John Cassidy is right about one thing. How people react to Ed Snowden depends on their attitude toward authority. The more anti-establishment you are, the more sympathetic you are going to be to Mr. Snowden. Frankly, though, I have little patience for either side of the argument. Mr. Cassidy self-identifies as being in the pro-Snowden part of this dispute, but his argument is completely incoherent.
When he finally gets to offering his own analysis, he gives us this:
The Obama Administration doesn’t want him to come home and contribute to the national-security-versus-liberty debate that the President says is necessary. It wants to lock him up for a long time.
And for what? For telling would-be jihadis that we are monitoring their Gmail and Facebook accounts? For informing the Chinese that we eavesdrop on many of their important institutions, including their prestigious research universities? For confirming that the Brits eavesdrop on virtually anybody they feel like? Come on. Are there many people out there who didn’t already know these things?
Mr. Cassidy is arguing that Mr. Snowden provided us with basically no meaningful information. Everyone knew that the NSA was sweeping up massive amounts of information, including any potential adversaries. There is no harm here. Perhaps recognizing that there must have been some value in Snowden’s disclosures, Mr. Cassidy continues:
Snowden took classified documents from his employer, which surely broke the law. But his real crime was confirming that the intelligence agencies, despite their strenuous public denials, have been accumulating vast amounts of personal data from the American public.
I’m not sure that the American public is any more enlightened than the jihadis or the Chinese. If our adversaries were not advantaged, I don’t think the public was particularly advantaged, either. There is absolutely no pressure for anyone to resign. No one is going to be charged with perjury. No crime has been revealed. Policies and programs have been exposed that people may dislike and may think go too far. I know that I feel that way. But even Mr. Cassidy acknowledges that Mr. Snowden broke the law. Mr. Cassidy says he wishes that Mr. Snowden had remained on U.S. soil to fight the charges against him even though he would be facing thirty years in prison, yet he argues that the penalty is far too stiff.
There is too much ambiguity in this line of argument. Surely the government has the responsibility to prosecute those who brazenly violate their oath to protect classified information. While there should be whistle-blower protections, they cannot apply to people who don’t reveal criminal wrongdoing.
On the other hand, those who are acting like Mr. Snowden is the second coming of Usama bin-Laden are equally irritating. People who conscientiously object to certain government policies are not usually doing so to aid and abet the enemy. I certainly don’t think that is the case here. Mr. Snowden needs to answer for what he did in court, as a deterrent to other leakers if nothing else, but he doesn’t need to be locked up for decades.
