Snowden’s worst fear, by his own account, was that 'nothing will change.' Snowden's nightmare comes true

Edward Snowden’s nightmare may be coming true.

Not exile; not the danger of imprisonment or prosecution; and not his newfound association with dictators, lawyers and impresarios.


Snowden’s worst fear, by his own account, was that “nothing will change.”

“People will see in the media all these disclosures, they’ll know the lengths the government is going to grant themselves powers, unilaterally, to create greater control over American society and global society,” he told The Guardian last month after he’d asked it to identify him as its source. “But they won’t be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things, to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests.”

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One month after The Guardian’s first story, which revealed an order from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court authorizing the National Security Agency to collect the phone records of every Verizon customer, there has been no public movement in Washington to stop the court from issuing another such order. Congress has no intelligence reform bill that would rein in the phone tracking, or Internet monitoring, or cyberattack planning, or any of the other secret government workings that Snowden’s disclosures have revealed.

There is no modern day Sen. Frank Church ready to convene historic hearings about the intelligence community, like the ones Church ran in the 1970s, proceedings that radically transformed the U.S. intelligence services. Far from having been surprised by Snowden’s disclosures, today’s intelligence committee leaders stepped right up to defend the NSA’s surveillance programs. From Republicans, led by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, to Democrats, including Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, they’ve been nearly unanimous in their support.

“I feel I have an obligation to do everything I can to keep this country safe,” Feinstein told The New York Times. “So put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

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In short, the workings of the NSA and its partner intelligence agencies — which, Snowden said, threaten to become “turn-key tyranny” — continue unabated.

“It’s very concerning,” said Jack Lerner, a law professor at the University of Southern California who specializes in privacy and national security. “I’ve seen surveys that already show some changing attitudes, however I’ve also seen a Pew survey that said there’s still a pretty strong majority in favor of essentially letting the NSA do this.”

Not that Lerner agrees it should — “There’re no checks and balances on the way they’re using it. There’s no guarantee they’re not listening on phone sex calls, or people they know, or public figures, or journalists.” He remembered a former NSA worker alleging the agency had monitored then-Sen. Barack Obama’s communications in the mid-2000s.

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But as far as a potential intelligence reform bill, or a public groundswell of opposition to the government’s surveillance apparatus – there’s been nothing of the kind.

Snowden has achieved folk hero status in some quarters and his disclosures have unquestionably caused headaches for the White House, particularly with European allies, tensions that could create future complications. But so far, he has achieved nothing close to the goal of “summoning the American people to confront the growing danger of tyranny,” as Snowden’s father put it in an open letter on Tuesday. Members of Congress have not only ignored Snowden’s call to arms but complain that his leaks have set back their ability to do their normal work.

Texas Republican Rep. Mac Thornberry, vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and a backer of cybersecurity reform, lamented to POLITICO last week that Snowden had slowed what was already sluggish progress on both cyber and defense appropriations bills.

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“I do worry that the passion or the headline of the moment could cause us to do something that would be a mistake, and I think that’s part of the reason [House Homeland Security Chairman Mike] McCaul decided to slow down a little bit on his bill. Obviously we’re not doing defense approps this week. We want to not just have a knee-jerk reaction to this event even though it is a big deal,” Thornberry said.

Speaking separately, McCaul said there is “no question” as to the “impact it’s had on cybersecurity legislation,” although he stressed how important it was for Congress to eventually pass a bill that would help the government and private sector share information about cyberthreats.

One problem, from Snowden’s perspective, is that although his disclosures did have the effect of provoking a national discussion about surveillance, including unprecedented concessions from NSA, Congress and the White House — many Americans weren’t outraged. In fact, in polls done in the month since The Guardian’s first story, majorities of respondents have said they accept the phone-tracking program, though Internet and email monitoring are less popular.

A CNN poll found that 56 percent of those surveyed found the phone-tracking “acceptable;” about 58 percent told Gallup they approved of government monitoring as part of the effort against preventing terrorist attacks.

Another problem, from activists’ perspective, is Snowden himself.

The spy movie, globe-trotting storyline about his flight from the U.S. to Hong Kong and then to Russia — and then his diplomatic limbo in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport — have made the storyline since his leaks as much about him as about government surveillance.

Nicaragua and Venezuela on Friday night became the first countries to offer National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden asylum.

“It’s like a magician’s misdirection — everybody’s focused on Snowden. It’s a chase story,” said Peter Earnest, director of the International Spy Museum. “My kids used to read ‘Where’s Waldo’ when they were growing up — this has all the aspects of that.”

A 36-year CIA veteran, Earnest said he was struck by how much of the media and public attention has focused on Snowden and how little had settled on the NSA and other programs that America’s top spies have had to acknowledge. On Thursday, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper even apologized to Feinstein in a public letter for giving her committee “erroneous” information.

“People seem very muted in their reaction to what he’s disclosed,” Earnest said of Snowden. “You know, you tell people the nature of these programs, some of the others, and people say, ‘So?’”

But even though torches and pitchforks never appeared outside NSA headquarters, privacy advocates and intelligence community critics say they feel that Snowden has, in fact, changed the game.

The Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald, whom Snowden has made the beneficiary of many of his leaks, wrote a whole column dedicated to the idea that Snowden had not leaked in vain. Greenwald wrote that in his initial conversations with Snowden, the then-NSA contractor told him he wanted to spark a “debate” about surveillance — which he certainly did — as compared to Snowden’s later hopes that the disclosures would prompt people to “stand up and fight.”

And the American Civil Liberties Union is suing the government to get access to more court information related to the interception of communications, arguing that Snowden’s disclosures reveal the huge scale involved with NSA monitoring — even if no one can say for certain exactly how many people are involved.

“It’s definitely at the high end of the scale,” ACLU attorney Patrick Toomey told POLITICO. “It could be in the tens of thousands, or even in the millions of people, but we don’t know enough about their targeting to know more.”

If Americans can find that out, or at least know more than they do today — and more than they did before The Guardian began its series of stories — Snowden’s disclosures will have been worth it, activists say. And there’s the distinct possibility — both Greenwald and Snowden have said as much — that still more bombshells are coming. If that keeps the NSA in the headlines, more Americans could object.

“One of the things for people who obsess about this stuff, like I do, is we don’t know what we’re buying and we don’t know what we’re paying for this service,” Lerner said. “We’re paying with our privacy, and we had a sense that we’re not paying very much … but we’re learning that maybe there is a cost, and maybe the cost is more than we thought it was.”

Juana Summers and Tony Romm contributed to this report.