Edward Snowden became one of the world’s most famous names when he blew the whistle on NSA surveillance. Not that US politicians seem to have noticed

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Snowden's leaks forced NSA reform on Congress. The US would still jail him | Trevor Timm Read more

Edward Snowden has been called many things for revealing how Americans are surveilled upon by their government – “traitor”, “thief”, even “spy” – but perhaps the most telling is his newly assigned cover name in Washington: “Eric”.

As hawkish politicians scramble to adjust to a bewildering new mood of reform in Congress, their rage is focused on the source of the information that led the Senate and House of Representatives to vote overwhelmingly to rein in the National Security Agency via the USA Freedom Act, which was signed into law on Tuesday.

Unfortunately, their statements reveal that several of his most prominent critics cannot remember what the NSA whistleblower is actually called.

“It was not a public program until Eric Snowden – a traitor to the United States – published a lot of information about what the intelligence community does,” fumed the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Richard Burr.

“This was one small piece and Eric Snowden put the lives of Americans and foreigners at risk,” added the North Carolina Republican, shortly before 67 of his colleagues voted to ban a programme that most claim they were not aware of.

Burr’s intelligence committee has been consumed with the aftermath of the Snowden revelations for two years and, only this week, he co-sponsored a failed amendment designed to restore the secrecy.

The reference to Eric is unlikely to spring from genuine ignorance, therefore, and may instead have been a temporary slip – or a deliberately casual approach to show his disdain.

An alternative explanation is that the amnesia is contagious.

The Maryland Democrat Barbara Mikulski, whose state is home to the headquarters of the NSA, has been sowing the seeds of doubt on the Senate floor for days.

“We cannot let this country go dark,” railed Mikulksi a week earlier when the Senate shut down not just bulk collection, but a host of other surveillance programmes by failing to renew their expiring legal authority before going on recess.

“I’ve got to believe that tonight the world is watching us and they say: ‘There goes the United States Senate and there they go home [sic]. Ha ha ha!’ They have a programme that someone literally disgraced, tried to disgrace the United States of America and render it helpless in terms of our ability to protect us. The name is Eric Snowden.”

Barbara Mikulski on ‘Eric’ Snowden

Mikulski has made repeated references to “Eric” Snowden over a period of months.

“Eric Snowden has his time,” she told fellow intelligence committee members last June. “He gets an hour on TV. He gets a hurrah from [former NBC anchor] Brian Williams.”

And as recently as Monday, while acknowledging some reform in the shape of the USA Freedom Act was necessary, the Maryland Democrat was at it again, as she praised NSA employees for working “a 36-hour day”.

“These men and women at times ever since Eric Snowden have been wrongly vilified by those who don’t bother to inform themselves about national security structures and the vital functions they perform,” she said. “Glib one-liners and snarky comments have been the order of the day.”

Such errors, also repeated in the media, have indeed generated some snark online, not least from those unfortunate enough to actually be called Eric Snowden.

Eric Snowden (@ericsnowden) Wait, I did what? https://t.co/GJ4UB7vNBt

The slips are not constrained to Senate intelligence committee members either.

The Tennessee Republican Lamar Alexander sought to ridicule Barack Obama last year by comparing his secrecy over healthcare reform with Snowden’s bean-spilling.

“With WikiLeaks and Eric Snowden spilling our beans every day, what’s happening on the Obamacare exchanges is the best-kept secret in Washington,” said Alexander.

Republican Lamar Alexander on ‘Eric’ Snowden

Even chief NSA critic Rand Paul has erred from time to time, telling CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in January: “Who are we going to hire, Eric Snowden’s contractor, to hold all the information? I don’t want them collecting the information. It’s not about who holds it. I don’t want them collecting every American’s information.”

But the casual disregard for Snowden’s correct identity among those who simultaneously seek to brand him as public enemy No 1 is what riles privacy campaigners most.

emptywheel (@emptywheel) 2 years later Barb Mikulski is still railing against Eric Snowden.

When the former presidential nominee Mitt Romney took to Fox News in January to accuse Russia of “harbouring of Eric Snowden” as a deliberate “stick of the eye toward us” he also inadvertently hinted at another reason the NSA whistleblower might be stuck in Moscow.



When the US government first sought to prevent the fugitive from leaving Hong Kong, the local justice secretary, Rimsky Yuen, claimed the reason it was refused was because the State Department got his middle name wrong in the paperwork: calling him Edward James Snowden rather than Edward Joseph Snowden.