By Peter Swire<\/p>\n
Published: January 30, 2014 <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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