Edward Snowden made news this week with a plea for a presidential pardon that was as arrogant as it was pitiful.
I have taken a lot of flak over the years for repeatedly denouncing him. Here are excerpts from just three of the commentaries I’ve written in this regard.
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From “Complaints about NSA Spying Are Schizophrenic…and Misguided,” June 8, 2013:
Edward Snowden strikes me as little more than a narcissistic, egotistical, publicity-seeking idiot who is to national intelligence what Kim Kardashian is to media celebrity.
What’s more, he seems every bit the media whore she is, and is probably hoping that his NSA leaks will make him even more famous than her sex tape made her.
Not to mention the idiocy inherent in Snowden seeking political asylum in China to protest a lack of government transparency in the United States. At least the spies who betrayed their country during the Cold War had a reasonable expectation that a political and ideological Shangri-La awaited them in the Soviet Union…
All of which is why this NSA story is really all about the leaker, not his leaks. And with their hysterical and overblown coverage, the media are willingly, willfully, and wantonly making him into an international cause celebre who, in his deluded mind, has the two most powerful nations in the world fighting over him. Indeed, Snowden probably finds being in this hot seat positively ecstatic, if not priapic….
From “Ignorance Prevails re NSA Spying and Snowden Leaking,” June 14, 2013:
Americans complaining about the government spying on them is rather like Kim Kardashian complaining about the paparazzi taking pictures of her…
In this Information Age, tech companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, and WikiLeaks are masters of the universe. But they have created a schizophrenic human species — whose members share everything about everything, yet claim to be zealous about their privacy.
Only this explains the growing national outrage over the government’s National Security Agency (NSA) monitoring their promiscuous and indiscriminate digital footprints. But there’s no explaining why these nincompoops think it’s okay for tech companies to spy on them to sell them stuff, but not okay for the NSA to do so to keep them safe.
Not to mention how they blithely give up truly sensitive personal information for the convenience of buying stuff with credit cards. After all, records collected from such transactions make the generic phone records the NSA collects seem even less intrusive than a traffic cop’s speed gun.
But all we need is for terrorists to pull off another 9/11. For the same people venting outrage about government surveillance today will be venting even greater outrage over the government’s failure to monitor the footprints of those terrorists (i.e., connecting the dots).
- And from “Judge’s Ruling on NSA Spying…,” December 18, 2013:
I too would be championing Snowden’s professed cause if he had taken his treasure trove of NSA secrets to a reputable newspaper, like the New York Times or Washington Post, instead of entrusting it to a news hustler like the then-obscure lawyer/journalist/blogger Greenwald.
Recall that Snowden initially claimed his only mission was to inform the American people about the NSA’s surveillance activities. Well, with apologies to George W. Bush, he had just cause to declare, ‘Mission Accomplished,’ six months ago.
Moreover, rather than fleeing like a fugitive, Snowden could have become a confidential informant (like a latter-day Deep Throat), continued on with his seemingly idyllic life in Hawaii, and left it to his newspaper of choice to expose all of the secrets that are fit to print … in a manner that does not compromise national security.
Instead, this narcissistic, self-righteous, naive and self-appointed arbiter — not only of what metadata the government can collect, but also of what documents it can classify as top secret — conspired with Greenwald to make his face every bit as famous as his leaks. In the process he wittingly (or unwittingly) handed the ‘NSA’s crown jewels’ over to America’s two most-formidable adversaries, China and Russia, on a silver platter. No Chinese or Russian spy could ever have achieved such a feat – even in his wildest dream.
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Well, here’s to official vindication. It takes the form of a 36-page report by the House Intelligence Committee, which summarizes years of congressional investigations into the nature and effect of Snowden’s leaks.
Evidently, Snowden’s plea compelled the members of that committee to send President Obama a unanimously signed letter urging him not to pardon Snowden:
‘We urge you not to pardon Edward Snowden, who perpetrated the largest and most damaging public disclosure of classified information in our nation’s history,’ the bipartisan letter said.
Mr. Snowden is a ‘serial exaggerator and fabricator,’ who is ‘not a whistle-blower’…
‘Snowden caused tremendous damage to national security, and the vast majority of the documents he stole have nothing to do with programs impacting individual privacy interests — they instead pertain to military, defense and intelligence programs of great interest to America’s adversaries,’ the report said.
(New York Times, September 15, 2016)
I rest my case.
Related commentaries:
Snowden leaks undermining global security…