained. They didnt reveal anything about the algorithms that the N.S.A. uses, the groups or individuals that the agency targets, or the identities of U.S. agents. They didnt contain the contents of any U.S. military plans, or of any conversations between U.S. or foreign officials. As Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists who broke the story, pointed out on Morning Joe today, this wasnt a WikiLeaks-style data dump. [Snowden] spent months meticulously studying every document, Greenwald said. He didnt just upload them to the Internet.

So, what did the leaks tell us? First, they confirmed that the U.S. government, without obtaining any court warrants, routinely collects the phone logs of tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of Americans, who have no links to terrorism whatsoever. If the publicity prompts Congress to prevent phone companies such as Verizon and A.T. & T. from acting as information-gathering subsidiaries of the spying agencies, it wont hamper legitimate domestic-surveillance operationsthe N.S.A. can always go to court to obtain a wiretap or search warrantand it will be a very good thing for the country.

The second revelation in the leaks was that the N.S.A., in targeting foreign suspects, has the capacity to access vast amounts of user data from U.S.-based Internet companies such as Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Skype. Exactly how this is done remains a bit murky. But its clear that, in the process of monitoring the communications of overseas militants and officials and the people who communicate with them, the N.S.A. sweeps up a great deal of online data about Americans, and keeps it locked awayseemingly forever.

Conceivably, the fact that Uncle Sam is watching their Facebook and Google accounts could come as news to some dimwit would-be jihadis in foreign locales, prompting them to communicate in ways that are harder for the N.S.A. to track. But it will hardly surprise the organized terrorist groups, which already go to great lengths to avoid being monitored. Not for nothing did Osama bin Ladens compound in Abbottabad go without a phone or Internet connection.

Another Snowden leak, which Greenwald and the Guardian published over the weekend, was a set of documents concerning another secret N.S.A. tracking program with an Orwellian name: Boundless Informant. Apparently designed to keep Snowdens former bosses abreast of what sorts of data it was collecting around the world, the program unveiled the vast reach of the N.S.A.s activities. In March, 2013, alone, the Guardian reported, the N.S.A. collected ninety-seven billion pieces of information from computer networks worldwide, and three billion of those pieces came from U.S.-based networks.

Its hardly surprising that the main targets for the N.S.A.s data collection were Iran (fourteen billion pieces in that period) and Pakistan (more than thirteen billion), but countries such as Jordan, India, and Egypt, American allies all, may be a bit surprised to find themselves so high on the list. We hack everyone everywhere, Snowden told the Guardian. We like to make a distinction between us and the others. But we are in almost every country in the world. We are not at war with these countries.

For most Americans, the main concern will be domestic spying, and the chronic lack of oversight that Snowdens leaks have highlighted. In the years since 9/11, the spying agencies have been given great leeway to expand their activities, with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court, which deals with legal requests from the agencies, and the congressional intelligence committees, which nominally oversees all of their activities, all too often acting as rubber stamps rather than proper watchdogs.

Partly, that was due to lack of gumption and an eagerness to look tough on issues of counterterrorism. But it also reflected a lack of information. Just a couple of months ago, at a Senate hearing, Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden, one of the few legislators to sound any misgivings over the activities of the intelligence agencies, asked Clapper, Does the N.S.A. collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans? To which Clapper replied: No, sir. (He added, Not wittingly.) At another hearing, General Keith Alexander, the director of the N.S.A., denied fourteen times that the agency had the technical capability to intercept e-mails and other online communications in the United States.

Thanks to Snowden, and what he told the Guardian and the Washington Post, we now have cause to doubt the truth of this testimony. In Snowdens words: The N.S.A. has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wifes phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.

Were Clapper and Alexander deliberately lying? If so, perhaps Snowden should be extradited to the United States and dragged into courtbut only as part of a proceeding in which the two spymasters face charges of misleading Congress. I suppose you could make the argument that he is a nave young man who didnt fully understand the dangerous nature of the world in which we live. You could question his motives, and call him a publicity seeker, or an idiot. (Fleeing to Hong Kong wasnt very smart.) But he doesnt sound like an airhead; he sounds like that most awkward and infuriating of creaturesa man of conscience. I dont want to live in a society that does these sort of things, he told Greenwald. I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.

So what is Snowdens real crime? Like Ellsberg, Vanunu, and Bradley Manning before him, he uncovered questionable activities that those in power would rather have kept secret. Thats the valuable role that whistle-blowers play in a free society, and its one that, in each individual case, should be weighed against the breach of trust they commit, and the potential harm their revelations can cause. In some instances, conceivably, the interests of the state should prevail. Here, though, the scales are clearly tipped in Snowdens favor.

Ill leave the last word to Ellsberg, who, for revealing to the world that that Pentagon knew early on that the war in Vietnam was unwinnable, was described in some quarters as a communist and a traitor: Snowden did what he did because he recognised the NSAs surveillance programs for what they are: dangerous, unconstitutional activity. This wholesale invasion of Americans and foreign citizens privacy does not contribute to our security; it puts in danger the very liberties were trying to protect.

Photograph by Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty.

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Why Edward Snowden Is a Hero | The New Yorker