Edward Snowden: heel or hero?

[klr]

I'm at a loss. On my iPad and can't see how to do a poll from here. Plus am knackered as bed beckons..

I vote hero with some reservations.

Just suggest a list of options when you're ready. A mod will probably have to add it anyway.

[Audley Strange]

This is a very interesting question that to me questions the basic concepts of citizenry. Is what he is doing somehow jeopardising the security of the American People and their military, or is it only a threat to an increasingly invasive security state? Or rather is he just some ideologue with some need to be centre of attention or perhaps someone who is working for a foreign government.

I don't know the answers to any of that, but I'd assume that he knew what had happened to previous U.S. security whistle-blowers of late beforehand, so I'm left wondering his motivation and without knowing that, I think I'll fall on the side of, some guy in breach of contract.

[Warren Dew]

Poll?

I'm sure the "hey, the gestapo aren't coming after me yet, I don't care" contingent would win a poll. That doesn't mean they're right..

[Warren Dew]

But where to draw the line? In my work, I have access to huge amounts of sensitive information. It's just the nature of the work I do. Should I start leaking that data whenever I see something I don't like*? What should be my threshold?

You should leak it when you are certain that what you are doing is morally and ethically wrong, you can leak it in an ethically sound fashion, and revealing it is so important that you're willing to give up all you have to do it. All these apply to Snowden.

Note that probably none of them applied to Manning.

[Ian]

I've had mixed feelings about the guy, but they've shifted recently. A few days ago I would've said neither hero nor traitor, but closer to the former than the latter and I had some sympathies for the guy who seemed to have acted nobly, if somewhat carelessly. Right now I'd say much closer to traitor, and I'd personally like to punch his teeth in. Why the change of heart? Well, what he's released to the news and the story the public has heard might not be everything there is to know about this matter, and that's all I'm going to say about that.

Anyway, I still can't help but shrug over what's been brought to light. Thanks to data mining, private corporations have FAR more insight into who you are and what you do with your time than the intelligence community ever will (ponder, for a moment, merely the sort of junk mail that shows up in your mailbox or email account)... but lo and behold people are shocked to find out that Uncle Sam's electronic intelligence agency, charged with the security of its citizens, has also found Big Data to be useful for some security purposes? Jeez, gimme a minute while I clutch a copy of 1984 while breaking into a cold sweat. Moreover, the information accessible by the NSA only relates to metadata; if they want to listen in to what you're saying and transcribe it, that still requires a warrant, something not as easy to obtain as many might believe. It's a gross simplification to brush off the US government as "paranoid" with no reason to worry about security, and even sillier to bring up the Ben Franklin quote, seeing as how he's somebody who lived long before the days of WMDs, cyber warfare or other modern concerns. And it is dumber still to invoke slippery-slope reasoning and say that we're on the way towards turning into the Fourth Reich. People have been concerned over Big Data and manipulation via private interests long before this news story came up, and those companies have squat for federal oversight compared to the intel community. The truth is that the American intelligence community is the most transparent of any major power on earth, by a (from my perspective) rather annoying mile in fact, and many people just plain aren't used to the idea that intelligence actually does require some degree of data collection/snooping - but they demand results from it nonetheless.

An excellent article I came across last week:

The Real Reason You're Mad at the NSA

Trigger Warning!!!1! :

"What's really going on here?" That's the question I typically ask students to kick-start a discussion about some aspect of American intelligence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where I teach a graduate course on the subject.

This same question might fairly be asked about the controversy dominating the news since the leak that revealed the intelligence community's highly classified electronic surveillance program. Why are we so fascinated with this case? Why are some Americans outraged at the government while others are outraged at the leaker? Why do so many of us have such firm and passionate views about all of this?

At one level, the answer is simple: Intelligence is a sexy subject, particularly in the post-9/11 era. And the surveillance program was a secret, so who wouldn't be interested? But this controversy taps into deeper cultural strains that go to the very heart of the intelligence community's role in America, and perhaps our maturation as a nation. The bottom line is that intelligence, as a profession, still does not sit comfortably in our polity. There are a number of reasons for this.

First, the essential qualities of good intelligence inevitably clash with the underlying values of an open, pluralistic, and free society such as ours. The effectiveness of our democracy depends on an informed citizenry; effective intelligence depends on withholding and protecting information deemed sensitive. As citizens, Americans cherish their privacy; intelligence officers, subject to frequent background checks, polygraphs, and intrusive financial disclosure, are accustomed to giving it up. The functioning of our system revolves around the rule of law; the functioning of intelligence, while based in American public law, relies on the willingness of its officers to "get chalk on their cleats" to quote former CIA Director Michael Hayden -- and to actually break the laws of other countries by secretly recruiting foreign nationals as agents. So as the curtain is pulled back on the NSA's surveillance program, many of us instinctively recoil -- and even some supporters wince a little. Meanwhile, prurient interest in the details skyrockets.

Second, we are a "young" intelligence nation, and intelligence is still the most novel tool in our foreign policy kit. The United States was the last major country to organize intelligence at the national level. To be sure, intelligence played a role in the Civil War, and our military branches have long had specialized intelligence services. But as late as 1929, the secretary of state, Henry Stimson, could declare in all seriousness that "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail," as he cut his department's funding for America's first cryptanalysis organization -- the so-called Black Chamber. By contrast, the French had had a "cabinet noir" as far back as the 16th century -- an organization within the post office tasked by the king specifically with reading other people's mail. The Chinese have thought systematically about intelligence since strategist Sun Tzu's historic writing in the 6th century BC; the British had an organized spy service under Elizabeth I in the 16th century; the Russians have embraced the profession for centuries, as have most of our European partners. But it was not until 1947 that intelligence really entered the U.S. national conversation with the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency.

In other countries, intelligence still holds plenty of fascination for the public, but many older nations, unlike the United States, have domestic intelligence services and have integrated the profession more comfortably into their cultures. Besides, they do not "leak" intelligence at anywhere near the frequency that we do, so material with the potential to shock or startle is much less plentiful.

Third, modern intelligence controversies are occurring at a moment when surveys by Pew and other polling organizations show that American distrust of government is at an all-time high, ranging between 73 and 80 percent in the last few years. I recall some years ago seeing a Ted Koppel interview with a successful Chinese businessman who, when asked if he liked his government, said: "I don't like it, but I trust it." I wonder if we have not come to think exactly the reverse in the United States. In my lifetime, I have seen us move from broad acceptance of governmental competence and authority in the Eisenhower era through a series of events that have led us to this low point -- the multiple assassinations of the 1960s, bitter division over Vietnam, the Watergate affair, Iran-Contra, the Clinton-era scandals, the Iraq imbroglio, and now the IRS controversy.

This legacy encourages us to always look for the dark side in governmental actions, and when we find a credible instance of wrongdoing -- regrettably not so hard in recent years -- we assume it is symptomatic of the whole. The partisanship everyone comments on today may or may not be a factor in this, but at a minimum it serves to keep the focus on the problems and push off constructive dialogue on solutions.

The surprise and shock provoked by this latest revelation is matched only by one little-appreciated irony: The United States is by far the world's most transparent nation on intelligence matters, and its spy services are without question the most closely and thoroughly overseen. Any adversary studying the frequent open congressional testimonies by intelligence officials, our daily press stories, our declassified intelligence publications, and our endless stream of leaks, would have to be hopelessly dim to not understand our priorities and deduce many of our methods. For example, the annual threat assessment that the director of national intelligence must present publicly to Congress -- I have presented it myself -- is a serious and detailed document that gives away no actual secrets but is certainly a reliable guide to our intelligence priorities and the main lines of our analytic thinking, as are annual unclassified reports to Congress on subjects like the foreign ballistic missile threat. Foreign intelligence officials, who do not have such requirements, endlessly ask me: Why, in heavens name, do you Americans do this?

Most of us who've worked in the field strongly support congressional oversight, which has the virtue of being the only real connection our profession has to the citizenry it serves. But to my knowledge, no other legislature in the world gets intelligence products approaching the scope and magnitude of what our oversight committees receive -- nearly all of the community's analytic assessments and literally hundreds of substantive briefings and special reports a year. Even our closest allies restrict their legislative oversight largely to budgets and only rarely delve into substantive product. In fact, foreign partners frequently object to our inclusion of their reporting in the assessments we send to Congress, because their own legislatures are barred from seeing the reporting they pay to acquire!

Another aspect of American life laid bare by the current controversy is the wide gulf between intelligence professionals and those who ask why a leak like this does damage. To an experienced intelligence officer, it's the ultimate "duh" question -- a bit like asking if a flashlight might be helpful on a dark night. Sure, adversaries assume we do some of this, but they don't know how we do it or how effective we are. The typical intelligence officer asks: Why should we give any detail or confirmation to people trying to kill us when they volunteer nothing and rely on secrecy as their most effective asymmetric tool against our superior power? In the intelligence game, we succeed as much by fostering ambiguity and uncertainty as by our technical ingenuity.

This gulf may just be symptomatic of that old Washington saying that "where you stand depends on where you sit." For the average citizen, the thought bubble when hearing about an intelligence leak may be "Isn't that fascinating... I've always wondered about that." For the average intelligence officer, often grappling with an adversary employing deception and tight security, the thought bubble is, "Damn -- how hard do you want my job to be?"

So the controversy over surveillance reveals much about us as a nation and about the cultural divide between the intelligence profession and those with a different focus. Where does it go from here? A prediction: The surveillance program will be endlessly and publicly debated, investigated, eviscerated, and digested. In the end, we will all get comfortable with some not-so-very different version of it, perhaps buttressed by a more consensus-based legal foundation. In the process, we will have created a public guidebook to how we do this type of intelligence, and our citizens will be much more educated and sophisticated about our intelligence methods.

But so will those who want to know all of this even more desperately than we do. There is no having it both ways. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2 ... 1481237582

[Audley Strange]

Once a precedent is set politically, it generally takes a lot of effort for that to be seen as extraordinary once implemented, in fact more often than not, without a public hoohah it becomes normal practice. The issue is as you point out Ian, not a new or temporary one, but it is a genuine concern not because of how it's being used now, but that when it does become a normal mechanism of State Intelligence, that it is easily exploited. It is not a slippery slope fallacy to assume that Crazy bastards take charge of Governments and use all kinds of things to keep the people in line.

I have to ask though. What is the NSA in this regard? Are they autonomous or will they just be following orders and is having 3rd party employees not just asking for trouble, both with Snowden as employees and with any potential crazy fuckers who might have a lot of money to run such a business and an have a dangerously insane ideology, you know, like that mad bastard who ran Blackwater.

[Ian]

It might be an exaggeration to call it a slippery slope, but the simple fact is that the infrastructure of modern communications inherently lends itself to surveillance capabilities. But I have a hard time imagining what we have today, the various programs and their oversights, ever transforming into the Stasi or the NKVD. It's just not part of our culture, and I doubt it ever will be.

People can take the post I made above in one of two ways: that's I'm an apologist for the NSA, or that I'm someone who tries to build bridges and show that things probably aren't nearly as sinister as some let themselves believe. I'm well aware that the gulf between the public and the intel agencies is a wide one, so I'm really trying to do the latter.

One thing I don't mind saying here: my years with this security clearance have made me less cynical than I would have been (or was) without it. Honestly, sometimes I roll my eyes over what cautious little cupcakes we can be.

Wanna hear an intelligence community joke? I first heard this one about six years ago:

Q: How can you spot an extrovert at the NSA?
A: He's the one looking down at other people's shoes when he talks.

[Audley Strange]

I'm not assuming any flag waving or anything. I had, once, a conversation with a Gentleman at a wedding who was officially "high up in the Foreign office" (I think he's now a Lord or something) His job entailed a lot of sifting through incoming reports from different places and he told me, without a hint of irony, that if people knew just how horrible things could be, they'd never leave the house.

Sure the simple fact is that it lends itself to easy surveillance we all know that and people are blasé with their privacy when it comes to Corps but not Govs. Here is my issue, if intelligence is to be outsourced, who is it being outsourced to? We've recently had a problem here with the media running all sorts of nefarious criminal spying on the people of this country to sell papers and there were hints at some retaliatory threats against the police and politicians by those people who had information on them. That's power. Now you may not have a paranoid politburo to worry about, but you do have a bunch of sociopathic plutocrats. You really want them and their employees having access to such vast information?

Qui Bono?

[Robert_S]

FWIW, I can't help thinking of the character Snowden from Catch-22.

[pErvinalia]

[pErvinalia]

The truth is that the American intelligence community is the most transparent of any major power on earth, by a (from my perspective) rather annoying mile in fact, and many people just plain aren't used to the idea that intelligence actually does require some degree of data collection/snooping - but they demand results from it nonetheless.

So why did the former head of the NSA lie to congress(?) a year or two ago when asked about the extent of spying on private communications?

[JimC]

The truth is that the American intelligence community is the most transparent of any major power on earth, by a (from my perspective) rather annoying mile in fact, and many people just plain aren't used to the idea that intelligence actually does require some degree of data collection/snooping - but they demand results from it nonetheless.

So why did the former head of the NSA lie to congress(?) a year or two ago when asked about the extent of spying on private communications?

Because intelligence agencies everywhere are a law unto themselves...

[Audley Strange]

@ Ian

"Well, what he's released to the news and the story the public has heard might not be everything there is to know about this matter, and that's all I'm going to say about that."

Are you being polite or are you forbidden? I am very interested in these characters, have been since "Spycatcher" was released and afterwards. There tends to be something deeply selfish about many of the whistleblowers, often it seems that its the money or the notoriety they desire and sometimes, like David Shayler or Bradley Manning, (and Assange I'm guessing) they seem to be unstable. Shayler thinks he's a female Jesus or something these days.

While I don't doubt smear campaigns, in many of these situations their own words and actions betray them.

[Coito ergo sum]

There is a distinction between guys like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange. Assange didn't work for the government, and did not take an oath, he is not under a legal obligation to keep government secrets. Snowden and Manning are -- so, for them to be true whistleblowers, they have to be revealing illegal activity.

We shall see where this winds up.

Something seems sort of contrived about the whole Snowden thing. It just doesn't seem to me to make sense what he's doing. But, I have no idea what is going on. I object to the general wiretapping and data mining process going on with the NSA and otherwise, but as a juror, I'm still deliberating on Snowden.

[Coito ergo sum]

The truth is that the American intelligence community is the most transparent of any major power on earth, by a (from my perspective) rather annoying mile in fact, and many people just plain aren't used to the idea that intelligence actually does require some degree of data collection/snooping - but they demand results from it nonetheless.

So why did the former head of the NSA lie to congress(?) a year or two ago when asked about the extent of spying on private communications?

Because intelligence agencies everywhere are a law unto themselves...

That, of course, is not the way it is supposed to be.