Edward Snowden: An Engineer with a Mission

With his alternative TV message, the former intelligence employee reveals his inner conflict: He is the creation of the very machine that he so thoroughly discredited.

He is now stepping out of the shadows and into the light. For months, Edward Joseph Snowden let the material that he released from the innermost parts of the American National Security Agency speak for itself and be interpreted by others.

Now he himself is speaking out with an “alternative” Christmas message on British TV in a big interview with an American newspaper. “Hi and Merry Christmas!” he greets the whole world. So far his public image has been determined by the world’s view of him. Now we are finding out a little bit about Snowden’s view of the world — and himself.

To some he was a “traitor,” to others he was a “freedom fighter” — these powerful labels said more about the people who judged him than they did about him. Public perceptions of Snowden’s character guided by interests have so far all too clearly affected his public image. His new friends are just as guilty of that as his new enemies are.

Snowden’s character remained a phantom of sorts into which anyone could read anything that they wanted. But now that’s changing. So who’s speaking to us?

A Girlfriend and a House in Hawaii

He’s certainly not an intellectual. He thinks and speaks like an engineer who always saw his calling in making technical things work and who always liked to work — in a very American way.

He is a son of the middle class. He came from a good officer’s household, and at the age of 20, he volunteered to serve in the U.S. Army in the Iraq War. The only reason he was never deployed was because of a serious accident.

He is someone who, despite quitting his computer science studies, entered into the service of his country as an in-demand IT expert with a lot of talent and diligence. By doing so, he became wealthy. He had an annual income of $200,000, a girlfriend and a house in Hawaii.

Like a Magician’s Apprentice

But then the talented computer scientist must have had an experience akin to a magician’s apprentice. In his opinion, something very bad suddenly happened with the fancy computer technology that he knows inside and out, and that works so well.

Empowered by his magical broom of intimate knowledge of computer technology and its specialized application at the NSA, he decided to bring down the curtain. The way he sees it, he’s still serving his country — he’s working on its behalf.

“I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA,” he said. “I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don’t realize it,” Snowden revealed in the Christmas edition of The Washington Post.

Megalomania and Saviordom

In these words one might hear delusions of grandeur or just self-empowerment grounded in naïve idealism. That is a reflection of the precise delusion of omnipotence and the belief held by many people today that the NSA, his former employer, is the world’s savior.

In that light Edward Snowden seems to be a creation of the very machine that he so thoroughly discredited. That becomes even clearer when one reads about his mindset when he decided to run the huge personal risk of his disclosure project.

“You recognize that you’re going in blind, that there’s no model,” Snowden said of his decision to release information about NSA practices. “But when you weigh that against the alternative, which is not to act, you realize that some analysis is better than no analysis. Because even if your analysis proves to be wrong, the marketplace of ideas will bear that out. If you look at it from an engineering perspective, an iterative perspective, it’s clear that you have to try something rather than do nothing.”

The Principle of Trial and Error

Any analysis is better than no analysis — this maxim could be engraved into the NSA’s emblem. It is the philosophy of technically empowered people, whose unrestricted actions are based on the principle of trial and error, to which Snowden is fatally comparing his former employer.

Doing something just because one can do something, and doing nothing is not an option — all in the hope that something reasonable comes out of it. “I didn’t want to change society,” he said. “I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.”

This way of thinking sounds very much like a mission. That is what Snowden calls it: “The mission’s already accomplished,” which indicates that he sees his job as complete. “I already won.”

It is no coincidence that he chose the same words as George Walker Bush, who, as a U.S. president in his famous appearance on May 1, 2003 on board the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, praised the troops. Snowden obviously sees his “mission” as a monumental event in history.

What a dramatic change! A subaltern engineer of a gigantic surveillance machine has become an historical person of the digital age.

The Game with the Experiment

But it is a mission that will end in the control of seemingly almighty technology — the “society” should see what they make of it. He has thrown the balls into the air and is now watching to see who catches them, regardless of the consequences. But it remains to be seen who will still be hurt by Snowden’s experiment of trial and error.

The engineer has a mission but is a player at the same time. He is anxiously watching the course of billiard balls in motion, under the spell of technology, but still hopeful that the laws of technology can be aligned with his morality.

In the Name of the Children

Based on many of his statements, his thoughts can be divided into moral and civil rights. He claims to be acting in the name of the children.

“A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded unanalyzed thought,” he said in his Christmas message on the British TV Channel 4.

He is an engineer who has become disloyal to his technology and is on a mission against the intelligence machine that he himself helped train. He claims to be working in the name of all the children of the world, so in a sense he is working on behalf of all future humanity following the principle of trial and error on a victorious, historic mission. And according to him, he is still in the service of the very machine that is stealing from humanity the most human thing that it has: privacy.

Those are the inner conflicts of Edward Snowden that his Christmas message reveals.