Some call him a patriot whistleblower, while others say he is neither patriot nor whistleblower — and may be even a traitor. Either way, Edward Snowden has become a Rorschach test for how Americans young and old see their government and how it balances security with privacy.
At a minimum, analysts say, the Snowden affair is pumping
unprecedented life into a much-needed debate between those who believe U.S.
intelligence agents should monitor Americans in the name of national security
versus those who believe the government is wildly encroaching on
constitutionally protected privacy.
Whichever side a person takes, Mr. Snowden's revelations
about the National Security Agency's deep-reaching data collection efforts
"set something vibrating that was not vibrating before," said Gordon
Adams, an international relations professor at American University who served
on President Clinton's national security staff.
"Whether you're a libertarian or a liberal,"
Mr. Adams said, "there's been a tectonic shift in people's concern about
their civil liberties, and Snowden set it loose."
"I don't know if that makes him a patriot or a
criminal."
President Obama has no doubts. For him, Mr. Snowden is no
patriot and in fact has been more disruptive than helpful in sparking a
thoughtful debate that the president felt he set into motion earlier this year.
"I called for a thorough review of our surveillance
operations before Mr. Snowden made these leaks," Mr. Obama said at a news
conference last week. "My preference — and I think the American people's
preference — would have been for a lawful, orderly examination of these laws; a
thoughtful, fact-based debate that would then lead us to a better place."
The president also said that if Mr. Snowden wanted to be
a whistleblower, he could have followed established procedures that would have
given him protections.
Others say Mr. Snowden performed a service.
"To call him a traitor is going too far," Rep.
Dana Rohrabacher, California Republican, said Friday during a
"Newsmaker" interview on C-SPAN. "In fact, he was being loyal to
the rest of us by letting the American people know that their government was
getting out of hand."
The most remarkable thing may well be the manner in which
debate around that very question has come to unfold in such politically
unpredictable ways over the past two months.
"This has kind of scrambled partisan lines like no
issue in recent memory," said Trevor Timm, a blogger and activist with the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group that advocates for digital civil
liberties.
Mr. Timm, who recently penned an op-ed for Politico
arguing that Americans believe Mr. Snowden is "a patriot," said the
revelations by the former NSA contractor have turned out to be "the most
bipartisan thing that's happened in years on both sides."
"The guardians of civil liberties exist in both
parties," Mr. Adams said. "It crushes the normal party instinct, so you
get strange coalitions around it and you're seeing that in Congress right
now."
One needn't look far for confirmation.
House Speaker John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican, got in
front of the debate in early June when he declared that Mr. Snowden was "a
traitor" for disclosing information that "puts Americans at
risk" and "shows our adversaries what our capabilities are."
That put Mr. Boehner in line with outspoken critics such
as Sen. Dianne Feinstein, California Democrat, who has accused Mr. Snowden of
committing "an act of treason."
Sen. Ron Wyden, Oregon Democrat and a longtime critic of
government surveillance, stopped short of using the word "patriot" in
reference to Mr. Snowden during a July 23 speech in Washington at the Center
for American Progress.
The congressman did say, however, that Mr. Snowden's
actions "lit the surveillance world on fire."
"Several provisions of secret law were no longer
secret, and the American people were finally able to see some of the things
I've been raising the alarm about for years," Mr. Wyden said. "And
when they did, boy were they stunned, and boy were they angry."
The problem, some observers say, is that the media and
elected officials in Washington remain too focused on questions about Mr.
Snowden's character to engage in the sort of deep policy discussion that Mr.
Obama claims to be so eager to have.
"The whole debate over whether Snowden is hero or a
traitor is a bit of a sideshow and that it ultimately doesn't matter very
much," said Gene Healy a vice president and analyst at the
Libertarian-leaning Cato Institute. "The real issue is what he
revealed."
"If he turned out to be a Chinese spy," Mr.
Healy said, "the government has still now admitted that this program
exists and that's what we ought to be focused on, debating the program, whether
it's legal, whether it's useful and whether it's dangerous."
**Guy Taylor rejoined The Washington Times in 2011 as the
State Department correspondent.As a freelance journalist, Taylor's work was supported by
the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and the Fund For Investigative
Journalism, and his stories appeared in a variety publications, from the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch to Salon, Reason, Prospect Magazine of London, the Daily Star of
Beirut, the Jerusalem Post and the St. Petersburg Times. He's also served as an
editor at World Politics Review, produced news videos and feature stories for
Agence France-Presse, and is an award-winning short film producer and writer.Taylor is a graduate of Clark University. After a stint
at States News Service, he spent five years at The Times from 2001 through
2006, first on the metro desk and later reporting from Iraq, Southeast Asia,
Eastern Europe and Guantanamo Bay, in addition to pursuing special assignments
throughout the United States. He was part of a team of Times reporters who won
a Society of Professional Journalists award for their coverage of the September
11 terrorist attacks.
He can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.