Edward Snowden presents a very complicated case. It’s basically impossible to argue with any of the following and, yet, it is undeniable that Snowden violated the trust placed in him and broke the law.
“For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished,” he said. “I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.”
“All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed,” he said. “That is a milestone we left a long time ago. Right now, all we are looking at are stretch goals.”
‘Going in blind’
Snowden is an orderly thinker, with an engineer’s approach to problem-solving. He had come to believe that a dangerous machine of mass surveillance was growing unchecked. Closed-door oversight by Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was a “graveyard of judgment,” he said, manipulated by the agency it was supposed to keep in check. Classification rules erected walls to prevent public debate.
Toppling those walls would be a spectacular act of transgression against the norms that prevailed inside them. Someone would have to bypass security, extract the secrets, make undetected contact with journalists and provide them with enough proof to tell the stories.
The NSA’s business is “information dominance,” the use of other people’s secrets to shape events. At 29, Snowden upended the agency on its own turf.
“You recognize that you’re going in blind, that there’s no model,” Snowden said, acknowledging that he had no way to know whether the public would share his views.
“But when you weigh that against the alternative, which is not to act,” he said, “you realize that some analysis is better than no analysis. Because even if your analysis proves to be wrong, the marketplace of ideas will bear that out. If you look at it from an engineering perspective, an iterative perspective, it’s clear that you have to try something rather than do nothing.”
By his own terms, Snowden succeeded beyond plausible ambition. The NSA, accustomed to watching without being watched, faces scrutiny it has not endured since the 1970s, or perhaps ever.
I’ve had very little to say about Edward Snowden or his revelations. That’s probably because of the ambivalence I feel about how he should be treated. I didn’t want to defend his actions, but I also didn’t want defend the behavior his actions divulged.
On some level, I think he has been vindicated, and that we cannot plausibly argue that his revelations have not been a net positive for the public. Yet, I also think that the government is justified in treating him like a criminal who has clearly harmed national security and foreign relations. More to the point, it’s hard for me to see how the state could show leniency in this case without putting our national security and foreign relations at further risk.
Perhaps the best balance is for the government to acknowledge that it needs to restrain itself and curtail the extent of its surveillance while submitting to more oversight, while finding a way to deal with Snowden that provides some deterrence against future leakers, but does less than throw the book at him.
Unfortunately, I can’t quite imagine a solution that strikes the perfect balance between the two imperatives. Partly, this is a problem of blame-shifting. The administration bears some responsibility for the excesses of the Intelligence Community, but it doesn’t bear all of the responsibility. Therefore, the administration cannot and should not simply throw the Intelligence Community under the bus, but the Intelligence Community shouldn’t go to war with the administration if their activities are curtailed and some jobs are lost as part of an accountability project. They also should not act like they have been betrayed if Snowden is allowed to come home without spending the rest of his life prison.
At the same time, the Intelligence Community can correctly argue that the vast bulk of their activities were authorized, and that their secrets need to be protected in order for them to be able to conduct their business with foreign services and domestic corporations. Snowden cannot simply be given a pass.
This creates an excruciating set of decisions for the Obama administration, but they must be guided by a sense of fairness, and they must take their lumps along with everyone else.
