Who Is Edward Snowden?

So what’s with all this recent uproar about the NSA and this infamous Edward Snowden? It’s a winding story of which has covered every front page since it began on June 6. It raises a major question of online privacy and where lines should be drawn in terms of government transparency.

Where did it all start?

It all started with the exposure of NSA’s secret surveillance program known as PRISM, by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency computer systems contractor. He went public at the beginning of June with highly classified documents and an exclusive interview with Britain’s The Guardian, which took place in Hong Kong. He previously occupied a comfortable NSA contract position in Hawaii, of which granted him accessibility to highly classified material.1 He found this material to be so disturbing he abandoned his whole life, as he knew it, in order for the material to be exposed to the public. Something like this would have taken immense courage as he well knowingly defied the largest superpower in the world, gave up his freedom and abandoned his comfortable life to expose the truth. The US federal government has now charged Snowden with espionage and is looking to extradite him back to the US to be prosecuted.1

Snowden chose Hong Kong to go public due to the established free speech framework that is present there as well as the tension in the government relationship of the two countries making him furthermore difficult to extradite. This whole situation hasn’t helped the Chinese – US relationship either. On Monday the United States expressed “frustration and disappointment with Hong Kong and China” for allowing Snowden to take a flight from Hong Kong to Moscow. Obama representatives say this “unquestionably” damages the relationship between China and the US. Chinese officials brushed off these threats of their relation saying that US – Chinese relations will continue as normal. 2

Snowden is now believed to be in Moscow airport and remains in limbo there because the airport is not technically part of Russia but rather part of transit. Additionally Vladimir Putin states that they have no obligation to extradite Snowden on the grounds that there is no extradition treaty established between the two countries.3 It is not known where he will go next, but he will be seeking a country to take refuge with a government that is neutral in the matter.

This winding story easily draws you away from the original issue that Snowden forfeited his freedom for – privacy and the honesty of government.

What is all this fuss about anyways?

Although the details of this secret surveillance program are foggy because of its classified nature, it is essentially the recording and storage of everyone’s communications and digital activities with the aim to prevent terrorism. This sounds like it could be something taken from ‘Big Brother’ in George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four”. But in the government’s defense, it claims to have prevented 50 terrorists’ plots worldwide and furthermore explains that the program is “limited, focused, and subject to rigorous oversight”.4 So this is all and well if its intention is to protect the civil liberties of individuals in the US as well as around the world, isn’t it?

So, What’s the problem?

The problem with this program is not that they are trying to do the wrong thing – but rather that they blatantly lied and kept secret about doing so. The whole essence of democracy is that the government does the will of the people – that each person has an equal say in the dealings of how things are run. A primary property of this is being truthful to the people. As outlined below, the director of the NSA was far from truthful:

So Who’s in the wrong?

Being truthful is widely perceived to be that which is right. And stripping away all layers of formalities and technicalities in this case lets look at who is truthful and who is deceitful in this situation. It appears that the director of the NSA, under oath, in front of congress and the world blatantly lied. And when exposed, did not even fess up to his blatant lying gracefully, but rather tried to squeeze his way around the felony of lying under oath by saying his lie was “the farthest from untruthful”, which in itself is a lie because the farthest from untruth would be the truth, which he certainly did not provide. Truth and transparency is essential to democracy because it is what holds the system together, what makes every citizen equal and what makes the people support their government. The system falls apart at the seams otherwise, because if we know that the government is lying about this then what else could they be dishonest about? Society puts so much trust in the government that it is essential that they are totally honest.

Therefore in my opinion Snowden is not the one who rightfully deserves to be prosecuted, but rather is a hero for exposing one of the worst qualities that a democratic government can embody – deceitfulness to their people. He was the one to bring the truth to the surface, which is the right of the people in this case. In doing so yes, he compromised so called “classified” information, but the information was not rightfully classified. The information could not possibly be classified if the director of the NSA had not committed the felony of perjury, which prevented it from being public knowledge. Edward Snowden is a hero for sacrificing his liberty and freedom for the betterment of the people. This is an issue of privacy that should rightfully be decided by the people and not arbitrarily be taken from them.

When it comes to here in Canada, I directly know that a similar system is in place. When I was in high school a close friend of mine firmly did not believe that every single text was monitored, after the topic was being discussed in class. He decided to test the theory himself by sending a simple text message to another friend at school, in one line saying he would bomb a certain government building – and that day police showed up at the school for him. They knew the innocence of the situation, so they only lectured him on the seriousness of the situation and that was the end of it.

Here’s Edward Snowden’s official interview: