“In Defense of Leakers: Snowden and Manning” - New Yorker

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Last edited Fri Aug 2, 2013, 03:01 PM - Edit history (1)

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/08/in-defense-of-leakers.html

AUGUST 1, 2013
BY JOHN CASSIDY

...Setting aside Snowden’s personal odyssey—he’s been holed up at Sheremetyevo Airport since June 23rd—the documents he released detailing the National Security Agency’s spying programs, domestic and global, have already had a transformative effect. For decades, Congress has adopted a hands-off and pusillanimous approach to the N.S.A., appropriating vast sums for its operations—its budget remains classified, but it’s reportedly about ten billion dollars a year—and not examining too closely how this money was spent. As the agency sought to expand its domestic surveillance programs in the aftermath of 9/11, Congress, by passing successive versions of the Patriot Act and other measures, actively enabled it to broaden its remit under the catch-all justification of countering terrorism.

Now, finally, some questioning voices are being raised. In a hearing on Capitol Hill yesterday, senators from both parties interrogated the N.S.A.’s leadership about its justification for mining the phone logs of millions of Americans who aren’t suspected of having any connection to terrorism, saying the agency’s top officials had greatly exaggerated the number of terrorist plots it had thwarted thanks to the program. Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, said he had been shown a classified list that didn’t indicate “dozens or even several” plots had been detected. Republican Charles Grassley, of Iowa, criticized James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, for misleading Congress about the phone-log program...



It barely needs saying that none of this would have happened had Snowden kept his own counsel about what he saw as the N.S.A.’s gross abuses of privacy, or if he had done what even some people in the media have suggested and registered his concerns to his immediate superiors. By handing over N.S.A. documents to journalists from the Guardian and the Washington Post, he brought to the attention of the American public detailed information about something they have every right to know: their government is spying on them.

Some of what the N.S.A. is doing had been revealed in previous news stories by investigative journalists, notably Eric Lichtblau and James Risen of the Times (who is facing the prospect of going to jail rather than revealing a source in another area). But the wealth of detail in Snowden’s documents, and his revelation of the existence of previously undisclosed spying programs such as Prism, makes ridiculous the suggestion that he didn’t really tell us anything new. At the very least, he told us that the N.S.A.’s surveillance operations are much bigger and more systematic than we previously knew, and that senior officials in the Obama Administration, notably Clapper, have been misleading Congress and the public about them.

Perhaps the most depressing aspect of the Snowden case has been the official effort, going all the way up to Secretary of State John Kerry, to depict him as a traitor. Actually, Snowden appears to be an idealistic young man who had no ill intentions toward his country but who gradually became disillusioned with some of its actions. He enlisted in the Army during the Iraq War because, he told the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, “I believed in the goodness of what were were doing,” only to be discharged several months later. Even now, he told Greenwald, he believes that “America is a fundamentally a good country; we have good people with good values who want to do the right thing, but the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics.”...

We still don’t know for sure what will happen to Snowden or Manning: the former appears destined to a life of exile, for now, at least, in a repressive country; the latter, for many more years in a military jail. (He’s already been in custody for almost three years, including in solitary confinement for eleven months—a treatment that a senior United Nations official charged with investigating allegations of torture described as cruel and inhuman.) We do know that, at great cost to themselves and their families, Snowden and Manning have illuminated much that the authorities would have preferred to keep hidden, and that they have sparked a long overdue public debate about what the Times, in its editorial about the Manning verdict, justly described as “a national security apparatus that has metastasized into a vast and largely unchecked exercise of government secrecy and the overzealous prosecution of those who breach it.” In short, the two leakers have performed a valuable public service.>>