Snowden Is an Example

The irony is that Russia is doing the United States a favor by keeping the whistle-blower quiet.

Edward Snowden is the centerpiece of the greatest manhunt ever undertaken by a government. It is taking place under the pretext of a law from World War I, the Espionage Act, but more specifically under the Patriot Act from Oct. 26, 2001, passed to further the panic caused by the attack on the twin towers. This law eliminated the last legal obstacles to phone tapping carried out by the North American federal authorities. And because of this, the administration has spent weeks scrutinizing the profiles of millions of employees linked to national security to ward off the risk that Snowden’s example might be infectious.

The last phase in the case of the CIA contractor, to whom Moscow has granted asylum and whom Washington accuses of disclosing state secrets, is the cancellation of the summit that President Obama was due to hold in the Russian capital with his counterpart, Vladimir Putin. But the decision to punish the world’s second nuclear power hides more than it reveals about the real interests of the U.S.

Cancelling the meeting only makes real sense when it is put into the context of the series of warnings, both public and private, to allies, friends, employees and adversaries — among which Spain is no exception — of the serious consequences that any contribution to helping the IT analyst leave Russia could entail. It is supposed that there he will not publish any more compromising material, as his host country is demanding. Washington is warning the world that it will bring the full force of the law down on anyone who dares to use telecommunications technology against the same power that has been secretly using this very technology to spy on its own citizens as well as foreigners. The operation has continued to have unhealthy effects that spread until they started affecting journalistic duty and public information in general. The president of the Associated Press, Gary Pruitt, has said that the sources linked to national security are drying up very quickly and that in Washington off-the-record comments from politicians and civil servants are at risk of becoming a thing of the past (Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com).

But the final irony is that the cancellation of the summit has not damaged the United States for two reasons. The first is because nothing positive could have been expected to come from the meeting in Moscow. There was no expectation that Russia would lend Washington a hand, neither with the civil war in Syria, nor the nuclear dispute with Iran, nor the negotiations seeking to reduce the nuclear arsenals of both powers. So Obama has saved an initiative that was probably doomed to fail, leaving the meeting for a better occasion. And the second is because Russia is doing another great favor for the United States by keeping Snowden quiet, simply because if Snowden fell into U.S. hands, the contents of the four computers on which he assures that he has accumulated valuable information — that are hidden in a safe place — would be disseminated by collaborators or accomplices of the libertarian hacker.

It fits perfectly into the strictest realpolitik that Washington should pursue Snowden and consider him a criminal and that it should so universally threaten anyone who intends to follow in his footsteps. It has all the more reason to do so following the precedent set by Julian Assange, who has taken refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London for the last 14 months. It is equally understandable that Putin should get one over on Obama, as long as he gets the opportunity to show who is and who isn’t totally independent. In particular, that Assange and Snowden, preceded by the case of Manning — who is already feeling the force of North American justice — have rendered an invaluable service to Western public opinion by revealing the extent of spying around the world. In 1900 in the United States, there was one telephone per 100 homes, whereas in 2012, there are more sets than people. Is this the limit of North American paranoia?

A year — the asylum period that Russia has initially granted – is long enough for whoever wants to negotiate, especially when Snowden maintains that he only published information that the public has a right to know, without putting lives or national interests in danger. The situation, with the two fugitives silenced but out of the United States’ reach, is a living reflection of diplomatic instability. Is this why the end of this conflict is negotiable?