{"id":2404,"date":"2014-08-24T11:17:27","date_gmt":"2014-08-24T15:17:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=2404"},"modified":"2014-08-24T22:25:33","modified_gmt":"2014-08-25T02:25:33","slug":"ed-snowden-hero-or-traitor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=2404","title":{"rendered":"Ed Snowden: Hero or Traitor?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post is not going to settle that question for you, and it\u2019s not one I thought I\u2019d be writing about, a recent resurgence in coverage of Snowden has made me think more deeply about him, now that the original panic and dismay have subsided. Most of the coverage is prompted by reporter James Bamford\u2019s recent article, published in Wired<\/em><\/a>. Bamford conducted the longest set of in-person interviews with Snowden since he went to ground in Russia a year ago. I\u2019ve also been studying Stuart Taylor, Jr.\u2019s, essay, published by Brookings<\/a>, \u201cThe Big Snoop: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Terrorists.\u201d<\/p>\n

Who Is Ed Snowden?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Ed<\/a>

Ed Snowden’s TED talk (photo: wikimedia.org)<\/p><\/div>\n

Snowden\u2019s position from the beginning has been that he is a patriot and a whistleblower, \u201cbent on saving his country from becoming an Orwellian security state,\u201d as Taylor puts it. Others<\/a> have recorded his ambition, his highly visible, well-polished initial announcements and PowerPoints, and his more recent TED talk, which may suggest more complex and troubling motivations<\/a>. Washington Post<\/em> reporter and author David Ignatius<\/a> (whose novel about a rogue CIA cyber-expert is reviewed on my home page) has said, \u201cSnowden looks these days more like an intelligence defector, seeking haven in a country hostile to the United States, than a whistleblower.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ironically, given the current fractured state of U.S.-Russia relations, Snowden was offered asylum there only if he stopped his work aimed \u201cat harming our American partners,\u201d Russian President Putin stipulated<\/a>. Snowden first withdrew his asylum application, but ultimately agreed<\/a> not to release more intelligence secrets. The stolen National Security Agency (NSA) documents are no longer in his hands.<\/p>\n

Security vs. Privacy<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

You will recall that in Snowden\u2019s jobs, he accumulated evidence that the NSA was collecting and storing phone records, emails, and other private Internet activity of a great many American citizens, not just those suspected of terrorism, associating with terrorists, or even remotely connected to any\u2014we \u201cordinary Americans.\u201d This revelation led to retired NSA director Keith Alexander\u2019s famous haystack analogy: If you want to find a needle in a haystack, you need the whole haystack.<\/p>\n

In polls, the majority of Americans oppose this wholesale domestic spying, and the government has damaged its credibility as a result. Yet, Snowden worries the public will become inured to disclosures of mass surveillance, as the PBS News Hour<\/a> reported. Our acceptance may be in part because Ordinary Americans feel privacy is already hopelessly lost, in part because we believe we are helpless to stop the spying, and in part because people tend to become numb to successive outrages and risks<\/p>\n

By spying on foreign citizens and leaders, NSA also has damaged relationships abroad. What the public has heard most about, however, is the spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel\u2019s cell phone calls, while \u201cthe violation of 80 million Germans is a nonstory,\u201d Snowden says.<\/p>\n

A fundamental and inevitable tension Taylor explores is between national security and individual privacy and the irony that a security apparatus is needed in order to protect <\/em>privacy. He covers, in a readable way, the basic tenets of relevant U.S. law going back to the Bill of Rights, in which the Fourth Amendment obligates the U.S. government to ensure that citizens \u201cbe secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.\u201d Before the telegraph, before the telephone, before the Internet, securing one\u2019s \u201cpapers and effects\u201d was relatively simple.<\/p>\n

Snowden Fallout<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Today, we must entrust the transmission and disposition of our communications to third parties that may or may not have an interest in protecting them or be able to do so when the NSA comes calling. However, the bad publicity Snowden\u2019s revelations generated for the telephone companies and Internet giants has prompted a rethinking of corporate policies and strengthening of encryption practices.<\/p>\n

Those steps haven\u2019t come cheap<\/a>. Tech companies have been hit by both substantial additional expenses and loss of income, as foreign clients become wary of their products\u2014a potential $180 billion revenue loss, according to Forrester Research analysts.<\/p>\n

In addition, the State Department says<\/a> Snowden has not only damaged U.S. intelligence-gathering, but also potentially endangered U.S. agents abroad, without citing specifics.<\/p>\n

Evolution of Law<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

After Watergate, Fourth Amendment protections were purportedly strengthened by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which put a layer of judicial review between U.S. citizens (or permanent resident aliens) and the intelligence agencies that want to spy on them. But post-9\/11, the Senate outflanked the FISA mechanism, in the hurriedly adopted Patriot Act. That new law widened the government\u2019s authority to conduct surveillance and investigations.<\/p>\n

Although critics predictably labeled the sweeping reforms President Obama proposed last spring as \u201cgoing too far\u201d and \u201cnot going far enough,\u201d the changes may have begun to move the needle. And, the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted to halt the NSA\u2019s practice of conducting warrantless searches of its database containing millions of Americans\u2019 emails and phone calls\u2014\u201cone of many proposed reforms that never would have happened had it not been for Snowden,\u201d Bamford claims.<\/p>\n

Evolution of Technology<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The \u201cexponential leap\u201d in authority under the Patriot Act coincided with greatly increased technical ability to collect, store, and monitor electronic communications data, a combination that, in Taylor\u2019s words, has \u201crun roughshod over laws, standards of conduct, and international norms,\u201d jeopardizing the desired balance between national security and individual privacy contained in the Fourth Amendment.<\/p>\n

NSA\u2019s new million-square-foot data storage facility in Bluffdale, Utah, potentially can hold \u201cupwards of a yottabyte of data, some 500 quintillion pages of text,\u201d Bamford says. Every hour, billions of phone calls, faxes, emails, computer-to-computer data transfers, and text messages from around the world flow through this facility. \u201cSome flow right through, some are kept briefly, and some are held forever.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then, there are the leaks. And, as Bamford points out, evidence suggests that Snowden is not the only leaker, because some media reports cite documents that apparently did not come from him. This put NSA in a real bind: \u201caccused of rogue behavior in its snooping,\u201d Taylor says, \u201cand of incompetence in protecting the information it had collected.\u201d Snowden says NSA cannot seem to tell which documents he just electronically \u201ctouched\u201d and those he actually stole, though he says he left digital clues to enable them to be differentiated. \u201cI figured they would have a hard time,\u201d he told Bamford. \u201cI didn\u2019t figure they would be completely incapable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Solutions?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

A second major tension, is \u201cthe severe limit on the degree to which transparency can be reconciled with functions of government that must be opaque \u2014 that is, secret \u2014 <\/em>in order to be effective,\u201d Taylor says. Certainly, the solutions Snowden himself suggests do nothing to reconcile that tension. In Bamford\u2019s article, he suggests, for example, \u201cmaking encryption a universal standard\u2014where all communications are encrypted by default.\u201d Regarding future leaks, he says, \u201cThe question for us is not what new story will come out next. The question is, what are we going to do about it?\u201d<\/p>\n

Further Information<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Check out the upper left corner of the Brookings article to see what its computers are tracking about you, as you read.<\/p>\n

NSA surveillance capabilities allow it to map your movements by monitoring the unique identifiers emitted by your cell phone, computer, and other electronic devices. You can get the flavor of this by checking out what Google can do<\/a>, unless your device has this feature turned off (how to turn it off<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Read about the MonsterMind<\/a>, a real? program designed to counter international electronic threats. It poses two dangers: the ability to wage autonomous retaliatory attacks that have unanticipated consequences; and, to the privacy point, the system\u2019s need to monitor virtually all communication between people in the United States and those overseas, as Snowden says, \u201cwithout a warrant, without probable cause or even a suspicion of wrongdoing. For everyone, all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Experts\u2019 views on the future of the Internet<\/a>, in light of a range of security concerns, reported in July 2014 by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post is not going to settle that question for you, and it\u2019s not one I thought I\u2019d be writing about, a recent resurgence in coverage of Snowden has made me think more deeply about him, now that the original … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[193,174,35,186],"tags":[416],"class_list":["post-2404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-espionage","category-first-draft-blog","category-real-life","category-technology","tag-real-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-CM","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2404"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2404\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2406,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2404\/revisions\/2406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}