Jim Geraghty talks about Edward Snowden and the NSA:
Everybody’s going to have an opinion on Edward Snowden, today the world’s most famous leaker.
In the coming days, you’re going to see a lot of people talking past each other, conflating two issues: one, did he do the right thing by disclosing all these details of the vast NSA system to gather data on Americans? And two, should he be prosecuted for it?
Of course, you can do the right thing and still break the law.
[. . .]
This may be a story with no heroes. A government system designed to protect the citizens starts collecting all kinds of information on people who have done nothing wrong; it gets exposed, in violation of oaths and laws, by a young man who doesn’t recognize the full ramifications of his actions. The same government that will insist he’s the villain will glide right past the question of how they came to trust a guy like him with our most sensitive secrets. Who within our national security apparatus made the epic mistake of looking him over — completing his background check and/or psychological evaluation — and concluding, “yup, looks like a nice kid?”
Watching the interview with Snowden, the first thing that is quite clear is that his mild-mannered demeanor inadequately masks a huge ego — one of the big motivations of spies. (Counterintelligence instructors have long offered the mnemonic MICE, for money, ideology, compromise, ego; others throw in nationalism and sex.)
Snowden feels he has an understanding of what’s going on well beyond most of his colleagues:
When you’re in positions of privileged access like a systems administrator for the sort of intelligence community agencies, you’re exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale then the average employee and because of that you see things that may be disturbing but over the course of a normal person’s career you’d only see one or two of these instances. When you see everything you see them on a more frequent basis and you recognize that some of these things are actually abuses.
What’s more, he feels that no one listens to his concerns or takes them seriously:
And when you talk to people about them in a place like this where this is the normal state of business people tend not to take them very seriously and move on from them. But over time that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up and you feel compelled to talk about. And the more you talk about the more you’re ignored. The more you’re told its not a problem until eventually you realize that these things need to be determined by the public and not by somebody who was simply hired by the government.”
My God, he must have been an insufferable co-worker.
‘Look, you guys just don’t understand, okay? You just can’t grasp the moral complexities of what I’m being asked to do here! Nobody here really gets what’s going on, or can see the big picture when you ask me to do something like that!’
‘Ed, I just asked if you could put a new bottle on the water cooler when you get a chance.’
Update: Politico put together a fact sheet on what we know about Edward Snowden. It’s best summed up by Iowahawk:
WTF? from HS dropout to Army washout to security guard to $200k/year cyber analyst to International Man of Mystery politico.com/story/2013/06/…
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) June 11, 2013
