He is still on the run but also somehow got caught already: Instead of discussing Edward Snowden’s revelations and the necessary consequences, America mainly discusses his flight and his motivations. The U.S. government couldn’t have hoped for a better resolution.
“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it,” immediately or later on. Edward Snowden probably wasn’t aware of this quote by American philosopher Henry David Thoreau, though he was aware of its consequences.
A whistleblower decides to oppose the lived values of the system through his actions. The price is estrangement, the danger of persecution; in many cases there are feelings of guilt. If a whistleblower shows his identity to the world, he submits himself to the public. The price is an absolute loss of control of the way he is perceived. Seen that way, Edward Snowden has already traded in a lot of life.
Since 30-year-old Snowden left Hong Kong, we have witnessed a thriller with diplomatic complications worthy of any movie, but not just that. The focus of the PRISM scandal has also shifted. The gigantic, historically unheard-of access that American and British intelligence agencies have to the world’s digital communication is no longer at the center of the discussion. Instead the discussion has become about the character of the man who made these revelations.
Soft Character Assassinations by the Government
This shift is in the interest of the American government, which has already started to foster doubts of Snowden’s character through public or anonymous media statements: his escape via China and Russia, the potential destinations Ecuador or Venezuela. All those are indicators that — according to an unnamed senior administration official — Snowden’s “true motive throughout has been to injure the national security of the U.S.”
Former head of the National Security Agency and CIA Michael Hayden played hobby psychologist and declared Snowden to be a “narcissist” driven by exaggerated vanity. Reputable American journalist John Cassidy, who works for the New Yorker, has long since called this a strategy to demonize Snowden and an attempt to delegitimize his concerns.
Since the whistleblower has disappeared from public view for some days, rumors are filling the vacuum. In The New York Times, unidentified Western intelligence experts conjectured that “the Chinese government had managed to drain the contents of the four laptops that Mr. Snowden said he brought to Hong Kong.” A “Russian special services veteran” claims to be absolutely certain that Edward Snowden has been interrogated by Russian agents in the Moscow airport.
No matter how speculative or how unproven all this is so far: Just by making such statements, they turn the whistleblower into a traitor of secrets. An intentional traitor or — almost worse — a naive boy who underestimated the consequences of his revelations. At least, that’s what remote diagnoses of various commentators might have you think. Snowden was a young man who acted either “to get off on the publicity” or at least “in a naive and thoughtless manner”; who drifted back and forth “between the real world and the fantasy world of computer games.”
The Motives Take Center Stage
By revealing his identity, Edward Snowden has tied his message to its messenger. The revelation was supposed to protect him, but it made him vulnerable on another level: It is much easier to besmirch a person than to besmirch the facts. It is legitimate to question a whistleblower’s motives, but it should be secondary. Now that question is turned into the main point, to the benefit of those whose actions were unveiled.
We ask, “Why does Snowden flee to countries which have a tenuous grasp of democracy?” instead of, “What concrete damage can the Department of Justice name as basis for their claim of espionage?” or “Are intelligence agencies still subject to democratic control?”
We ask, “Why doesn’t Germany offer asylum to Snowden?” rather than, “What major actions does the federal government take against PRISM and Tempora* and how is the democratic control of the BND [Bundesnachrichtendienst, the German foreign intelligence agency]?”
We ask, “What could make an intelligence analyst turn against the state?” rather than, “Why do so many people help the state conduct activities that have lost all sense of proportion and that are beyond democratic control?”
The questions may be wrong, but the answers have unfortunately become important now; the public opinion of Edward Snowden will contribute greatly to the future reputation of whistleblowers who step forward from intelligence agencies and governments. The judgment “hero or traitor” will influence every single administration employee in the U.S. and far beyond, if he is pondering publishing something against the will of his supervisors.
The New Definition of a Whistleblower
One can already see that it won’t get any easier: journalists of the publishing house McClatchy have recently revealed an “Insider Threat Program” by the U.S. government. Since 2011, government employees have been instructed to identify potential whistleblowers in advance and to punish the relay of information severely. The role of the whistleblower is reinterpreted along the way: according to the U.S. government, a whistleblower doesn’t show his evidence to the public anymore but addresses things internally. Anything else is considered treason, as eight indictments of government officials for espionage show.
So it’s no surprise that the Obama administration has only taken a single consequence so far in reaction to the PRISM revelations and it concerns the prevention of further leaks: at the NSA, administrators can now only access systems with the written permission of a second administrator.
The technical and psychological preparation has been made and yet there is something that could vitally support the American intelligence agencies in their fight against whistleblowers — if the general public agreed that Edward Snowden wasn’t a hero but a traitor.
They are well on their way to achieving this.
*Editor’s note: Tempora, according to The Guardian, is a clandestine security electronic surveillance program trialed in 2008, established in 2011 and operated by the British Government Communications Headquarters.
Yes, the majority of Americans have been messenger-killers since this unprecedented scandal began. But not because they’re evil or heartless. It has to do with several generations of them being raised on a steady diet of fear. Reading their comments on several internet sites convinces me that they’re even to frightened to read the NSA documents available to the entire world now — or even consult the extensive collection of articles and analyses on the Guardian website.
They may be the majority, but there is a substantial number of well informed Americans who regard it as their duty to keep up on the journalism — and many of them are not just racist Obama-haters. They are sincerely troubled by the events of the last 12 years, and as a non-American, I look to them to have some impact on their compatriots.