Why Snowden Lost

Despite the backlash that he continues to provoke around the world, Edward Snowden failed because he took flight. Other whistle-blowers had more courage.

Today, Daniel Ellsberg is 82 years old. In June 1971, the Rand Corporation analyst, who worked for the U.S. Department of Defense, created a scandal when he gave photocopies of the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times and then The Washington Post. The papers were a confidential government report on the reality of the Vietnam War under Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon and the manner in which the United States, under arguable pretexts, threw itself into a hopeless course of action. The charges against Daniel Ellsberg, pursued by the American courts for “theft, conspiracy and espionage,” provoked a great debate in the U.S. as the Vietnam War became more and more contested. Opinions and emotions were running so high that, under pressure, the case was eventually closed without further action by the court.

Edward Snowden could be the 2013 Ellsberg because what he revealed about the National Security Agency’s practices is especially scandalous. Even more shocking was that these indiscretions show that not only American institutions and officials were targeted, but also plenty of international institutions, nations and foreign leaders, the majority of which are U.S. allies.

Facing Public Opinion as Justice

Of course, let’s be reasonable: The U.S. is not the only country that uses such techniques. But according to Snowden’s information, they did so to such an extent and in such a systemic way that it is difficult to not be shocked, even though we tolerate these methods for their efficacy. And one questions even more the national leaders who, like Moscow during the Cold War, installed microphones in the offices of partners with whom they were entering into an accord liberalizing their trade. This would imply a minimum of mutual trust.

What a beautiful debate this could have been regarding the necessary protection of privacy in the face of the crucial war against those who threaten democracy and capitalism. This controversy has been well started, but up until the present it has not developed as it could have, for one reason: The whistle-blower, in lieu of facing public opinion and justice, has fled the country whose practices he denounced.

Stateless

Making circumstances worse, he took refuge in two successive countries that, as their histories attest, are renowned for their support for human rights and liberty: China and Russia! He gave one of them additional arguments that put his own country in an awkward position by revealing how the Americans infiltrated Chinese information systems. He allowed Russia to play the Big Man by refusing political asylum to the man who hurt the interests of “our American partners,” said Vladimir Putin, who compared the Snowden affair to that of dissident Andrei Sakharov. As if one could make a connection between the U.S. today and the USSR’s gulags!

Now that he has been denied political asylum practically everywhere and his American passport has been revoked, it would be in the best interests of Snowden, stateless, to stop running and stop listening to the WikiLeaks community’s advice because their leader is gloriously confined to a room in Ecuador’s London embassy. Edward Snowden must return to the United States and present himself before the courts and public opinion. Oddly enough, the most fervent defenders of his cause wish this as much as his die-hard opponents.