“The 21st century mole demands no payments for his secrets.
He sees himself instead as an idealist, a believer in individual sovereignty
and freedom from tyranny. Chinese and Russian spooks will not tempt him.
Rather, it's the bits and bytes of an online political philosophy that attract
his imagination, a hacker mentality founded on message boards in the 1980s,
honed in chat rooms in the '90s and matured in recent online neighborhoods like
Reddit and 4chan. He believes above all that information wants to be free, that
privacy is sacred and that he has a responsibility to defend both ideas,”
writes Michael Scherer in a recent edition of TIME magazine. Personally, TIME
is a long way from its prime both qualitatively and quantitatively, when it was
actually a serious news conveyor rather than a puff rag rattling off this kind
of soporific drivel.
A more rational explanation for the new breed of “informers”
like Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden is that they were
weaned in an Internet Wild West free from any constraint whatever. What Snowden
is accused of doing according to TIME—passing
documents to the press revealing “a massive program to compile U.S. telephone
records into a database for antiterrorism and counterintelligence investigations”
including the operation called “Prism,” which gives the NSA “access to records
at major online providers like Google, Facebook and Microsoft to search
information on foreign suspects with court approval”—seems awfully tame reading
compared to what some suggest what amateur “informers” like Snowden are actually guilty of, which I will get to
later. Meanwhile, Scherer continues:
“The U.S. National Security infrastructure was built to
protect the nation against foreign enemies and the spies they recruit.
Twenty-something homegrown computer geeks like Snowden, with utopian ideas of
how the world should work, scramble those assumptions. Just as antiwar
protesters of the Vietnam era argued that peace, not war, was the natural state
of man, this new breed of radical technophiles believes that transparency and
personal privacy are the foundations of a free society. Secrecy and
surveillance, therefore, are gateways to tyranny. And in the face of tyranny,
the leakers believe, rebellion is noble. ‘There is no justice in following
unjust laws,’ wrote Aaron Swartz, a storied computer hacker and an early
employee of Reddit, in a 2008 manifesto calling for the public release of
private documents. ‘We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make
our copies and share them with the world.’"
This flowery prose is not only disingenuous, it gives these
people a lot more “credit” than they deserve. Some of us just see these people
as opportunists in an age where one is unhindered by gate keepers not only by
their irresponsible employers, but on the Internet. All you have to have is a
connection and you’re off. Heck, you can even find instructions on how to build
your very own atomic bomb. One may also fairly asked why these “informers” were
not provoked during the Bush administration, when these programs and
philosophies were first instituted. You didn’t hear Limbaugh, Hannity,
O’Reilly, Coulter or Beck railing about privacy and civil rights back then.
Is this really just a function of the kind of attack politics that usually come
out of the woodwork during Democratic administrations? While there has not been
as much talk of “scandal” in Congress, this is nevertheless the kind “scandal” talk
you do hear from shoot-from-the-hip types all over right-wing talk and conspiracy
theorists on the Internet.
Snowden claims that the U.S. has hacked “hundreds” of
Chinese “targets.” I don’t think many Americans find that fact particularly
disturbing; China is not exactly a “friend” of the U.S.—in fact it poses the
greatest threat to our national well-being, and has been accused of its own
hacking of U.S. targets. The hypocrisy of these people is simply astonishing. Even
The Guardian noted that Assange has
‘”championed” Russia despite its own neglect of privacy, political and civil
rights, and the fact that of two recent government whistleblowers, one is
currently on trial and the other died in prison. Assange—currently holed-up in
the Ecuadorian embassy in London—has been allowed to operate on “the Kremlin's
English-language propaganda channel Russia Today”—confirmation of what I said
before about “RT News.”
There has even been talk of nominating Snowden for a Nobel
Peace Prize. I’m sure potential terrorism plotters are salivating at the
prospect. Nevertheless, to Pres. Vladimir Putin’s “credit,” he withdrew his
offer to Snowden for political asylum when the latter refused to stop disseminating
any more of the “secrets” he absconded. Snowden currently has applied to 15
countries for political asylum, according to Russian officials as he currently
resides in the transit area of Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport. So far, no
takers. But Putin’s “favor” to the U.S. may not be all that altruistic, as we
will see later. But more Scherer:
In the meantime, the
threat of more leaks is likely to grow as young people come of age in the
defiant culture of the Internet and new, principled martyrs like Snowden seize
the popular imagination. "These backlashes usually do provoke political
mobilization and a deepening of commitments," says Gabriella Coleman, a
professor at McGill University in Montreal, who is finishing a book on
Anonymous. "I kind of feel we are at the dawn of it."
Don’t you just want to lose your lunch? Snowden has pilfered as much material as he could get his grubby hands on, and
can’t be stopped in disseminating every last scrap. Rather than be a "principled martyr," he is less a “principled” thief than your average, run-of-the-mill unprincipled thief,
and he would not have become one if there wasn't the reward of fame; if there is money in it, he’ll take that to. After all, he thinks that every
anti-American regime is his “friend” and will shower him with accolades and
booty for being a propaganda organ (John Wilkes Booth, of course, also thought he was going to be looked upon as a "hero" when he assassinated Lincoln). What does that make him?
Marc A. Thiessen of the Washington
Post has an idea. He noted that Russian and Chinese government computer hackers
have likely already collected all the pertinent data from Snowden’s four stolen
laptops. While The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald claims to be in possession of all of
Snowden’s files, he states that the newspaper “cannot access them yet because
they are highly encrypted and they do not have the passwords.” To this, Thiessen
noted that “I’m sure that elicited laughter in Moscow and Beijing. Snowden’s
encryption may be an obstacle for journalists such as Greenwald, but it’s not a
problem for the PLA and the FSB.”
But we should not pussyfoot around the question of what Snowden
and his ilk really are: “What this means is Snowden’s public revelations of
classified information may very well be the least damaging thing he has done.
By taking top-secret documents out of the country and carrying them first to
China and then to Russia, Snowden has aided and abetted the PLA and the FSB in
their espionage efforts against the United States.” Thiessen then draws the
logical inference:
“That doesn’t make
Snowden a hero. It makes him a traitor.”
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