I Don't Care Where He Is

Edward Snowden, the former contractor who is credited with pulling the veil off of PRISM, the massive federal surveillance program, is in Moscow at this writing, reportedly asking Ecuador for asylum.

Hero or traitor, he picks some strange places to escape U.S. charges: Hong Kong (China) and now Moscow. He reportedly considered Cuba and Venezuela. Perhaps since Julian Assange was able to hide in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, Snowden figured he’d find some refuge in that South American country.

Those who think he’s a traitor would no doubt prefer to see him in the confined spaces of an American prison, but his other choices aren’t so great. If I were choosing places to live, Hong Kong, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela and Ecuador would probably not be high on the list. He can never again set foot in the United States or a country that’s too friendly with us if he wants to avoid capture. Those who want to see him paying a price for his misdeed might take some comfort from the fact that he will always have to be looking over his shoulder. As for Julian Assange, BTW, I don’t see the Ecuadorean embassy listed among London’s five-star hotels. Plus, he can’t use any free tickets to those West End shows.

It may be easy for others to conclude that Snowden is a hero, but heroes don’t always get an immediate ticker-tape parade.  We’ve only recently gotten close to the concept of honoring our own service members who fought in unpopular wars. Heroism usually requires a price of some kind, which Mr. Snowden is already paying.

Personally, I would prefer we spend as little time and money as possible on this fellow. And perhaps we’ll be a little more careful before we hire government contractors in the future.

One piece of advice, though, Ed: If I were you, I’d be careful to avoid open spaces. With this administration’s penchant for using drones, well, a round of golf might be a really bad idea right now.

Hero/Leaker Worship

Wherever he is now, there’s no question that Edward Snowden, who revealed the existence of the massive PRISM data-gathering program (or metadata, or whatever that’s called) is the most famous man on the planet – but is he a hero?

Personally, I’m not sure I’m ready to see him fitted him for a red cape quite yet. I actually had a Facebook friend who said Snowden should be compared to patriots who won the United States its independence from Britain. Really? Didn’t he violate a secrecy oath? I’m also a little bothered by the fact that he fled to Hong Kong – a little too close to China for my taste. And it has been pointed out that there were existing channels for whistleblowing, that the world stage wasn’t necessary.

Fine. Perhaps he could have used existing channels, but it might have been a long time before any of us actually heard the whistle. This way, we all heard it instantly.

Maybe I should be outraged at the existence of this kind of program. I’m not. It may even be a good idea in some respects. But do we deserve to know about it and to have a debate about it? Absolutely!

There are a couple of things that bother me about it, aside from the concept of surveillance (that word is troublesome, only because it implies someone’s actually looking at all this data at all times – that’s not happening). But I heard the feds are building a zillion-dollar facility somewhere to house all of this stuff  – a home for the “haystacks” in which the security folks would look for “needles” when learning of a terrorist threat. How many such facilities will be necessary going forward? Second, why is a 29-year-old contractor with no college degree given access to top secret information – and paid $200,000 a year? How many more Snowdens are we relying on to keep our secrets (and some secrets have to be kept)? Now that we know what we’re paying for, are we getting our money’s worth?

As I’ve said before, the average American can’t get too upset about privacy loss when he’s willing to sell his soul to the digital devil after seeing an online deal for a $100 flat-screen TV.

In my view, the only thing that’s really going to protect us from government abuse is SUNLIGHT. Snowden did us a favor. He ripped the black curtain off the window – but he didn’t exactly topple the Berlin Wall. Before he ascends into heaven – or descends to the other place – we all have something to discuss first.

Out of the Barn 2

The nightly cable new outrage festival was in full swing last night amid reports by the Washington Post and The Guardian that federal agencies had “back doors” into the servers of Silicon Valley companies to spy on Americans, ostensibly for collecting information on us to protect us against terrorism. I’d like to be able to tell you I’m surprised, but am not, and can only get outraged up to a point.

The story, of course, is bad news for the Obama administration, and casts the President himself as something of a hypocrite. While campaigning for office, he was critical of the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretap program, but the Post report reveals that he certainly can’t pretend he’s a champion of privacy.

While the government’s PRISM program is intended as a national security tool and is supposed to make us feel safer, in many respects it does exactly the opposite. If the government can collect information on all of us for national security reasons, the obvious fear is, suppose at some point down the road, the government decides to use this capability for other reasons?

That said, the civil libertarians can burst their blood vessels about big government, but they and the rest of us don’t get nearly as exercised about the data mining that’s already going on by the private corporations we all connect or deal with and what’s being done with that information about us. There is just as much potential for harm, if not more.

We do have to ask ourselves about our own complicity in all of this. Most of us carry devices that report exactly where we are at all times. Every time we use the Internet to look something up – maybe on a site we wouldn’t care to have others know we visited – that visit is being logged someplace, and presumably could come back to bite us later on.

And, I just can’t wait to hear the screams after private aerial drones go into widespread use. We’d better start thinking about getting ourselves fitted for lead-foil suits.

Although the Post story doesn’t surprise me, I certainly recognize the beneficial effect of investigative reporting like this. More than a year ago, I observed here that the privacy horse had long since left the barn. There may not be a lot we can do about that, but at least some entity is telling us where the horse is headed. And though it may be inconvenient, we still have a fundamental individual choice about whether we go along for the ride.

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