The Guardian, the British newspaper that’s published the scoops on the National Security Agency’s expansive surveillance programs, ran an editorial Tuesday that served as a spirited defense of leaker Edward Snowden.
Snowden, the 30-year-old former defense contractor who leaked details on the surveillance programs, is facing espionage charges from the United States. But those charges are “innappropriate,” the Guardian’s editorial asserted.
This is emphatically not a cold war style national security case; it is a 21st century case about the appropriate balance between the power of the secret state and the rights of free citizens in the internet era. To charge Mr Snowden under America’s first world war Espionage Act is inappropriate. We live in a different world from that. America is not at war in the traditional sense. Mr Snowden is not a spy. Nor is he a foreign agent. He is a whistleblower. He has published government information. And it is as a whistleblower that he will eventually have to answer to the law.
Read the editorial here.
