Snowden’s heroism

Ten years ago this week, Edward Snowden began shocking the world with his revelations of federal surveillance crime sprees. Unfortunately, many of the media outlets that used his disclosures of confidential information have long since shunned him or joined the shameless stampede calling for his prosecution.

Snowden did heroic service in awakening Americans to Washington ravishing their privacy. Snowden’s ‘reward’ is to be banished in Russia without a snowball’s chance in hell of a fair trial if he returns to America. But as he courageously declared, “I would rather be without a state than without a voice.” He explained why he leaked classified information: “I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.”

To recognize Snowden’s contribution to liberty, it helps to review the political and legal landscape before his revelations. In 2008, Sen. Barack Obama’s denunciations of the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretaps secured his image as a champion of civil liberties. Campaigning for president, Obama pledged “no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens…. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient.” Unfortunately, Obama didn’t promise not to ignore the law when it was “really, really convenient.”

After Obama clinched the Democratic Party presidential nomination, he reversed himself and voted for granting immunity to telecom companies that betrayed their customers to Uncle Sam. This was a bellwether for Obama’s future constitutional depredations. After Obama took office, his appointees speedily expanded National Security Agency seizures of Americans’ personal data. The Washington Post characterized Obama’s first term as “a period of exponential growth for the NSA’s domestic collection.”

The acid drip of revelations of illicit surveillance that began after 9/11 continued regardless of Obama’s “Hope and Change” mantra. Shortly after Obama’s inauguration, former NSA analyst Russell Tice declared that the NSA was monitoring “all Americans’ communications. Faxes, phone calls and their computer communications.” Tice also revealed that the NSA had targeted journalists and news agencies for wiretaps. Tice’s revelations failed to hold the media’s attention.

In June 2009, the NSA admitted that it had accidentally collected the personal information of vast numbers of Americans. The New York Times reported that “the number of individual communications that were improperly collected could number in the millions.” But it wasn’t a crime; it was merely inadvertent “overcollection” of Americans’ personal data which NSA would retain for (at least) five years.

In 2010, the Washington Post reported that “every day, collection systems at the [NSA] intercept and store 1.7 billion emails, phone calls and other type of communications.” In 2011, NSA expanded a program to provide real-time location information of every American with a cell phone, acquiring more than a billion cell phone records each day from AT&T. Regardless, the media continued portraying Obama as a civil liberties savior.

Obama perpetuated perverse Bush-era legal doctrines to totally shield federal surveillance from judicial scrutiny. After the Supreme Court accepted a case on warrantless wiretaps in 2012, the Obama administration urged the justices to dismiss the case. A New York Times editorial labeled the administration’s position “a particularly cynical Catch-22: Because the wiretaps are secret and no one can say for certain that their calls have been or will be monitored, no one has standing to bring suit over the surveillance.”

Cynical arguments sufficed for five justices. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, declared that the court was averse to granting standing to challenge the government based on “theories that require guesswork” and “no specific facts” proving federal targeting, based on fears of “hypothetical future harm.” The Supreme Court insisted that the government already offered plenty of safeguards – such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court – to protect Americans’ rights. Law professor Stephen Vladeck commented on the decision: “The coffin is slamming shut on the ability of private citizens and civil liberties groups to challenge government counterterrorism policies.”

Three months later, newspapers around the world began publishing confidential documents leaked by Snowden. Americans learned that the NSA can tap almost any cell phone in the world, exploit computer games like Angry Birds to poach personal data, access anyone’s email and web browsing history, remotely penetrate almost all computers, and crack the vast majority of computer encryption. The NSA used Facebook and Google apps to send malware to targeted individuals. NSA filched almost 200,000,000 records a month from private computer cloud accounts. Obama’s Justice Department secretly decreed that all phone records of all Americans were “relevant” to terrorism investigations and that the NSA could therefore justifiably seize everyone’s personal data.

Snowden revealed how the NSA had covertly carried out “the most significant change in the history of American espionage from the targeted surveillance of individuals to the mass surveillance of entire populations.” The NSA created a “repository capable of taking in 20 billion ‘record events’ daily and making them available to NSA analysts within 60 minutes.” The NSA is able to snare and stockpile a billion times more information than did East Germany’s Stasi secret police, one of the most odious agencies of the post-war era. Snowden later commented, “Suspicionless surveillance does not become okay simply because it’s only victimizing 95 percent of the world instead of 100 percent.”

Seeking to defuse the controversy, Obama justified NSA surveillance as simply “a tradeoff we make…. To say there’s a tradeoff doesn’t mean somehow that we’ve abandoned freedom. I don’t think anybody says we’re no longer free because we have checkpoints at airports.”

On Capitol Hill, the response to Snowden’s disclosures ranged from vacuous to devious. House Speaker John Boehner declared, “When you look at these programs, there are clear safeguards. There’s no American who’s going to be snooped on in any way, unless they’re in contact with some terrorists somewhere around the world.” Other congressional leaders quickly denounced Snowden as a “traitor.” House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich) and former NSA chief Michael Hayden publicly joked about putting Snowden on a government kill list. Rogers won the “DC Knucklehead of the Week” Prize when he defended illicit surveillance: “You can’t have your privacy violated if you don’t know your privacy is violated.”

Excerpted: ‘Ten Years Later, Snowden’s Heroism Shines Ever Brighter’.

Courtesy: Counterpunch.org