I haven’t known what to make of Edward Snowden, the well-paid contractor who revealed the extent of the NSA’s spying on Americans. Is he a civilian version of Cpl. Bradley Manning, the Army analyst whose release of thousands of secret documents put Wikileaks in the news? I don’t think so. Manning isn’t a whistleblower; he didn’t seem to know or care what he was releasing, he just wanted to release it. There was no greater good he was serving other than himself. I still think Manning should be punished for his deeds.
Where does that leave Snowden? After all, he also broke his oath to keep secrets, too, and unlike Manning he was getting paid handsomely to keep those secrets. Also, the type of NSA collection he exposed first appeared in the press way back in 2006 (or perhaps even a year earlier). Is one guilty of revealing a secret if what one reveals isn’t a secret anymore?
Snowden gave up a pretty good life to do what he did: he had a nice girlfriend, a home in Hawaii, and a high-paying job in intelligence. He now has none of these things and is hiding somewhere in Hong Kong. He seems content with his fate and knows full well what he did and why he did it. What did he find so compelling to make him take that step?
I think the only way to describe the NSA behavior Snowden exposed is massive overreach. The types of programs now coming to light, with billions of collections on Americans going on with little or no oversight, are frightening in their scope. For Americans who assume their right to privacy is safeguarded by the Fourth Amendment these revelations are shocking. This massive collection turns the notion of innocent until proven guilty on its head. These programs are in essence solutions in search of problems.
Americans should have a problem with that.
Obama won the presidency fueled by a public fed up with the Bush administration’s draconian police state. Once president, Obama saw no need to put a stop to these policies and indeed may have accelerated them. For a former professor of constitutional law, our president has strangely little regard for the Bill of Rights.
I don’t want to live in a country ruled by paranoia, led by fear. I don’t believe America needs to constantly find new enemies. I don’t believe when egregious abuses of our privacy are discovered that we should accept the government’s word that it’s doing the right thing. I don’t believe there should be one set of laws for one class of citizens (i.e., the executive and legislative branches), and another set of laws for others.
I don’t believe the rights granted by the Constitution only apply as long as it’s convenient for the government, yet more and more the excuse of “national defense” seems to trump everything else.
To boil it all down, Snowden has some explaining to do. He must answer for his actions. But Snowden’s actions aren’t the only ones to be called into question. Our leaders have far more explaining to do, how they can justify activity that goes so far beyond what everyday Americans might think necessary and prudent.
If we are a country willing to trade our hard-won freedoms in the name of preventing a few crude pipe bomb attacks, we really need to question what we’re doing. I still believe America is bigger than that, that we can balance our freedom and our security without choosing one over the other. I thought America becoming a surveillance state was the wrong response after the 9/11 attacks and I certainly think it’s wrong today. Now’s the time to hash out what kind of country we want to be.