NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden says he doesn’t care if people call him a traitor.
A day after Citizenfour won the Oscar for best documentary feature, its subject, Edward Snowden, appeared on Reddit for an “Ask Me Anything” question-and-answer session.
To be honest, I laughed at NPH. I don’t think it was meant as a political statement, but even if it was, that’s not so bad. My perspective is if you’re not willing to be called a few names to help out your country, you don’t care enough.
For what it’s worth, Greenwald—who joined Snowden and Citizenfour director Laura Poitras on the Reddit AMA—insisted on Reddit that he had laughed it off too, despite earlier calling it “stupid and irresponsible” to a BuzzFeed reporter.
Don’t let it happen in your country.
With that, Snowden implicitly brushed aside any notion that his time as a fugitive in Russia might have caused him to rethink the intelligence leaks that made him the target of an international manhunt. He has repeatedly said that his life in Russia is “great,” though he faces charges of theft and espionage back in the United States.
Redditors cheered Snowden’s resolve. That said, on a practical level, it’s unclear how much earlier he could have realistically come forward. After all, he had only worked at Booz Allen for a few months before he began leaking documents to Greenwald, Poitras, and the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman, among others.
On the other hand, many of the documents he turned over to the media actually came from his time at Dell, where he worked on the computer firm’s CIA and NSA accounts from 2011 to 2013. Had he blown the whistle then, it’s conceivable the programs he revealed would have been slightly less far along. Whether they would have been any easier to dismantle is another question. I tried asking Snowden myself, but my question didn’t get enough upvotes from other Redditors to merit a response.
We can devise means, through the application and sophistication of science, to remind governments that if they will not be responsible stewards of our rights, we the people will implement systems that provide for a means of not just enforcing our rights, but removing from governments the ability to interfere with those rights.
Call Snowden what you will, but he’s right about this much: The U.S. government today views its citizens’ privacy as a lower priority than its own spying capabilities. You can see this not only in the NSA’s surveillance programs, but in the words of President Obama, who supports strong encryption only if it’s weak enough for the government to get around it.
Thomas Hobbes might differ with Snowden on the sort of rights that humans would enjoy in a state of nature. But John Locke, and many others, would agree with him that “there must always be a balance of power between the governing and the governed.” Snowden is convinced that balance is out of whack, and he has no regrets about allegedly breaking the law in order to realign it. Good for him.
Oh, and perhaps now we can all stop whining about that Neil Patrick Harris joke. It was one of the few funny things he said all night.
Was Edward Snowden a Traitor?