NSA leaker Edward Snowden's 15 minutes of fame are about up—or at least they will be when he stops auditioning for a remake of Terminal by living in the Moscow airport, the only place he seems to be sure no one will extradite him from. The attention will soon, hopefully, go back where it belongs: on the vast domestic surveillance program he exposed.
Yet while his 15 minutes lasts, it's worth looking at a few new pieces of information about how Snowden got the secret information and what he has done while on the lam, because this also has wider implications that go beyond his own life or even the NSA program.
First, there is the new revelation, according to the South China Morning Post, that Snowden sought out a job with the NSA's consulting firm for the specific purpose of gathering information and leaking it.
"For the first time, Snowden has admitted he sought a position at Booz Allen Hamilton so he could collect proof about the US National Security Agency's secret surveillance programmes ahead of planned leaks to the media.
"'My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked,' he told the Post on June 12. 'That is why I accepted that position about three months ago.'
"During a global online chat last week, Snowden also stated he took pay cuts 'in the course of pursuing specific work.'"This sheds a little different light on how we look at Snowden's actions. He is not an ordinary guy who had the burden of this knowledge unexpectedly thrust upon him. He engaged in an act of deliberate espionage. He chose to join the spy game, even though he doesn't apparently have the skills for it.
That ought to color our view of his tyranny tour to China, Russia, and points beyond (if he doesn't end up living the rest of his life at Moscow's airport hotel). If he made an elaborate plan for how he was going to get access to the NSA and its data, why didn't he make a better plan for how he was going to get away after the leak came out? Or perhaps this was his plan.
I've gotten a number of responses from readers defending Snowden, so let me say that the big issue here is the NSA program he revealed, and I'm glad he revealed it. But I don't need Snowden to be a hero. I can love the leak and hate the leaker.
Jelani Cobb names one of the big things that's been bothering me about Snowden.
"In the days since his leaks about NSA intelligence gathering, the prevailing notion of Snowden had gone from civil-libertarian hero to egotist gadfly before settling, for the better part of a week, into an accepted media denominator: enigma. His flight to Moscow offered Snowden one more role in the rapidly expanding cast of characters: Cold War reenactor.
"Snowden's China–Moscow–Maybe Havana itinerary recalled the bygone days when East and West were swapping dissidents, with fugitives necessarily turning a blind eye to the human-rights failings of their new allies. It's been a long time since anyone looked at Russia with idealism—the country's current declining population is fueled largely by out-migration of young people—but the Snowden affair echoes those familiar contradictions....
"Snowden's decision to depart for Russia reasonably raised questions about what information he may have traded in exchange for safe passage but should reasonably make us wonder why he fled at all. If his primary motive for dispatching classified government information was to forestall the creeping arm of government surveillance, enlisting the assistance of China and Russia—two governments with an even feebler grasp on civil liberties than post-9/11 America—makes no sense. If, as some have argued, Snowden has shrewdly played off geopolitical tensions to avoid prosecution, he's simultaneously offered a patina of moral standing to governments guilty of the same actions he criticizes."Like a generation of leftists during the Cold War—though this time it seems to be through anti-war libertarianism—Snowden is so focused on denouncing the evils of his own society that he doesn't mind endorsing countries that do all the same things, only worse.
So much for Snowden's own moral standing. What really struck me was the whole Cold War analogy. David Francis expands on this idea.
"Snowden is a dissenter with a bag full of top-secret documents, visiting U.S. rivals like Russia and China in the hopes that they or one of their allies will grant his asylum. It's a story of betrayal, shifting world power, and a secret, silent continuous war being fought in the shadows. It's a story that could have taken place in the 1970s, with West Berlin standing in for Hawaii, the site of Snowden's deceit, and East Berlin taking the place of Moscow, the city where he's currently hiding.
"It's the first story of the 21st Century Cold War."That's what is really concerning about this whole saga. It is the sense, as Francis puts it, that "countries are lining up behind either the United States or China based on broad governing philosophies." In this case, the other side is defined, not by doctrinaire Communism, but by a less ideological, more nationalistic authoritarianism.
Francis goes on to describe the big prize of this Cold War as Africa, which Obama has been ignoring—somewhat ironically, given his father's background. Why Africa? Because it is on the rise economically and may soon provide one-quarter of the world's workforce.
But that's what I mean when I say that this is much bigger than Snowden. It's about the sense that the foreign adversaries of freedom have fully and finally gotten over the shock of the fall of Communism and are reconstituting an anti-American axis—for whom Snowden is serving as a "useful idiot."
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