Two Great Essays on Glenn Greenwald's New Book

Some of the instances are more subtle than others, but spread over the several hundred pages of this book, they reveal a mind that has liberated itself from the basic claims of fairness. Once the norms of journalism are dismissed, a number of constraints and assumptions fall away. Critical distance from the source disappears. Greenwald and Poitras “vowed to each other repeatedly and to Snowden” that their actions would honour Snowden’s choice. So Poitras is outraged when the Guardian violates Snowden’s wishes by sharing his files with the New York Times, as if the Guardian were a vehicle for Snowden’s purposes. And Greenwald attacks the New York Times, which had received thousands of documents from Wikileaks, for highlighting Julian Assange’s troubling behaviour, as if the paper owed its source the benefit of clergy rather than its readers a full picture. Greenwald treats his source as inviolate.

For Greenwald, Poitras, and Snowden’s other supporters, the Obama Administration’s determination—fitful over time—to arrest and prosecute Snowden is a violation of his rights. Because the disclosures revealed government wrongdoing, Snowden should be immune from the laws he broke. Greenwald points out that the majority of Americans both oppose the NSA’s data collection programmes and also want Snowden prosecuted. He finds these opinions “inconstant,” which is only true if politics is higher than the rule of law. This view betrays the demanding but necessary principle of civil disobedience—from Thoreau to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King—which requires that conscientious dissenters who act against an unjust law must be willing to pay the price.

In the same way, Greenwald believes efforts by the US and British governments to recover leaked documents are illegitimate, because of what those documents revealed. Last August, Greenwald’s Brazilian partner, David Miranda, was held and questioned for nine hours at Heathrow airport by the British authorities under an anti-terrorism law. Miranda was transporting some of the Snowden archive from Berlin, where Poitras lives in self-imposed exile, to Rio, where he and Greenwald live. Miranda’s electronic devices, including files from the Snowden archive, were confiscated. Greenwald initially told the press that his partner was being held to intimidate him from continuing his work on the NSA disclosures, but did not mention the purpose of Miranda’s trip. The application of the terrorism law was opportunistic, and the law itself prone to abuse, but Greenwald seems to think that a citizen of a foreign country passing through a British airport in possession of highly classified documents taken from the British government should be beyond the reach of any law.

If Greenwald and others were actually being persecuted for their political beliefs, they would instinctively understand that the rule of law has to protect people regardless of politics. The NSA disclosures are disturbing and even shocking; so is the Obama administration’s hyper-aggressive pursuit of leaks; so is the fact that, for several years, Poitras couldn’t leave or re-enter the US without being questioned at airports. These are abuses, but they don’t quite reach the level of the Stasi. They don’t portend a totalitarian state “beyond the dreams of even the greatest tyrants of the past,” as Greenwald believes is possible. A friend from Iran who was jailed and tortured for having the wrong political beliefs, and who is now an American citizen, observed drily, “I prefer to be spied on by NSA.” The sense of oppression among Greenwald, Poitras, and other American dissenters is only possible to those who have lived their entire lives under the rule of law and have come to take it for granted.

In the year since the first NSA disclosures, Snowden has drifted a long way from the Thoreauvian ideal of the majority of one. He has become an international celebrity, far more championed than reviled. He has praised Russia and Venezuela’s devotion to human rights. His more recent disclosures have nothing to do with the constitutional rights of US citizens. Many of them deal with surveillance of foreign governments, including Germany and Brazil, but also Iran, Russia, and China. These are activities that, wise or unwise, fall well within the NSA’s mandate and the normal ways of espionage. Snowden has attached himself to Wikileaks and to Assange, who has become a tool of Russian foreign policy and has no interest in reforming American democracy—his goal is to embarrass it. Assange and Snowden are not the first radical individualists to end up in thrall to strongmen.

The second is by David Aaronovich, writing in the New Statesman:

Suppose for a moment that you thought that the security services of the US and Britain had an important role to play in keeping us safe. Imagine that you believed the existence of cyber-industrial espionage, hostile hacking, organised crime, terrorism and rogue states required competent and vigilant men and women to protect our democracies and their interests. Think about all that and ask yourself: does not the Snowden affair make you feel very much less safe? The man has been very impressive. His account of his motivations has been restrained and convincing. There could not have been a better public face for the anti-NSA case. But what the fuck? How was this allowed to happen? Just three years after a young US army intelligence analyst, Chelsea Manning, was able to download and leak a spectacular amount of classified information, here is a young man of 29, a private contractor – one of 60,000 such private employees – working directly from NSA offices where work was focused on China. A young man whose entry to the NSA was unaccompanied by his CIA employment file. A young man who says, after his defection, “I had access to full rosters of anybody working at the NSA. The entire intelligence community and undercover assets around the world. The locations of every station we have, all of their missions. If I just wanted to damage the US I could have shut down the surveillance system in an afternoon.” This young man, animated by a moral code drawn from video games (as related by Snowden to Greenwald), manages to steal 50-60,000 secret British documents alone. He skips job, agency, office, home and city and then partners with a man – Greenwald – who has made it clear that he agrees with Julian Assange’s dumping in the public domain in 2011 of tens of thousands of unredacted diplomatic cables, an action that put human rights activists in danger. Though Snowden, Greenwald and the Guardian team report their sometimes comic sense of paranoia that the infallible NSA will track them down (possibly using spy cabbies and co-opted Triad gangs), in fact it is Snowden’s parents who first notice his departure. Even three months after the Snowden stories strike, the NSA has no idea what it has lost, or how important it is. At no point in this saga has the NSA looked remotely scary, or even slightly competent. What Snowden showed was that its vulnerability to young and ideologically mobile engineers armed with thumb-drives has turned the NSA into the NiSA – an agency defined by insecurity.