A US intel contractor. An eager and responsible kid given access to highly classified documents.* Said “kid” was shocked and appalled at what he saw. So, he took photographs. Lots of them.
Then what to do?
He wasn’t Daniel Ellsberg who was able first to contact a few Senators and when after a year and a half that didn’t work to inform the public, he managed to interest the NYTimes and WaPo. Then there was that little matter of his indictment for espionage.
Even if he could have been, did he even want to be a whistle-blower? It’s not as if the American public cared all that much about the content of the Pentagon Papers – the Vietnam War dragged on and a year and a half after the release of the Pentagon Papers, Nixon was re-elected in a landslide.**
Did he even fully comprehend what he was seeing? Or care? Handing the document photos off to a drug addict and dealer childhood friend (the “Snowman”) to sell to the USSR was one way that some of the information would see the light of day someday and somewhere.
It didn’t take long from that April 1975 first sale before Christopher Boyce and the “snowman” were busted and convicted of espionage in 1977. The content of those documents barely and only briefly surfaced publicly. They had been of little interest or value to the USSR that seems to have purchased them hoping that the source could get access to something they wanted.
Boyce could have thwarted a “coup” against another elected liberal government. Could have focused the world’s attention on Australia in the early days of US-Australian surveillance cooperation. Shed a light on US-Australian covert participation in the 1973 Chilean coup. Could have denied Rupert Murdoch his big scoop. (A Murdoch created “scoop” for which he later paid damages to the direct victim, but allowed his co-conspirator to roam free in the US and participate in a right-wing and Holocaust denial cult.)
Boyce could have changed history. Instead he’s but an easily forgotten convicted criminal.
Almost forty years later, it was left not to the “Snowman,” but Edward Snowden to shine that light on Australian-NSA collusion. (Fitting that RT broke this component of the story – but will Putin open those Soviet archives?)
Gough Whitlam fared better than Salvador Allende, Torrijos, Roldos Aguilera, and others ousted from power during those years. The tragedy for Whitlam is that he could see what was being done to his government and by whom but was powerless to stop it. Ordinary Australians bought the right-wing propaganda just as easily as a few years later the Brits signed onto Thatcherism and the Yanks onto the Reagan Revolution.
Those calling for Edward Snowden’s head – on both the left and right – are agents of secrecy, lies, and US and corporate hegemony in support of the haves regardless of whether they are conscious of their participation. Democracy and equity cannot exist in a robust form as long as people so easily succumb to government and corporate propaganda in real time. Getting more difficult to sell that garbage in the western southern hemisphere, but it continues to mostly sell itself in much of the rest of the world.
*It was amusing to observe all the public outrage that a 29 year old high school drop-out could have had access to the NSA “crown jewels.” (As if they call an old geezer and not the fourteen year old kid to fix their computer glitches.) It’s not only not unusual for a young person to have such access, but more of them have yet to lose an innate sense of right and wrong, and therefore, more likely to expose what they have seen. Such people are still extremely rare as the consequences for truths are usually very harsh. It’s why Wikileaks had to be destroyed.
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[Update]** From The Devil And Daniel Ellsberg by Peter Lee, July 9, 2013
In Daniel Ellsberg’s estimation his leak of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 did little, if anything to end the Vietnam War as conducted by Richard Nixon. The U.S. war only ended because of Nixon’s downfall soon after his re-election in 1972, thanks to the antics of his plumbers, the team of extra-legal leak-plugging zealots that Nixon’s coterie unleashed on his enemies.
