Edward Lucas is a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, a think-tank in Washington, DC and a senior editor at the Economist. A new edition of his 2008 book “The New Cold War” has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan.

LONDON

Anyone who has seen the Bourne Identity, or scores of similar Hollywood films, finds Edward Snowden a familiar character. The fugitive insider is the star. The rogue agency is the villain in pursuit. By the closing credits, the hero will be vindicated, thanks to media coverage and belated congressional scrutiny. He gets the girl. Generals James Clapper and Keith Alexander—or their screen counterparts—take a perp walk.

It is easy to go along with that narrative, particularly if you are a journalist. Our trade instinctively sides with David, not Goliath. We thrill to the idea of disclosing secrets. We flinch at any constraint on press freedom. The thought of British spooks attacking a Guardian computer with an angle-grinder in the name of safeguarding secrets that have already been copied and stashed elsewhere seems as grotesque as it is pointless.


But I disagree. The theft and publication of secret documents, as my new book, The Snowden Operation, argues, is not a heroic campaign but reckless self-indulgence, with disastrous consequences. Snowden and his accomplices deserve censure, not applause.

Snowden claims the moral high ground. In a recent softball interview with German television, he claimed that the National Security Agency was involved in scandalous industrial espionage. In a live Q&A on his supporters’ website, he decried “unaccountable senior officials authorizing these unconstitutional programs.” His revelations continue, most recently via NBC and the Guardian, claiming among other things that the NSA uses the “Angry Birds” video game to track its targets (though closer scrutiny of the material suggested a different story).

The furor is misleading, though. In judging the action of whistle-blowers, three criteria apply. They must have clear and convincing evidence of abuse. Publishing the information must not pose a disproportionate threat to public safety. And the leak must be as limited in scope and scale as possible. Snowden failed all three of these tests.

The documents published thus far do not depict a rogue agency. They indicate—with partial, out-of-date and ambiguous evidence, mostly consisting of out-of-context presentation slides—that the NSA has plenty of flaws. How could it not? Like other government agencies and bureaucracies, it pushes the limits of its regulatory, political and judicial constraints. That is not surprising. Like people everywhere, NSA officials brag. They make mistakes (and get disciplined for them). Again, not too surprising.

To justify even a limited breach of secrecy, Snowden would need to prove something far more: evidence of systematic, gross wrongdoing, based on wilful contempt for judicial, legislative and political oversight. In such circumstances, the actions of a Daniel Ellsberg can be justified.

But nothing published by Snowden shows that. The NSA revealed in these documents looks nothing like J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. And Barack Obama, for all his faults, is not Richard Nixon, using the power of the state to go after his domestic enemies. On the contrary: The United States has put the most elusive and lawless part of government—intelligence—into the strongest system of legislative and judicial control anywhere in the world. Some want it still stronger (I think it’s too cumbersome and intrusive). But such questions are for the political process to settle. They do not justify catastrophic and destructive leaking.

The Snowdenistas’ second line of defense is that they have at least sparked a debate. But a public discussion, and limited reforms, on issues such as the use of National Security Letters (secret FBI orders to force people and businesses to cooperate with law enforcement), the privacy risks of warehousing metadata and whether “zero-day” exploits (vulnerabilities in computer hardware and software) should be instantly patched or exploited for espionage—are limited benefits, not overwhelming ones. They do not justify catastrophic damage either. The question of whether we house telephone metadata at the NSA or house it at tech companies is not exactly the difference between tyranny and freedom.

Nor does impact alone justify the actions of the Snowdenistas’ media accomplices. Journalism operates in a moral framework. Every potential story has a source and an effect. A responsible editor considers both—and not just the sizzle of the material itself. Simply arguing that a story will interest the public betrays the media’s claim to be taken seriously. The defense that there is no point turning down a scoop because another outlet will publish it is even more unconvincing.

The Snowdenistas have not only failed to prove that the NSA is out of control, or that it intrudes on Americans’ personal privacy. They have also published material that has nothing to do with these issues. Why is it in the public interest to reveal how honest, law-governed countries spy on corrupt, authoritarian ones? The Snowden revelations about Norwegian and Swedish intelligence cooperation with the NSA against Russia, published by the Dagbladet newspaper in Oslo and Swedish television, respectively, are the most glaring example of the thoughtlessness of the Snowden approach. These countries have every reason to be worried about Russia. Their agencies operate under democratic control – and with strong public support. But for the Snowdenistas, the only thing that matters is that they cooperate with the NSA, the Great Satan of the intelligence world. It is worth noting that America is at the heart of the world’s only successful no-spy agreements, with its close allies – notably Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. A list of countries that would trust Germany or France not to spy on them would be rather shorter.

Other disclosures are similarly hard to justify. Why is it in the public interest to reveal how the NSA intercepts e-mails, phone calls and radio transmissions of Taliban fighters in Pakistan, as the Washington Post did, or to show that the agency is intensifying scrutiny on the security of that country’s nuclear weapons? Snowden even revealed details of how the NSA hacks into computers and mobile phones in China and Hong Kong—hardly whistleblowing stuff.

It is fatuous for Snowden’s allies to say that they are keeping the stolen material safe from hostile intelligence agencies. Few outsiders would suggest they have the skills or knowledge necessary to do so. With equal fatuity, they assert that they redact the published material so as not to breach security. How can they possibly know what will be damaging and what may be harmless? In any case, their technical ability seems not to extend even to deleting an agent’s name from an Adobe Acrobat file.

Snowden’s leaks have weakened Western security relationships, corroded public trust, undermined the West’s standing in the eyes of the rest of the world and paralyzed our intelligence agencies. The Snowdenistas seem oblivious to this. Like the anti-nuclear campaigners of the 1980s, or the anti-capitalist protestors of more recent years, they see Western faults with blinding clarity, but forget that we have enemies and competitors. When we stumble—or are tripped—they advance.

All this neatly and suspiciously fits the interests of one country, Russia—which just happens to be where Snowden arrived in such curious circumstances, and now lives in such strange secrecy. Based on 30 years of experience dealing with friendly and hostile intelligence in the Cold War and afterwards, I am stunned that colleagues who are so extraordinarily paranoid about the actions of their own governments are so trusting when it comes to the aims and capabilities of the Russian authorities. (Scanty clues, which I detail in the book, suggest that Snowden lives either in or near the Russian foreign intelligence headquarters in Yasenevo in southern Moscow.)

The political agendas of the most ardent Snowdenistas—people such as the bombastic Brazil-based blogger Glenn Greenwald, the hysterical hacktivist Jacob Appelbaum and the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange—cloak extreme and muddled beliefs in the language of privacy rights, civil liberties and digital freedoms—a naive and one-sided attitude exemplified by the Norwegian Socialist Left Party's nomination of Snowden for the Nobel Peace prize. To expose and attack the security and intelligence services of democracies, while sheltering in the capital of a country that habitually menaces its neighbours, is an odd way of promoting world peace. A political party based on these quasi-anarchist, nihilist ideas would get nowhere. Yet they are bringing about the greatest peacetime defeat in the history of the West.

My argument does not rest on whispers from the shadows: It is based on publicly available facts, plain for everyone to see. Snowden and the Snowdenistas are not on a noble crusade; they are at best “useful idiots,” at worst engaged in sabotage and treason. Someone should make a Hollywood film about it.