Rieder: Vindication for Edward Snowden

Rem Rieder | USA TODAY

Score one for the whistleblower.

Congress' decision to abandon the federal government's bulk collection of the phone records of American citizens represents vindication of the much-pilloried former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

While scrambling over expired elements of the Patriot Act continues in Washington this week, it's clear that when the dust settles, the feds will no longer be in the bulk collection business. And that's a good thing.

When Snowden leaked classified documents to journalists two years ago outlining the hitherto secret scooping up of the records of millions and millions of Americans with absolutely no connection to terrorism, he was vilified as a traitor by House Speaker John Boehner and former vice president Dick Cheney. Politico's Roger Simon dismissed him as "the slacker who came in from the cold" and for being "29 and possessing all the qualifications to become a grocery bagger" (who knew being 29 was a felony?). The Washington Post's Richard Cohen said incomprehensibly that Snowden would "go down as a cross-dressing Little Red Riding Hood."

But what the slacker turned piñata did was stir a much-needed conversation about civil liberties in the United States, about whether the federal government could decide on its own to appropriate all that information about its citizens.

No, the feds weren't listening in on everyone's conversations. But they have been steadily gathering records that show when a call was made, how long it was and who was on the other end.

As the national conversation — as opposed to the ones the feds were monitoring — played out, a funny thing happened. Public sentiment turned out to be much more heavily anti-snooping than the hardliners must have suspected, even in the face of the renewed terrorist threat posed by the vicious Islamic State.

And in Congress, an unlikely coalition of Democrats and libertarian Republicans is in the process of stopping the feds from wholesale collection of phone records.

Here's the deal: Three portions of the Patriot Act, including Section 215, the one used by the Bush and Obama administrations as the rationale for the snooping, were set to expire Sunday. (To complicate matters, a federal appeals court ruled in May that the snooping wasn't authorized by Section 215 and was in fact illegal.)

Rather than simply extend the controversial provisions, the House on May 13 passed the USA Freedom Act, which would curtail the bulk records program. Instead of the feds sweeping up the records indiscriminately, they would be stored by telephone companies. If intelligence agencies believed they needed access to specific records, they could petition the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act Court, a court that rarely says no.

While not ideal, it seemed like a smart compromise aimed at protecting privacy while fostering security. President Obama said he would sign the measure,

But the bill ran into trouble in the Senate, thanks to the hamfisted leadership of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. The Senate took up the bill later than it should have, and McConnell, rather than embrace the Freedom Act, held out for extension of the original deal. At last recognizing reality, McConnell and other GOP leaders on Sunday dropped their opposition to the Freedom Act, only to run into a buzzsaw named Sen. Rand Paul. Paul, R-Ky., a presidential aspirant and staunch libertarian, wanted to see the original Patriot Act provisions simply die. So he took advantage of Senate rules to block the bill.

Now the provisions are gone. But it's likely that the Senate this week will either approve a modified version of the House bill or the bill itself.

Which means common sense will prevail. And so will have Edward Snowden.

To be sure, Snowden broke the law when he turned over classified documents to Glenn Greenwald of British newspaper the Guardian and Barton Gellman of The Washington Post. He has been charged with espionage, and is now languishing in Russia under the hospitality of one Vladimir Putin.

But I've seen no evidence to suggest he leaked the material for nefarious purposes. Rather, he says he wanted to provoke just what he did: a debate over what kind of country we want to be.

To his credit, rather than opting for a wholesale document dump on the Internet, Snowden made the material public via the editing process of careful news organizations.

That sounds more like whistleblower than traitor to me.