I’ve been watching the chatter this morning and seen the argument that Snowden isn’t the issue, the NSA spying is the issue. Indeed, Snowden himself started this argument by saying almost exactly that in the video that introduced him to the world. So I thought I’d explain why I don’t think that’s true.
To get our definitions straight, I wholly agree that whether he jilted his girlfriend or his favorite ice cream flavor is hardly a pressing public issue. It’s also worth noting that some of the focus is hard for journalists to avoid because the story about him is almost exponentially more accessible than the precise ins and outs of the programs he revealed. What remains obvious and yet little discussed is how little we actually know about these programs.
But to the main point, Snowden is inevitably and rightly a big part of this story because whether he’s a hero or a misguided young man or some mix of the two is a mirror image for making sense of what he did and why he did it.
Let’s imagine a hypothetical: President Obama, in a fit of wholly unjustified rage, strangled a man in the White House and his staff was covering it up. But one person couldn’t go along with it and spilled the beans. Imagine that was Snowden. It might be interesting as a matter of curiosity and novelistic detail what made that one person have the guts, courage or whatever else to spill the beans. But the issue is really 100% the president killed someone in a totally commonplace homicide with no justification and what do we do about it? How do we punish him?
To Snowden and his supporters, the same basic calculus applies. The wrongdoing speaks entirely for itself and how we found out is purely a secondary story. But that’s not how everyone sees this. Whether what Snowden uncovered is wrong, whether he’s accurately described it, whether the damage to US security was worth it, whether he had any business making this decision on his own … these are all totally contested points. And because of that he’s inevitably a big, big part of the story. It’s folly to deny or run away from that.
