The Edward Snowden Affair

I’ve been trying to understand the media frenzy around NSA contractor Edward Snowden.  As media types are prone to do, they focus far more on headlines than investigating facts so it’s difficult to find out exactly what happened.  We are led to believe that Snowden, a high-school dropout who worked as a contractor to the US National Security Agency, not only had access to but also revealed these alarming details regarding highly sensitive surveillance that the US government was conducting on unsuspecting citizens:  Our phone records are being monitored.   

 Is anyone really shocked by this?  Anyone who has ever watched a spy movie or a gangster film knows that the government has the ability to see and hear just about anything we do.  And when terrorists like the Tsarnaev brothers conspire to detonate bombs at the Boston Marathon, we demand that the government do more to eavesdrop on bad guys so they can be stopped before they inflict their damage.  We want our government to identify, locate and round up all the colleagues that the Tsarnaev brothers corresponded with in the days leading up to and immediately after the attack, and the only way to do this is to have access to their phone records.  

So what’s the big deal?  The big deal is that people are uncomfortable with the idea that Big Brother knows too much about us.  Most brutal regimes demand loyalty from their citizens, and resistance can be easily nipped in the bud if the ruling class has access to otherwise private correspondence.    But at the end of a long, heated debate, most of us acknowledge the inevitable tradeoff of personal freedoms for greater security.  But we would feel more comfortable that our government would be responsible with this information if we didn’t have bald faced scandals involving the IRS and justice department using their influence to target political enemies.   It’s hard to take politicians seriously when they say “Trust us, we won’t use this information against you” when we just heard the IRS apologize for unfairly targeting groups who used names that ran afoul of the political leanings of the government employees in power.  

But let’s get back to Snowden.  We should be concerned that a low-level systems administration contractor could get access to classified information.  I’ve been to the NSA headquarters, and I have to say these are the most paranoid group of people I’ve ever encountered.  We couldn’t bring into the building any laptops, cameras, phones, jump drives, SD disks, CD-ROMs or anything that could be used to transfer information. We had to bring a US Government issued ID that matched the NSA employee sponsored invitation list, and there were guards with machine guns posted at the metal detector entrance to let us know how serious they were.  The conference rooms had no windows, lest someone spy through from some remote mountain vantage point. Nothing could be removed from the room, and we were subject to search before retrieving our items when exiting.  How could such a group possibly say “Oops, we didn’t think to restrict contractor access to our classified information”?  

More likely the case is that Snowden really didn’t have access to anything top secret, or even anything that wasn’t common knowledge.  Some people – maybe Snowden himself - apparently don’t spend time thinking that much of the stuff they put on the Internet, emails, facebook, etc can be seen by anyone with a computer, and that includes NSA employees.  So those people act shocked to learn that the US Government can see what you posted and who you called.  But just because Snowden isn’t the James Bond he wants to portray doesn’t mean we should treat his activity lightly.  The US Government’s response cannot be limited by the value of the information Snowden revealed, but it must send a message to any and all future traitors that the US takes disclosure agreements seriously, and you should not think that 15 minutes of international fame is a good tradeoff for betraying your country.  Just like presidents lying to congress, we cannot allow ourselves to discern between ‘important lies’ and ‘excusable lies’.  It’s the principle of the act and the integrity of the security measures that must be considered.  

So I hope we catch Edward Snowden, put him on trial, and send him to prison for a very long time.  But maybe not until he has had to live in hiding for a few months, and the world finds out how meaningless this spy info really is.  Then the world would see clearly how fame and notoriety is such a bad trade for a lifetime of fear, regret and shame.