Whisked out of a luxury Hong Kong hotel, vanishing into the mysterious wing of a Moscow airport, Edward Snowden’s continent-jumping, hide-and-seek game seems like the stuff of a pulp thriller — a desperate man’s drama played out before a worldwide audience trying to decide if he’s a hero or a villain.
But the search for the former National Security Agency contractor who spilled government secrets has become something of a distracting sideshow, some say, overshadowing at least for now the important debate over the government’s power to seize the phone and Internet records of millions of Americans to help wage the war on terrorism.
“You have to be humble on Day 1 to say, ‘This isn’t about me. This is about the information.’… I don’t think he really anticipated the importance of making sure the focus initially was off him,” says Mike Paul, president of MGP & Associates PR, a crisis management firm in New York. “Not only has he weakened his case, some would go as far as to say he’s gone from hero to zero.”
Snowden, he says, can get back on track by “utilizing whatever information he has like big bombs in a campaign,” so the focus returns to the question of spying and not his life on the run.
Snowden’s disclosures about U.S. surveillance to Britain’s Guardian newspaper and The Washington Post have ignited a major controversy in Washington that shows no signs of fading. A petition asking President Barack Obama to pardon Snowden — dubbing him a “national hero” — has collected more than 123,000 signatures. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., meanwhile, has called Snowden’s disclosure of top-secret information “an act of treason.” And Republican House Speaker John Boehner is among those who’ve called Snowden a “traitor.”
The president, himself, has dismissed the 30-year-old Snowden as a “hacker” and vowed the U.S. won’t be scrambling military jets to snatch the former contractor and return him to the U.S., where he faces espionage charges.
Some say Snowden is losing ground in the battle for public opinion by cloaking his travels in secrecy, creating more interest in his efforts to elude U.S. authorities than his allegations against the government.
By disappearing in Russia, he loses “access to rehabilitate himself in the public’s mind,” says William Weaver, a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso who has written about government secrecy. “You have to keep selling yourself, if you will, and do it in a smart way so people don’t get tired of you. … His only hope was to hit a grand slam home run with the public and make it stick. For every hour that he’s not doing something like that, he’s in trouble.”
Others say Snowden’s personality is irrelevant and doesn’t change his major argument — that the U.S. intelligence community has lied about the scope of its surveillance of Americans.
Gene Healy, a vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute, recently wrote an essay denouncing pundits who’ve labeled Snowden a “grandiose narcissist” and a “total slacker.” He maintains that the former contractor’s revelations are all that matters. “The content of the message is far more important than the character of the messenger,” he wrote in the piece published in the Washington Examiner.
Healy also said “the most disturbing” part of Snowden’s disclosures was the massive amounts of data collected on citizens. “The potential abuse of that information represents a grave threat to American liberty and privacy regardless of Snowden’s character and motivations,” he wrote.
David Colapinto, general counsel at the National Whistleblowers Center, says it’s not surprising Snowden has become an “easy target’” facing harsh criticism from those at the highest levels of government — people “who have a bigger megaphone than he does.”
“The name-calling and whatever may happen in the future — we don’t know what he’s going to do,” he adds. “We don’t know what the government is going to do. … It’s pretty hard to pull out a crystal ball.”
So far, America seems to be divided, according to polls taken in the first days after Snowden’s leak of top-secret documents. Many people initially applauded the former contractor for exposing what they saw as government spying on ordinary Americans. Since then, though, government officials have responded with explanations of the program and congressional testimony attesting to the value of surveillance in thwarting deadly terrorist attacks.
In one poll, a June 12-16 national survey by the Pew Research Center and USA Today, 49 percent of those surveyed said the release of classified information about the NSA program serves the public interest, while 44 percent found it harmful. For those under 30, the gap was dramatically larger — that group said it’s good for the public by a 60-34 percent margin, according to the survey.
Still, more than half of those polled — 54 percent — also said the government should pursue a criminal case against someone who leaked classified information about the program.
A second survey taken in that same five-day period found a similar split. The Washington Post-ABC news poll found that 43 percent support and 48 percent oppose criminally charging Snowden. But the survey also reported that 58 percent of Americans support the NSA’s sweeping surveillance program.
Snowden has acknowledged taking highly classified documents about U.S. surveillance and sharing the information with the two papers, the Guardian and The Washington Post. He also told the South China Morning Post that the NSA hacked Chinese cellphone companies to seek text message data.
Snowden is expected to seek asylum in Ecuador. That decision could take months. He has been supported by WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group whose founder, Julian Assange, has been given asylum in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.
At this point, Snowden’s main job is to stay out of prison and he has both a “powerful narrative” and major disadvantages, says Eric Dezenhall, head of a crisis management firm in Washington, D.C.
“The biggest thing on the asset side is the concern people have about government surveillance — it’s very legitimate,” Dezenhall says. “The weaknesses are having betrayed secrets he was entrusted with and the fact he ended up in these hostile countries. …. Public opinion doesn’t move on nuance. (People think) You’re a whistle-blower who’s in Russia or China. So you think they have an answer to this problem? It’s not very intelligent.”
Gerald R. Shuster, a professor of political communication at the University of Pittsburgh, says if Snowden had remained in the U.S. and “stood his ground, he would have remained more heroic” and attorneys would have lined up to represent him.
But if he’s brought back to face charges and “he’s shown in handcuffs, the aura of idealism is over,” Shuster says. “He’s more and more perceived as a criminal.”
Colapinto, the lawyer for the whistle-blower group, says it’s too soon to know how Snowden’s plight will play out.
“This is like a moving river,” he says. “We’re maybe midstream. We don’t know where this will end up. I think history will judge him as things develop. But we just don’t know the end of the story.”
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MOSCOW — While Edward J. Snowden has remained mysteriously hidden from sight during his visit to Russia this week, Russian television has been making him a hero.
On programs that were hastily arranged and broadcast on the two largest federal channels, he was compared to the dissident Andrei Sakharov, to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and to Max Otto von Stirlitz, a dashing fictional double agent from Soviet television. He was described as “the man who declared war on Big Brother and got stuck in the transit zone,” and as “a soldier in the information war, who fights, of course, on the side of Russia, or maybe the side of China.”
For as long as he remains here, one program’s host said, “the pulse of world history is beating here in Moscow.”
Since Mr. Snowden landed in Moscow on Sunday, the likelihood that he will remain in Russia has steadily crept up.
Though President Vladimir V. Putin said this week that “the sooner he chooses his final destination, the better for us and for him,” Mr. Snowden shows no sign of leaving.
The chance that Russia will turn him in has all but vanished, as evidenced by Thursday’s television programs, which were almost certainly produced under Kremlin orders and have a powerful effect on public opinion. Officials here have signaled an openness to granting him political asylum, and each passing day would seem to narrow Mr. Snowden’s options, giving the United States time to negotiate with Ecuador and Venezuela, other countries that may grant him asylum.
“I think the main thing for him right now is to guarantee his security,” said Igor Korotchenko, a former specialist in Russia’s top military command who now edits the magazine National Defense. “Already he cannot live his former life. The United States of America will look for him all over the world in order to punish him as an example to potential traitors and so that the political elite in Washington will be satisfied. They want his blood.”
“Whose protection does he want: Ecuador, Venezuela or Russia? It is hard to judge right now,” Mr. Korotchenko said. He added, “In Russia, he will find a country capable of guaranteeing his security because I think in Latin America the United States would find much opportunity to solve the problem, so to say.”
So far, there is no consensus among Russian elites on whether Russia should grant Mr. Snowden asylum, a step that would advertise the country, cold-war-style, as a haven for Western dissidents. Russia’s upper house of Parliament has invited him to testify about the impact of spying by the National Security Agency on Russian citizens, and about the activities of giant Internet companies that may have shared information with the agency.
Though Mr. Putin has made it a central goal to challenge American dominance in world affairs, the potential cost of granting Mr. Snowden asylum has come into sharper focus over the past few days. Russia will host President Obama in September, and would be stung if the visit were called off. Powerful figures like Igor I. Sechin, who as chairman of Rosneft has struck a series of bold deals with Western oil companies, may also be worried about the potential repercussions. Mr. Putin and many of those around him are former intelligence officers, and they may see Mr. Snowden as a traitor, and an unpredictable player.
Igor M. Bunin, the director of the Center for Political Technologies in Moscow, said that by far the best solution for Moscow would be to send Mr. Snowden to another country, “to Ecuador, Venezuela, to Cuba, wherever.”
“Snowden is like a hot meat pie in your hands: even if you want to eat it very much, it’s very hot and maybe it’s better to throw it on the floor,” Mr. Bunin said. “To make a deal with America to turn Snowden over would be a slap in the face of public opinion because he is already a hero in Russia and part of the West. On the other hand, not turning him over destroys your relationship with America.”
Unlike Ecuador and Venezuela, Russia has avoided staking out a position on political asylum for Mr. Snowden, and in his remarks at a news conference on Tuesday, Mr. Putin said he hoped not to become personally involved.
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LONDON — Edward J. Snowden, the whistleblower on global U.S. surveillance, has been called all kinds of things by members of Congress over the past couple of weeks — including a “defector” and a man guilty of “treason.” Federal prosecutors have prepared a sealed indictment against him.
At the same time, he has been lauded by Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, as a member of the “young, technically minded” generation “that Barack Obama betrayed.” Assange called President Obama the real “traitor.” Across the world, and in the United States itself, many people sympathize with Snowden. They see his leaks as a needed stand for individual freedom against the security-driven mass surveillance of a U.S. National Security Agency armed with the technology to gather and analyze the digital trails of our lives.
So what is Snowden? A self-aggrandizing geek who betrayed his country and his employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, exposed the United States to greater risk of terrorist attack, and may now — wittingly or unwittingly — have made his trove of secrets available to China and Russia, nations that are no longer enemies but are rival powers?
Or a brave young American determined to fight — at the risk of long imprisonment — against his country’s post-9/11 lurch toward invasion of citizens’ lives, ever more intrusive surveillance, undifferentiated data-hauling of the world’s digital exhaust fumes (for storage in a one-million-square-foot fortress in Utah), and the powers of a compliant secret court to issue warrants for international eavesdropping and e-mail vacuuming?
Snowden, apparently holed up in the transit area of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, has disappeared from view. Perhaps one way to assess what he has done is to imagine how things would stand if he had never existed. I am not big on counterfactuals — hypothetical history is at once tantalizing and meaningless — but in this case the exercise may be useful.
We would not know how the N.S.A., through its Prism and other programs, has become, in the words of my colleagues James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, “the virtual landlord of the digital assets of Americans and foreigners alike.” We would not know how it has been able to access the e-mails or Facebook accounts or videos of citizens across the world; nor how it has secretly acquired the phone records of millions of Americans; nor how through requests to the compliant and secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (F.I.S.A.) it has been able to bend nine U.S. Internet companies to its demands for access to clients’ digital information.
We would not be debating whether the United States really should have turned surveillance into big business, offering data-mining contracts to the likes of Booz Allen and, in the process, high-level security clearance to myriad folk who probably should not have it. We would not have a serious debate at last between Europeans, with their more stringent views on privacy, and Americans about where the proper balance between freedom and security lies.
We would not have legislation to bolster privacy safeguards and require more oversight introduced by Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Nor would we have a letter from two Democrats to the N.S.A. director, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, saying that a government fact sheet about surveillance abroad “contains an inaccurate statement” (and where does that assertion leave Alexander’s claims of the effectiveness and necessity of Prism?).
In short, a long-overdue debate about what the U.S. government does and does not do in the name of post-9/11 security — the standards applied in the F.I.S.A. court, the safeguards and oversight surrounding it and the Prism program, the protection of civil liberties against the devouring appetites of intelligence agencies armed with new data-crunching technology — would not have occurred, at least not now.
All this was needed because, since it was attacked in an unimaginable way, the United States has gone through a Great Disorientation. Institutions at the core of the checks and balances that frame American democracy and civil liberties failed. Congress gave a blank check to the president to wage war wherever and whenever he pleased. The press scarcely questioned the march to a war in Iraq begun under false pretenses. Guantánamo made a mockery of due process. The United States, in Obama’s own words, compromised its “basic values” as the president gained “unbound powers.” Snowden’s phrase, “turnkey tyranny,” was over the top but still troubling.
One of the most striking aspects of the Obama presidency has been the vast distance between his rhetoric on these issues since 2008 and any rectifying action. If anything he has doubled-down on security at the expense of Americans’ supposedly inalienable rights: Hence the importance of a whistleblower.
Snowden has broken the law of his country. We do not know what, if anything, he has offered China or Russia — or been coerced or tricked into handing over. He has, through his choice of destination, embraced states that suppress individual rights and use the Internet as an instrument of control and persecution. His movements have sent the wrong message.
Still, he has performed a critical service. History, the real sort, will judge him kindly.
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Op-Ed Columnist: The Service of Snowdenby By ROGER COHEN
Deluded geek endangering his country or brave American? History will judge Snowden kindly.
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Two readers describe their feelings upon hearing about the Supreme Court decisions.
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Opinionator: The Up-in-the-Air President by By TIMOTHY EGAN
Obama’s policies are sound and have majority support. It’s his fear of taking the fight to Republicans that is so maddening.
