Delegating to journalists he hardly knew a cache of documents so large that he could not possibly have read them, cheerleading the disclosure of intelligence secrets that had nothing directly to do with the surveillance of Americans.
Delegating that job to journalists has always seemed to me like a responsible decision on his part. What would you have had him do instead?
If the journalists released "intelligence secrets that had nothing directly to do with the surveillance of Americans" (it's not clear to me that they did, but I'm willing to suspend disbelief here) isn't that on them, not Snowden?
Read everything, disclose only information that he could reasonably connect to the NSA violating the rights of Americans. Not reveal everything all at once. Not assume that a particular journalist whose politics he supported would (a) carefully minimize the leak to whistleblowing material only and (b) be competent enough to protect it against the intelligence services of other countries.
I just not sure how much choice you can afford when going up against a state actor. I would say spreading the "blame" and being a public figure was quite crucial to increasing the odds of success and providnig less incentive for the US government to take action.
I never understand this reasoning. That all the burden should be placed on Snowden to pour over the documents and determine what is breaking the law and what isn't. He was fairly certain a majority of it was - at that point it's most responsible of him to hand it off to people who are in a better decision to make those calls.
1) Do you expect a single person to go through 1000's of documents with their rudimentary understandings and interpretations of the law? Would you and why would you trust him if so?
2) Should he have a lawyer go through the documents with him?
3) Should he get second opinions on whether or not something is breaking the law?
4) Should he trust a team of respected journalists and their team of lawyers to go through the documents on his behalf?
The journalists he released the documents to have trust that they've established for years. That makes them hard to dismiss as looney bins. Snowden does not have that trust and would have been easy to dismiss by himself.
As per my other comment above/below - I think he's basically handled it as well as he could under the circumstances. Most of what's come out is pretty much targeting nefarious and/or potentially illegal practices. I think his actions have been - and hopefully will continue to be - a positive force for change.
But - yes, he chose to release that material. If, for instance, the journalists released something irresponsible that, say, led to deaths of people, that's still part of a chain of events that leads to him and his decision.
I'm glad he did what he did, and so far things seem to have gone ok, and I can't imagine the stress and pressure he's under.
You either blow the whistle or remain silent. Choosing to not release the material would mean he's compliant, and not a whistle blower. Which - given the details that have come to light - I judge the compliance of the individuals impeding on my rights to privacy far harsher than I judge Snowden as a whistle blower.
>If, for instance, the journalists released something irresponsible that, say, led to deaths of people
Do you think Snowden or the journalist team are more or less likely to release something irresponsibly that would lead to the deaths of people? My bets are on Snowden; had he acted alone.
Simply because as an individual he is less capable of citing/knowing which laws what is breaking, what should be released and shouldn't be released (he would have to make that call himself, rather than discussing it among others), how details may be interpreted by the public, dangers of releasing certain information, etc. I believe it would be inevitable for him to fuck up had he acted alone.
Your argument boils down to "he shouldn't have blown the whistle" and I cannot agree with that. At all.
> Your argument boils down to "he shouldn't have blown the whistle" and I cannot agree with that.
You're simplifying it too much. I think he did the right thing, but took some big risks of varying kinds, too. That's part of what makes someone a 'hero' isn't it? Pressing forward in the face of uncertainty and danger.
I was just arguing with the "it's all on the journalists if something goes awry" line.
Those risks are inherent with blowing the whistle. Full stop. Cannot be removed. They come with blowing the whistle. The only way to prevent those risks entirely would be by not blowing the whistle. If you disagree, please explain to me how I am simplifying too much.
Blowing the whistle comes with inherent risk. He did everything within his power to minimize that risk and act responsibly.
E:
I see I'm arguing a statement ever-so-slightly out of your original context (read your edit). So disregard this as a tangent discussion. :) Cheers.
The risks we're talking about obviously aren't inherent in blowing the whistle. "Don't release things you haven't read". Seems straightforward enough.
If he had taken steps to minimize the leak but missed stuff, there would be a reasonable argument here. But he leaked things that pretty clearly didn't document misconduct, but was damaging to the NSA, and a casual skim of that stuff could have ruled out its publication.
Would quibble with your mention of "release" here because Snowden hasn't released that sort of information directly.
To the extent he amassed and shared with journalists the type of information you're talking about, Snowden has previously stated that he felt he needed to prove to journalists that he was an authentic source.
Your claim certainly still applies in the form of "he didn't need to do that" or "he didn't need that much material to establish bona fides" or even "he's lying" but to my knowledge, he didn't release damaging information himself.
Snowden did leak information to journalists who then decided to report on it, and I'm sympathetic to the idea that Snowden should have assumed journalists would be inclined to report on damaging information that didn't reflect misconduct. Snowden may also have made different assumptions than you do about what constitutes misconduct.
I'm not sure I understand. Exactly what prevented him from minimizing the material he leaked?
By pretty much everyone's admission, Snowden relied on Greenwald and others to minimize the leak, and that's what they've done: only a fraction of the documents he took have been published. At first blush, that sounds admirable, but when you think about this for a second, the implication is that people like Greenwald are now in possession of a huge collection of documents that aren't in the public interest (if they were, Greenwald's obligation would be to publish them!).
You are taking as given that he released things that he didn't read. I don't think that's a reasonable assumption. According to Greenwald the documents were meticulously organized and chosen to either expose wrongdoing or provide the necessary background information for a journalist to understand the wrongdoing.
By every account of the people who know, Snowden read and understood every single document he leaked.
The "spy mall catalogue" doesn't fit the definition you used. Implants into COTS hardware to accomplish SIGINT missions against foreign governments is neither nefarious nor illegal.
It may not be illegal, but it has a few negative secondary effects, among them:
1) reduces the value of US hardware on the international market, as businesses want to use equipment without backdoors installed by foreign intelligence services
2) pits the intelligence community against large portions of the tech sector, who because of market pressure will be forced to consider such activity a security threat
3) obliderates any moral high ground from which to stand on to condemn foreign intelligence services for doing the exact same thing, e.g.the State department's hypocritical efforts to condemn the Chinese for various forms of espionage in which the NSA apparently routinely engages
It can't be any more nefarious than an assault rifle (there are at least purposes for spying implants that don't involve killing people). If you feel like all military hardware is nefarious, and think people should leak secret weapon plans, that's an intellectually coherent argument.
Personally, guns bother me a lot more than SIGINT implants.
That's some very untrustworthy language used there. The article expresses lots of allegations, doubts and negative opinions, but never mentions the big brother surveillance, the point of what Snowden did and the immense value for society of it. Even if some published documents were harmful to US government, it is not Snowden who published them. The article reads more like a manipulative government propaganda than like a balanced text written by a genuine journalist.
The question we're addressing here is not "Did Snowden do good things?" The question is whether he is a hero, and the fact that he did bad things is relevant. You could argue that he did more good than bad, and I might even agree; but doing more good than bad doesn't make someone a hero.
the data-mining program that slurps up e-mail and phone data of American citizens
>Even if some published documents were harmful to US government, it is not Snowden who published them.
He gave them to journalists that published them. How is it not his fault?
You're right, the article mentions it. But it does not do a good job at that, it does not paint things in proportion. The big brother surveillance and recording of everybody in US is euphemised as "domestic surveillance program" and "data-mining program". The focus of the article is on slandering Snowden.
"The question we're addressing here is not "Did Snowden do good things?" The question is whether he is a hero, and the fact that he did bad things is relevant."
The article, as some groups do, tries to turn people from thinking and talking about the important things such as the big brother surveillance and questioning government to various irrelevant issues, such as "isn't he a traitor". They try to mislead your attention astray. Don't let them; think for yourself.
If you don't think the question of whether he's a traitor is relevant, then don't worry about that question. I originally posted this link because people were debating that question.
You said "slandering". That generally implies untruth, but the only thing you've really pointed to is non proportionality, which is kind of weird (does every article need to include every single fact at all relevant to the case? Presumably not, but then on what basis can you call something disproportionate?)
"If you don't think the question of whether he's a traitor is relevant, then don't worry about that question." No way. This question is an irrelevant issue with which the propaganda machine confuses people and derails the actual discussion about broken government they want to have. And that is why I'm worrying about this question here.
"but then on what basis can you call something disproportionate?" I call the article disproportionate, misleading and low-quality based on reading it and remembering other accounts of things.
Thanks for the link. This article by Gosztola on salon.com questions Eichenwald's claims regarding Snowden a gives some compelling arguments against them. I do not think that is an attack ad hominem. Of course, after reading both articles, one may get an impression that Eichenwald cannot be trusted. But whether that is so or not, one needs to decide for himself.
The fact that rmxt brought up some problems with a different story that Eichenwald wrote in this context is an ad hominem. Besides, there's no need to trust Eichenwald, the stories he links to are written by others, and the bulk of his article is argument, which you can agree or disagree with without any trust being required.
That's an attack on other positions this person has taken re Snowden, not the one he took in the article I linked. Mentioning that in this context seems like an ad hominem.
By and large, what's been released seems relatively pertinent and 'on target'. To me it seems like he's handled it all pretty well, especially given the circumstances: I can't imagine the pressure and stress.
I'm much more ambivalent about the wikileaks cables leak, because that truly was a massive data dump, much of which was not exposing any wrongdoing, just private conversations.
It's disappointing to see someone who is usually so thoughtful on these issues implying that the mass surveillance of the ~7 billion people on this planet who are not Americans was inappropriate to disclose.
Perhaps you meant something different, but that's not how your comment reads.
Yes, disclosing that was inappropriate. What else do you want to know?
I'm not demanding that you agree with me, but I would push back on the idea that my argument is unreasonable.
I have conservative friends and I have an-cap friends and friends at many points in between. The an-caps oppose all espionage by any state anywhere; the conservatives think disclosure of any spying by the USG is treason. Not everyone agrees about this stuff.
This thread is rooted in a comment that expresses surprise that there are Americans that oppose what Snowden did. Well, there are a lot of Americans who oppose it, for a bunch of different reasons. So: be less surprised.
I want to know why you (at least implicitly, given your comment's wording) think it was appropriate to disclose mass surveillance of Americans but inappropriate to disclose mass surveillance of others.
I didn't mean to imply that you had the "wrong" political view or even one that I disagreed with. It just struck me as internally inconsistent given the (apparently wrong) assumptions I'd made about your perspective from other comments on the topic over the past few years.
And of course I'm not surprised that there are lots of Americans who oppose what Snowden did, but as someone who tends to pay attention to your comments, I was surprised by one of the reasons you seemed to.
No modern industrialized nation prohibits foreign intelligence collection. Most prohibit domestic collection, to some extent. Evidence of domestic collection is in the public interest. Evidence of foreign collection isn't.
These threads tend to get batty very quickly. Let me lay this out a bit:
* I think NSA (and, to a much greater extent, GCHQ) are culpable for a huge amount of misconduct, much of it revealed by Snowden.
* I'm glad the Snowden documents that illuminated clear misconduct, such as GCHQ cable tapping of Google in the UK, or US collection of cell phone metadata, were published.
* I do not generally believe that people in the NSA randomly listen to foreign communications for kicks, nor do I believe for a second that they do things like surveil presidential candidates, despite what Snowden has implied. Not because people in the NSA are good or righteous or principled, but simply because nobody has the time to do that
* I believe NSA foreign collection generally happens for reasons that most people in the US support - tracking terrorist networks and counterproliferation.
* I believe the balance of NSA foreign collections operations happen for reasons that I don't like, but that are pro-forma "legitimate" and part of the competition that occurs between all countries. For instance: to the extent that NSA is monitoring the state depts/foreign offices of other countries: I'm not a fan of that, but I'm not outraged by it.
* I believe NSA cuts a whole lot of corners in pursuing those goals, especially post-9/11.
* I do have a problem with corner-cutting, and I would have a problem with evidence that the NSA was listening to, say, German telephone communications for sport, or, like France, monitoring foreign commercial communications to tip off domestic industry, leaks illustrating that would be in the public interest.
Given this rough sketch of my worldview, it does not seem reasonable to me for the public to have a line-item veto over all the foreign SIGINT conducted by the USG. That notion seems equivalent to simply not doing SIGINT at all, which to me does not seem realistic or productive.
Just wanted to say thanks for the thoughtful reply and taking time to sketch out your views comprehensively.
Your comment left the why part of my question a little ambiguous, but I'm assuming from your response that it's a combination of because everyone else is doing it, the US sort of has to in order to remain competitive because everyone else is doing it, because it's not prohibited, and because it's not in the public interest (assuming you mean US public's interest here).
I wanted to apologize for mincing your words a bit upthread - this comment makes more clear the distinctions you draw around misconduct, "legitimate" / de facto practices, and what's in the public interest.
As for the "why" - presumably it would be in the public interest for the government to spy upon notorious public enemies like terrorists or potentially hostile governments? Is there a good argument otherwise?
> I believe NSA foreign collection generally happens for reasons that most people in the US support - tracking terrorist networks and counterproliferation.
> I would have a problem with evidence that the NSA was [...] monitoring foreign commercial communications to tip off domestic industry
Neoconservatives are conservatives who believe in a muscular foreign policy focused on the middle east centered on support for Israel. Tea Party conservatives aren't neoconservatives, nor are libertarians.
Well, to be fair, most Americans are unlikely to care about foreign surveillance (although I can hear Team America World Police playing in the background right about now...).
The issues that upset Americans is going to be the domestic surveillance programs.
Journalists with a publicly verifiable track record who had a history of adversarial journalism. He chose them for their principles, not their charisma. It seems like you're grasping at straws here. How is an embedded contractor with high level security clearances supposed to get cozy with journalists? It's ludicrous.
Snowden watched what happened to Bill Binney and Thomas Drake and knew that the suggested whistleblowing path was a trap. Journalists were the second to last resort (the last being the wikileaks approach). The outcomes are evident. He was right. There is/was a problem and courts and commentators worldwide acknowledge that. Hell, even Obama acknowledged there were problems.
And on your last point: it turns out non-Americans have human rights too, something that Snowden would have no-doubt recognized after living in Switzerland. American exceptionalism bullshit is no excuse for crimes against humanity (i.e. mass surveillance).
These are uncharacteristically dumb comments from you.
