Why Silicon Valley sticks up for Snowden

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.

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Why Silicon Valley sticks up for Snowden