"In ‘this our talking America’ (as Emerson called it), we prefer to talk about personalities. It could be anticipated that the ‘leaker’ of NSA secrets, and not the trespass by government against the people, would become the primary subject of discussion once the authorities produced a name and a face. He was destined to have his portrait fixed by the police and media, blurred and smeared to look, in some vague way, probably psychopathic, and once arrested to be dispatched to trial and prison. The Obama justice department, under its attorney general Eric Holder, has in the last four years prosecuted six ‘whistleblowers’ under the Espionage Act of 1917: twice the number prosecuted by all previous administrations combined. Before he fled Hawaii for Hong Kong, Snowden kept close watch on those prosecutions, and on the treatment of Bradley Manning in the brig at Quantico and in his military trial. Snowden resolved not to endure Manning’s fate. He would get the story out in his own way, and would also describe his own motives as he understood them, before the authorities published his image and tracked it over with the standard markings of treachery and personal disorder. So the first Guardian stories were followed, in the same week, by a twelve and a half minute video interview of Snowden, shot by the documentary director Laura Poitras. The interviewer was Glenn Greenwald, a constitutional lawyer as well as a Guardian columnist, whom Snowden had sought out and who, in defiance of American journalistic etiquette, served as author or coauthor of early Guardian stories from the NSA leaks. The principles that guided Snowden’s thinking and something of his views could be inferred already from his choice of Greenwald and Poitras as the persons to help convey his story to the public. I have now watched this interview several times, and have been impressed by the calm and coherence of the mind it reveals. Snowden had looked for ways of serving his country in the grim months after September 2001 (he would have been 18 then). He joined the army, hoping to be taken on in special forces, but broke both legs in a training accident and then dropped out, disaffected with an anti-Arab racism in the mood which took him by surprise. He had never finished high school but had no difficulty passing the test for a diploma equivalent. Since his computer skills were prodigious and easily recognised, he was an obvious candidate for well-paying security work in the IT industry, and, by his mid-twenties, had worked his way to the highest clearance for analysing secret data. At the same time he was educating himself in the disagreeable facts of America’s War on Terror, and the moral and legal implications of the national security state. He was pressed by larger doubts the more he learned. Not all these particulars emerged in the interview, but all could be inferred; and Snowden’s profile differed from that of the spy or defector (which he was already charged with being) in one conspicuous way. He did not think in secret. In conversations with friends over the last few years, he made no effort to hide the trouble of conscience that gnawed at him. It also seems to be true – though in the interview he doesn’t clearly formulate the point – that even as he went to work and made use of his privileged access, he felt a degree of remorse at the superiority he enjoyed over ordinary citizens, any of whom might be subject to exposure at any moment by the eye of the government he worked for. The remorse (if this surmise is correct) came not from a suspicion that he didn’t deserve the privilege, but from the conviction that no one deserved it. And yet, the drafters of the new laws, and the guardians of the secret interpretation of those laws, do feel that they deserve the privilege; and if you could ask them why, they would answer: because there are elections. We, in America, now support a class of guardians who pass unchallenged through a revolving door that at once separates and connects government and the vast security apparatus that has sprung up in the last 12 years. The cabinet officers and agency heads and company heads ‘move on’ but stay the same, from NSA to CIA or from NSA to Booz Allen Hamilton; and to the serious players, this seems a meritocracy without reproach and without peril." - lrb.co.uk/v35/n13/david-bromwich/diary
Posted on: Sat, 29 Jun 2013 03:28:47 +0000
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