John Cassidy in The New Yorker: In Defense of Leakers: Snowden and Manning
On the day that Edward Snowden finally left Moscow’s airport in a taxi to take up Russia’s offer of temporary asylum and the sentencing portion of Bradley Manning’s trial continued, it is worth restating what should be obvious. Leaking classified information is a crime, and it can be damaging to the national interest; but, in some circumstances, it can also be a patriotic and useful act that helps bring about necessary reforms.
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.
.
<snip>
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.
<snip>
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.”
<snip>
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/08/in-defense-of-leakers.html?mbid=gnep&google_editors_picks=true
= new reply since forum marked as read
