On December 19, 2010, Lukashenko declared himself reelected with 80 percent of the vote. His nearest opponent, the respected dissident Andrei Sannikov, carted off to jail, where he has reportedly been tortured. After the election, Shamir wrote a glowing account of Lukashenko’s government in CounterPunch, denouncing the opposition as “the pro-Western ‘Gucci’ crowd.” He also boasted that WikiLeaks had exposed American “agents” in Belarus, according to an account in the New Statesman.

The boasts were ugly but not idle. The next month, a state-run newspaper published what it claimed were excerpts from cables provided by Shamir, which supposedly identified prominent dissidents, including Sannikov, as paid American agents. James Ball, a former WikiLeaks employee who now works for The Guardian, has written that when he and others raised questions about Shamir’s actions, “we were told in no uncertain terms that Assange would not condone criticism of his friend.”

The Belarusian affair coincided with a deepening of Assange’s connections to Putin’s government. Without much public commentary, Assange has acquired something like Russian government media sponsorship. In April 2012, he launched a half-hour political TV show—eventually named “The Julian Assange Show”—on the Kremlin-funded and -controlled RT television network and website. His first guest was the normally furtive Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. At a moment when Assange’s bright light seemed to be fading, the Russians gave him his own outlet on a network whose primary mission is to advance Putin’s political line. (Greenwald has defended Assange’s association with RT, arguing that working for the Russian network is no different from writing for major U.S. outlets such as The Washington Post, NBC, and The Wall Street Journal, all of them supposedly corrupted by their right-wing corporate ownership.) Assange’s connections to Putin’s regime would appear to have something to do with the next chapter in the NSA controversy—how and why Edward Snowden came to seek asylum in Russia.

On May 20, Snowden fled Hawaii with hard drives full of NSA material and arrived in Hong Kong, where he was joined by Greenwald and his associate, the filmmaker and activist Laura Poitras. The day after the pair revealed to the world Snowden’s identity as the NSA “whistle-blower,” Assange praised him as a “hero” from within the Ecuadorian Embassy. In time, Assange would disclose that WikiLeaks was paying for Snowden’s travel and lodgings and providing him with legal counsel. In mid-June, Assange’s confidante, the WikiLeaks editor Sarah Harrison, arrived in Hong Kong and joined Snowden. From this moment on, Assange and WikiLeaks became central to the Snowden story.

In initial interviews with Greenwald and Poitras, Snowden said he willingly accepted the risk of going to prison and that he wanted to end up in a country with strong protections for privacy rights, possibly Iceland. But the Obama administration indicated that it regarded Snowden as a serious criminal, and before long, it became clear that Snowden’s chief concern was in finding a country that could safely get him out of Hong Kong, no matter how despicable its own record on privacy rights.

On June 21, according to a report in the Russian newspaper Kommersant, Snowden took up residence at the Russian consulate in Hong Kong. Two days later, he and Harrison boarded an Aeroflot flight for Moscow. Reports vary about who exactly steered Snowden to the Russians. But WikiLeaks has claimed the credit, tweeting that it had helped to arrange for Snowden to gain “political asylum in a democratic country.” Izvestia divulged that the Kremlin and its intelligence services, in collaboration with WikiLeaks, had completed Snowden’s escape.

Within days of Snowden’s arrival in Sheremetyevo airport, powerful Russians expressed interest in having him work with the Putin government. Senator Ruslan Gattarov, a Putin ally, offered to hire Snowden as a consultant for a Duma working group that would investigate whether U.S. Internet firms gave information about Russians to Washington. Kirill Kabanov, a member of Putin’s so-called Human Rights Council, called for the Kremlin to grant Snowden political asylum; Putin had offered to consider such a request soon after news broke about Snowden’s thefts.

On July 12, having been holed up at the airport for three weeks, Snowden held an event widely described as a press conference to announce that he would be seeking temporary asylum. He spoke not before the hundreds of journalists who had flocked to the airport, but before a carefully selected group of invitees that included “pro-Kremlin figures in the guise of civic activists,” according to a posting on The New Yorker website by Russia expert Masha Lipman. Also in attendance was Anatoly Kucherena, a prominent attorney who serves on the pro-Kremlin Public Chamber and the body appointed to oversee the FSB, and who has since become Snowden’s lawyer and sole spokesman to the world.

In his statement Snowden praised the international resistance to “historically disproportionate aggression,” by which he meant the U.S. attempts to bring him to justice. “Russia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador have my gratitude and respect for being the first to stand against human rights violations carried out by the powerful rather than the powerless. By refusing to compromise their principles in the face of intimidation, they have earned the respect of the world.” No credible public figure has praised Russia’s increasingly vile record on civil liberties for many years. For Snowden and for WikiLeaks, it appears, what really counts in the field of human rights is a willingness to protect Edward Snowden.

The payoff of the Snowden affair for Putin and the Russians thus far has been substantial. Just as the Kremlin’s human rights reputation, already woeful under Putin, has spiraled downward, it is able to swoop in to rescue an American political outlaw, supposedly persecuted by the Obama administration. The dissident journalist Masha Gessen has observed, “The Russian propaganda machine has not gotten this much mileage out of a U.S. citizen since Angela Davis’s murder trial in 1971.”

More than that, the Russians have used Snowden to embarrass the United States with one very specific complaint. The Putin regime has long hated the central role that the United States plays in setting the rules of the Internet through the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and wanted to assert maximum control over the Internet within its own borders. With Snowden, it had scored the ultimate data point in its case—the crucial evidence that the United States was manipulating the Internet for its own nefarious means. “We need to quickly put these huge transnational companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook under national controls,” Gattarov told an interviewer. “This is the lesson Snowden taught us.”

Some of the documents stolen by Edward Snowden have revealed worrisome excesses on the part of the NSA. Any responsible whistle-blower, finding evidence of these excesses, might, if thwarted by her or his superiors, bring the evidence of those specific abuses to the attention of the press, causing a scandal, which would prod Congress and the NSA itself to correct or eliminate the offensive program.

The leakers and their supporters, however, see things very differently. To them, national security is not a branch of the government; it is the government, or it is tantamount to being the government: a sinister, power-mad authority. As Greenwald has argued: “The objective of the NSA and the U.S. government is nothing less than destroying all remnants of privacy. They want to make sure that every single time human beings interact with one another, things that we say to one another, things we do with one another, places we go, the behavior in which we engage, that they know about it.” It is impossible, therefore, to reform this clandestine Leviathan from the inside. And so the leakers are aiming at de-legitimating and, if possible, destroying something much larger than a set of NSA programs. They have unleashed a torrent of classified information with the clear intent of showing that the federal government has spun out of control, thereby destroying the public’s faith in their government’s capacity to spy aggressively on our enemies while also protecting the privacy of its citizens. They want to spin the meaning of the documents they have released to confirm their animating belief that the United States is an imperial power, drunk on its hegemonic ambitions.

According to the leakers’ own evidence, however, this interpretation is simply not the case. The files leaked so far strongly indicate that the U.S. intelligence system, although in need of major reform, is not recklessly spying on its citizens. The President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies found serious problems with the NSA’s data collection, and recommended, among other restrictions, outlawing the NSA’s practice of amassing and storing the phone records of virtually all Americans. Yet it also showed persuasively that the NSA has acted far more responsibly than the claims made by the leakers and publicized by the press.

There are many examples of such sensationalism. Early on in the affair, for example, Snowden’s most spectacular charge was that, at his desk, without a warrant, he could eavesdrop on anyone “even the president, if I had a personal email.” Several weeks later, Greenwald, writing in The Guardian, revealed a document that purportedly substantiated that claim—“training materials” for a supposedly “top secret” program called xKeyscore, described in the document as the NSA’s “ ‘widest-reaching’ system for developing intelligence from the internet.” The gist of Greenwald’s article was widely reprinted in the American press.

Inspected carefully, however, the documents are plainly not “training materials.” Instead, they are more likely the PowerPoint version of a puffed-up marketing brochure, possibly or even probably from an outside contractor trying to sell the program to the NSA. The title slide dates from January 2007, which means that they predate important legislation passed in August 2007 and July 2008 that sharply checked the NSA. And the slides say absolutely nothing about giving users the power to read e-mails, with or without a warrant. Greenwald’s article does cite another set of xKeyscore materials which dates from 2012, and which might well prove that the article’s claims and Snowden’s statement were accurate and truthful. But Greenwald and The Guardian have not made those materials public, and when the defense writer Joshua Foust, who pointed out many of these criticisms, subsequently questioned them about the documents, Guardian editors replied that they had no intention of releasing them. The champions of “transparency” have been remarkably opaque when they choose to be.

A similar pattern recurs with other supposedly damning documents. Among those cited by The New York Times, in its editorial supporting clemency for Snowden, is one that purportedly proves “the N.S.A. broke federal privacy laws, or exceeded its authority, thousands of times per year, according to the agency’s own internal auditor.” But the Times was drawing on a Washington Post report that failed to say whether the “thousands” of violations amounted to a significant proportion of the total uses of the database, or only a relative handful, within the margin for human error. The Timesalso failed to emphasize that, according to the document, the vast majority those violations, as audited in the first quarter of 2012, were due to simple human or mechanical error and that there was no way of knowing whether the balance involved serious, as opposed to technical, violations of law. The findings, finally, came from an internal audit by the NSA—an indication that the NSA takes steps to police itself.

The leakers have gone far beyond justifiably blowing the whistle on abusive programs. In addition to their alarmism about domestic surveillance, many of the Snowden documents released thus far have had nothing whatsoever to do with domestic surveillance. As Fred Kaplan has pointed out in Slate, Snowden has exposed NSA operations to track the Taliban in Pakistan, monitor e-mails for intelligence of developments in Iran, and more surveillance abroad. These operations, Kaplan notes, were neither illegal, improper, or, in the context of contemporary global affairs, immoral. Regardless of whether any of these documents in any way compromised U.S. interests abroad, they were plainly not the revelations of “whistle-blowers” seeking to secure Americans’ constitutional rights. They are the revelations of leakers, out to damage their bugaboo national security behemoth.

Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange have largely set the terms in the debate over transparency and privacy in America. But the value of some of their revelations does not mean that they deserve the prestige and influence that has been accorded to them. The leakers and their supporters would never hand the state modern surveillance powers, even if they came wrapped in all sorts of rules and regulations that would constrain their abuse. They are right to worry, but wrong—even paranoid—to distrust democratic governments in this way. Surveillance and secrecy will never be attractive features of a democratic government, but they are not inimical to it, either. This the leakers will never understand.



Sean Wilentz is a contributing editor at The New Republic and the George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton University.

Correction: This story originally identified Joe Mullin as a high tech and legal expert. In fact, Joe Mullin is a journalist and editor at Ars Technica. We regret the error.