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My Reflective Analysis on Edward Snowden

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My Reflective Analysis on Edward Snowden

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Who needs the movies when life is full of such spectacular coincidences? On Thursday, David Anderson, the government's reviewer of terrorism legislation, condemned snooping laws as "undemocratic, unnecessary and - in the long run - intolerable", and called for a comprehensive new law incorporating judicial warrants - something for which my organisation, Liberty, has campaigned for many years. This thoughtful intervention brought new hope to us and others, for the rebuilding of public trust in surveillance conducted with respect for privacy, democracy and the law. And it was only possible thanks to Edward Snowden. Rumblings from No 10 immediately betrayed they were less than happy with many of Anderson's recommendations - particularly his call for judicial oversight. And three days later, the empire strikes back! An exclusive story in the Sunday Times saying that MI6 "is believed" to have pulled out spies because Russia and China decoded Snowden's files. The NSA whistleblower is now a man with "blood on his hands" according to one anonymous "senior Home Office official".

Low on facts, high on assertions, this flimsy but impeccably timed story gives us a clear idea of where government spin will go in the coming weeks. It uses scare tactics to steer the debate away from Anderson's considered recommendations - and starts setting the stage for the home secretary's new investigatory powers bill. In his report, Anderson clearly states no operational case had yet been made for the snooper's charter. So it is easy to see why the government isn't keen on people paying too close attention to it.

But then, when it comes to responding to criticism, the approach of the Conservative leadership has been the same for some time: shut down all debate by branding Snowden - or anyone else who dares question the security agencies - as an enemy of the state and an apologist for terror.

It's a technique we at Liberty have felt the full force of. In March, the discredited, and now largely retired, intelligence and security committee produced a report into the legal framework covering surveillance. This was the same toothless committee that failed to spot the dodgy dossier, expose extraordinary rendition or pick up on the sheer scale of blanket intrusion outside of the law - which Snowden did a great public service in revealing.

Instead of properly scrutinising the agencies' activities, the ISC lashed out against campaigners, shamelessly misrepresenting us as considering terrorism a price worth paying for our airy-fairy values. Valid concerns of campaigners and parliamentarians were buried under a mound of toxic spin.

The hyperbole that followed yesterday's story was astonishing - Professor Anthony Glees reportedly branded Snowden "a villain of the first order" - Darth Vader eat your heart out.

So let me be completely clear: Edward Snowden is a hero. Saying so does not make me an apologist for terror - it makes me a firm believer in democracy and the rule of law. Whether you are with or against Liberty in the debate about proportionate surveillance, Anderson must be right to say that the people and our representatives should know about capabilities and practices built and conducted in our name.

For years, UK and US governments broke the law. For years, they hid the sheer scale of their spying practices not just from the British public, but from parliament. Without Snowden - and the legal challenges by Liberty and other campaigners that followed - we wouldn't have a clue what they were up to.

A debate about surveillance powers in the internet age is not best advanced by that all-pervading slogan: "nothing to hide, nothing to fear." We cannot have a risk-free society, and it is too much to expect of the agencies or the law to deliver it. But surely we can have an open and balanced discussion about how we adapt to new threats while safeguarding the intimacy and dignity rightly craved by human beings.
'Undemocratic, unnecessary, intolerable'... The official verdict on Britain's state snoopers Topics

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Let me be clear - Edward Snowden is a hero | Shami Chakrabarti

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Who needs the movies when life is full of such spectacular coincidences? On Thursday, David Anderson, the government's reviewer of terrorism legislation, condemned snooping laws as "undemocratic, unnecessary and - in the long run - intolerable", and called for a comprehensive new law incorporating judicial warrants - something for which my organisation, Liberty, has campaigned for many years.

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When the Edward Snowden story first burst on the scene early this year, one of the central debates that ensued was whether Snowden should be considered a whistleblower or a traitor. In the months since, this debate has largely faded from the conversation.

The events of this week are starting to revive that debate. Proof enough of this was a conversation this week on MSNBC 's Morning Joe, a sort of bellwether of Inside the Beltway thinking. In response to a federal judge ruling that the National Security Agency's collection of telephone metadata was unconstitutional, Joe Scarborough, the former Florida Congressman who hosts Morning Joe, asked whether this made Snowden a whistleblower.

While claiming that he "didn't know the definition of whistleblower," Scarborough suggested that he believed Snowden might be one in light of the fact that the federal judge said the NSA's actions would be deeply offensive to James Madison, the father of the U.S. constitution. John Heileman, one half of the unofficial biographers of recent U.S. presidential elections, agreed, saying the court's ruling "vindicated" Snowden's action.

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I disagree and in fact would argue that at this point it is beyond dispute that Snowden is a traitor. Full disclosure: I always felt that Snowden was a traitor. This is not because I disagreed with his view that the NSA is out of control. Given the level of threat presented by terrorism today, I too am deeply worried by the extent the NSA goes to prevent these hypothetical attacks. One cannot help but be concerned about what America's fate should a serious security threat materialize.

The reason why I believed from the beginning that Snowden was a traitor was not because of the information he had been leaking but the manner in which he had done it. In my view, a true whistleblower would have first pursued legal avenues for reining in the NSA, such as seeking out sympathetic members of Congress. The American people, after all, elect people to serve in Congress specifically for the purpose of representing their interests on important matters of state.

Additionally, in my view, a true patriotic whistleblower believes in his or her cause enough to be willing to accept the punishment their disclosures bring. If they truly believe in the righteousness of their cause, they'll be confident enough that the American people will ultimately come to appreciate their actions and they'll be pardoned. Snowden's flight to Hong Kong and then Moscow showed he wasn't willing to suffer the consequences for his actions, calling into question how much he believed in his cause.

This being said, while I personally felt this all made him a traitor, in the early days of the Snowden story I felt that there could a legitimate debate over whether he was a whistleblower or not. After all, while fleeing abroad certainly made Snowden a coward, it didn't necessarily preclude him from being a whistleblower. The information he disclosed wasn't necessarily any less important to restoring Americans' liberty because of his personal shortcomings.

It has long since become apparent that Snowden should be viewed as a traitor, however. The main reason that Snowden cannot be seen as a whistleblower is the careless ways in which he collected and leaked information, which have only become fully apparent after the first month or so of the Snowden story breaking. Had Snowden been a whistleblower interested in protecting the American constitution, he would have carefully collected information documenting NSA overreach in spying on Americans. Only that would have been given to the journalists and newspapers Snowden contacted.

Instead, he collected an apparently unknowable amount of information (unknowable to both him and the NSA) and dumped it on the doorsteps of largely foreign newspapers. As he no doubt fully understood, most of these documents contained information pertaining to how the NSA collected intelligence on legitimate foreign targets, not Americans whatsoever.

Snowden of course would defend himself by pointing out that he hasn't chosen what was published from his stolen documents. Indeed, he has quite self-righteously said that he believed he was too biased to determine what information it was in the public interest to publish. That is why, Snowden has claimed, he gave it to responsible journalists and editors to decide on which documents needed to be kept secret, and which the public should know about.

While all this sounds very noble it conveniently ignores the fact that society has not appointed journalists or newspaper editors to decide these matters, nor are they qualified to do so. In fact, journalists and editors ultimately have a different immediate interest than the American public; namely, the former are interested first and foremost in selling newspapers, not protecting U.S. national security. They may sometimes withhold information at the government's request, but in general their preference is heavily weighted towards publishing information that sells papers.

This has been fully on display in the case of Snowden's leaks. Although I haven't been keeping a precise scorecard, it seems to me that the overwhelming majority of the stories that have been published from the Snowden documents are about U.S. spying on foreign nations, not its domestic operations. Americans' rights are not at risk when the NSA taps the phones of foreign leaders. As such, leaking these documents were not the actions of a patriotic whistleblower.

In fact, as others have pointed out, information from the Snowden documents has been published in a manner that seemingly seeks to do as much harm to U.S. alliances across the world as possible. Meanwhile, Snowden seeking refuge in first China and then Russia nearly guarantees that the governments in these countries have gained a treasure trove of valuable information on NSA operations against their countries.

Stealing classified information to systematically undermine U.S. alliances across the world, while aiding U.S. adversaries, is practically the definition of treason. Snowden couldn't help but know that his actions would lead to these outcomes. And for that reason it is beyond dispute that Snowden, regardless of whether or not some of his disclosures had any merit, has betrayed the United States and his fellow citizens. Nothing from this week or in the future will change this fact.

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When the Edward Snowden story first burst on the scene early this year, one of the central debates that ensued was whether Snowden should be considered a whistleblower or a traitor. In the months since, this debate has largely faded from the conversation. The events of this week are starting to revive that debate.

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Hero, traitor, geek - no matter what you think of Edward Snowden there is no doubt that he has changed the world a great deal.

In June 2013, the globe-shaking document leaks from Snowden put a spotlight on the National Security Agency's domestic spying.

The revelations Snowden presented to journalist Glenn Greenwald - who worked at the Guardian at the time of the disclosures - have made people question the Obama administration's mass surveillance practices.

The U.S. government also considered making changes to its surveillance programs such as Prism.

Two years later, here's how the world has changed since the shocking evidence were revealed:

1. Questioning security practices and "intelligence failures," MI5, MI6 and Britain's Government Communications Headquarters publicly testified in front of Parliament for the first time ever.

Topics covered by the Parliament Intelligence and Security Committee include security services oversight and global newspapers' involvement in the Snowden leak.

2. The German government ends its ties with wireless company Verizon after Snowden claimed that the U.S. had conducted mass surveillance in Germany, including tapping on Chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone.

Other American companies soon followed in Verizon's footsteps with Boeing and Brazil ending its $4 billion-plus defense contract in 2013.

3. There was a rise in encryption and user privacy startup companies who have developed apps and hardware with higher security - from Wickr messaging, Silent Circle's Blackphone and more.

Tech giants like Google and Yahoo stepped up their security following the disclosures by adding encryption to users' emails.

4. A redacted 39-page Pentagon report - "DoD Information Review Task Force-2: Initial Assessment, Impacts Resulting from the Compromise of Classified Material by a Former NSA Contractor" - was released in 2014.

Twelve of the 39 pages from the report were made public - saying that the NSA documents leaked by Snowden were "the scope of the compromised knowledge related to US intelligence capabilities is staggering."

There is no known evidence that Snowden has provided any NSA documents to a "foreign adversary," according to The Guardian.

5. Most cybersecurity experts agree that Snowden has had a magnanimous impact in the community.

"Snowden has managed to rack up 1.18 million followers within a short period of time," Dodi Glenn, vice president of cyber security at PC Pitstop, LLC, told the Daily News in an email. "Several polls show some view Snowden as a traitor, while others view him as a hero or whistle-blower."

"To some degree, he has caused people around the world to further question their government," Glenn continued. "He has certainly caused many to lose trust in the government. The trend in reporting government leaks may have already started as sites like Wikileaks get more content."

Maybe not turn into hacktivists overnight, but people in the tech industry sympathize with him.

"The fact Edward Snowden has revealed the incredible level of monitoring that is going on has made Netizens more wary, cautious and outright suspicious about what they receive and send on the Net," Stu Sjouwerman, founder and CEO of software company KnowBe4, said in an email to the Daily News.

"As the Net really still is in Beta, and the NSA in 1978 voted against encryption of Internet data, we are dealing with an infrastructure that is at the very same time exciting and scary," said in the email. "Snowden has shed some light on the dark side and we should all be thankful to him."

(Marco Garcia/AP)

Snowden has also recently opened a Twitter account.

"Can you hear me now?" the NSA whistleblower tweeted for the first time on Tuesday.

Snowden has been actively using the online social networking site this week, even tweeting back and forth with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson - who interviewed the former NSA contractor on his podcast, Star Talk Radio.

Politicians - like former New York governor George Pataki - have already called for Snowden's account to be shut down by tweeting at Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.
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5 ways Edward Snowden has changed the world since NSA leaks

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Hero, traitor, geek - no matter what you think of Edward Snowden there is no doubt that he has changed the world a great deal. In June 2013, the globe-shaking document leaks from Snowden put a spotlight on the National Security Agency's domestic spying.