Edward Snowden broke the law, but he provided an “important service” while doing so, according to former Vice President Al Gore.
Gore was asked about Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked top secret agency documents, during an interview at a Tuesday event co-sponsored by the website PandoDaily. Asked if Snowden was a traitor or a hero, Gore said things were put on a spectrum he would put Snowden away from “the traitor side.”
“He clearly violated the law so you can’t say, ‘Okay, what he did is alright,'” Gore said. “It’s not. But what he revealed in the course of violating important laws included violations of the United States Constitution that were way more serious than the crimes that he committed. And so he, in the course of violating important laws, he also provided an important service, OK? Because we did need to know how far this has gone.”
Watch:
True enough. But most of us who were aware of what the Bush presidency was pursuing in National Security policy under the Patriot Act were hardly shocked by the ‘revelations.’ I still wonder why Snowden was ok with this until Obama became president. Was he driven by fear of government abuse under a liberal Democratic president more than the rightist regime that preceded it, the one that concocted the schemes he came to abhor? I still find that puzzling.
I have a little less respect for Al Gore now.
Once again, a failure to distinguish between revealing domestic spying, which was of great value, from revealing foreign intelligence operations (to the public, but also in more detail to Russia and China, which got access to his computers), which was serious criminal conduct. The distinction is important, and needs to be made.
It will be an interesting litmus test of sorts to see how various headlines and tweets cover Gore’s comments.
“Gore praises Snowden for providing an ‘important service’”
vs.
“Gore slams Snowden for having ‘violated the law’”
vs.
“Drooling Obama sycophant Al Gore spreads pernicious lie about Snowden committing crimes, uses statist platform to claim that you have no right to say ‘what he did was right’”
vs.
“Brave Patriot Al Gore denounces pernicious surveillance state in order to stand with Snowden”
vs.
“Fat Al Gore claims he invented the internet that Edward Snowden used to leak classified documents, which proves that global warming is a hoax”