You’re convinced he’s a spy because the people in charge of illegal activity have accused him of espionage after he gave up his life to disclose their illegal activity?
OKAY…
What illegal activity?
perjury for one thing.
As OP observed, the vast majority of the documents Snowden took had absolutely nothing to do with NSA surveillance on Americans. He ruined perfectly legitimate intelligence operations. It is fairly obvious at this point that Snowden and Assange are both Russian assets.
It’s hard to delineate exactly what’s legal or not since much of it remains legally untested due to it’s covert nature. Suffice to say, the legal interpretation being pushed by the administration is one that is highly tortured and not one that the general public and congress thought it was approving when it granted the NSA it’s powers.
In many ways, it’s a more distressing interpretation to believe that it’s all legal vs somewhat illegal as that would mean not only the NSA, but the justice system as well has been corrupted.
Russian assets? Not necessarily.
In it for the money and fame? Definitely.
So Edward Snowden put his freedom and livelihood on the line because the world desperately needed to know of… a lie of omission by a mid-level bureaucrat?
Color me unimpressed.
Hasn’t at least one judge ruled that parts of the program(s) are unconstitutional due to violations of the 4th amendment?
James Clapper is the Director of National Intelligence which is the designated leader of the United States Intelligence Community, hardly a mid-level bureaucrat. And it wasn’t a lie of omission, it was just a straight out lie, to congress.
But fine, if you want a list of things which, if not by-the-letter illegal, at least directly violate public expectations over the size and scope of the NSA:
- That the NSA considers meta-data to be “not data” and collects it indiscriminately from Americans, including phone logs from Verizon and, presumably, every other mobile carrier.
- That the NSA defines “collect” as the act of accessing the data and does not consider data collected if it’s merely stored in NSA databases.
- That the NSA standard for justifying accessing data as foreign merely requires “51% certainty”, a standard that is as absurd as it is facetious.
- That the NSA regards being 3 hops away from a target of interest to be sufficient cause to access data, a standard that basically allows for blanket coverage.
- That the NSA compromised a standards body to deliberately weaken encryption standards, then pushed a private company into using those standards without disclosing to customers, both domestic and foreign.
- That the NSA engaged in economic espionage against allied countries, despite longstanding public assertions that the NSA does not engage in economic espionage.
- That the NSA routinely shares classified information with the DEA and may share it with other agencies such as the IRS.
- That the NSA employees caught violating internal rules to spy on friends and lovers with no intelligence purpose were given slaps on the wrist and that there’s no automated, systematic auditing put in place to prevent this, meaning nobody knows the extent of abuse in the system.
Some of the other stuff Snowden revealed could be considered distasteful but plausibly under a realpolitik interpretation of the NSA charter (such as hacking into allied leaders phones or tapping private data center lines of American companies in foreign countries) but the examples listed above are, IMHO, a clear perversion of the NSA charter and not anything the American public expected from the a reading of the law.
Oh, I’m sure he is to certain people in Russia and China. Best hero that ever happened for them.
Suicidal for China,perhaps.
It’s military is 25-30 years behind that of the US and it has no allies or nearby bases to launch pre-emotive strikes against the US. Any war started by China would result in yet another humiliating defeat for the nation.
Back to the subject at hand: Snowden’s value as a spy was diminished when he contacted the media,if he indeed was a spy. Had simply slipped into Russia quietly,he could have and would have done far greater damage to the NSA as there would be no telling what information that he had.
“Fair” can mean a lot if things, but an unsupported smear intended to help one win an argument is not one of them. It’s sad that 60 years after McCarthy, calling out the U.S. government for misbehavior still gets you accused of being a Russian spy.
There were many members of Congress from both sides of the aisle that had issues with the surveillance program. I don’t really see a reason for them to lie about the vast majority of the documents relating to military matters and not the surveillance program.
Actually this almost seems intuitive to me. Additionally, why would Snowden have not released everything he has (meaning all 1.7m documents) if all 1.7m pertain to the surveillance program. There is no easy way to pierce the “veil” of classified information, but Snowden is the one who presents himself as a whistleblower. If he is, then what reason does he have for protecting the 1.7m classified documents he is known to have taken but has never released if those documents pertained to a surveillance program he wished to expose?
Even if the 1.7m aren’t related to military affairs and other sensitive State secrets but are just mundane/uninteresting…it’s still questionable why Snowden wouldn’t have released them since it would immediately disprove any assertions that he was doing what he did for espionage purposes.
The only two reasons I could imagine are:
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He is a legitimate whisteblower and his robot / file crawler program inadvertently got a huge amount of classified files about military matters. Snowden did not want to leak military operations secrets, so he perhaps destroyed these files before going to Russia.
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He’s a spy who stole them for espionage purposes.
I’m not really seeing any other two options that pass the credibility test.
If he’s a legitimate whistleblower who wasn’t looking to hurt the U.S. but just expose a program he disagreed with, then it is possible he destroyed these documents before arriving in Russia, or maybe even prior to leaving Hawaii. We just know he downloaded them, we have no idea what he’s done with them sense.
I do agree it’s likely at least some of the classified documents are things that everyone already knows, probably shouldn’t be classified, and are mostly uninteresting. But it’s strange to me military leaders would lie about someone harming the United States in terms of an intelligence leak. That’s a failure on their part, no military leader would fake failing at something that I’ve ever known. If the documents all pertain to military matters it makes it look like a much worse thing than the surveillance program which was not actually that secret (since many European governments were cooperating with us and one could, and some folks had, made the argument that based on the reading of the laws passed since 9/11 such a program could be going on.)
This could be true as well, if so it puts him in the pure mercenary motivation camp of guys like Ames and Hanssen, except I can see why he might use whistleblowing as advertisement like you say. Ames or Hanssen knew how to sell secrets to the Russians as they were part of the intelligence community, Snowden was just a Sys Admin and probably had no clue how to make “contact” with foreign agents who might be willing to pay him fat stacks.
But if this is the case it just means he didn’t have a handler, but it’d still mean he was a spy (just operating shop for himself.)
I don’t believe we have any idea on any of the things you just said. Glenn Greenwald has made claims he has a lot of Snowden documents he hasn’t published. But we have no idea actually how many documents Snowden had in Hong Kong when we know he had contact with the Chinese Government (who may well have seized storage media or etc and seen all the documents then), we have no idea how many he had when he arrived in Russia and we have no idea if he had all 1.7m documents later on when he worked with Greenwald. He could have given journalists every document he ever stole, or he could have given them 0.1% of them. We don’t know the numbers involved. If he gave 0.1%, it’s possible that is all that he had. We don’t know what portion of the 1.7m documents he downloaded he left the country with. It’s conceivable some he deleted right away.
NSA is actually part of the DOD, did you not know that? Its director reports to both a an Undersecretary of the DOD and a higher ranking general (NSA head himself is always a general in the armed forces.) It would make a lot of sense that NSA computers contain sensitive military information.
Not really, no. What you’re saying is true if the intelligence is something like an invasion plan. It does you little good to have that if your enemy knows it because that will just mean they’ll change the plan. But if it’s information of a technical nature it doesn’t really matter whether they know as much as it matters that you have it, because you can copy it and use their technical innovations for yourself.
A lot of spies eventually get caught and their names leaked. There was a guy who did something similar to Snowden years ago who also ended up living in Russia and he was known pretty publicly. That same guy later died in mysterious circumstances after being “visited” by Russian intelligence, some claim Putin had him killed as his “good deeds” were too long in the past to matter and removing him removed a potential barb in Russian-U.S. relations as this was in the early 2000s when Putin seemed to be trying for a better relationship with the West.
If you know you’re in a business where you may get outed/caught anyway, it probably makes sense to not stay in Hawaii doing what you’re doing forever. Snowden probably has heard of Ames and Hanssen and arguably he wouldn’t want to stay in his job forever because he could get caught. If he’s fleeing the country anyway to collect his rewards, then staying secret doesn’t matter much. The intelligence services in the U.S. would know what he had done once he mysteriously disappeared.
In fact your chronology makes more sense if that’s what happened. He was making his exit (secretly), and in Hong Kong he realized that if he didn’t go public the NSA would still know what he had done. They had already checked on why he hadn’t been at work and some forensic IT work would have eventually discovered what he had done. He may have gone public since he felt he would be more protected from assassination if his name was in the open versus him living in secret in Russia.
Lots of Americans that have spied for Russia had idealistic ideological reasons that at least started them down the path. Ames/Hanssen were always noted as being particularly scorn worthy because they were motivated purely by a desire to get cash.
Explain. Did it require that for Ames and Hanssen to do what they did? I think it just requires the Russians to have a regular foreign intelligence service capable of conducting HUMINT or developing assets abroad (check), and an American willing to spy (check.) It doesn’t mean it happened, but it’s weird you consider what would be a pretty typical case of espionage a crazy conspiracy theory and then you wave it away by saying “it’d require a vast network of shadowy…” you do realize that’s basically what an intelligence service is, right?
He only published a few documents.
Something to keep in mind is that in the history of Americans who spied for Russia we have three broad categories:
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The ones who got caught. We know them because they went to prison and were notorious.
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The ones who fled to Russia. We also tended to find out who they were. It always seemed to get out there. Sometimes it’s been cases like Snowden where they wanted it known what they had done, but I think other times it just eventually gets out.
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The ones who never get caught. I don’t know anything about these guys, and I imagine it’s because no one does. Or if anyone does they don’t want it known the ones we could never even identify.
If you’re spying for Russia you might know a thing or two about the history of people who have spied for Russia. If you conclude that it’s in your best interests not to keep doing this forever, it’d make sense to demand to your Russian contact that you get an exit setup sooner rather than later. Ames apparently was slowly working on something like that, but he didn’t pursue it very aggressively as he seemed to mostly want to just keep making money as a spy and not have to leave the United States. Ames is in prison for life now.
Once Snowden had made it to Hong Kong he may have been made aware of the fact they were closing in on him because his dereliction at work had gotten him noticed. At that point he may have reasoned that being a public “whistleblower” makes a lot more sense than trying to get to Russia covertly.
What’s that got to do with Snowden? The NSA’s abuses remain what they are no matter what happens in Russia.
He’s published no documents. He turned documents over to journalists, who published and reported on some of them. Which spies don’t do.
What a daffy, convoluted theory.
This is pretty much the scenario Snowden’s accusers have to hang their frame on, and it is reasonable.
But that just means he could have been an untrained spy selling out to the Russians. The motive for revealing oneself is the same for an activist. A publicly known Snowden is safer, and any whistleblowing his project is more likely to be successful, than some obscure government contractor who could be killed on the streets of Hong Kong and never make the news anywhere.
I don’t buy the OP’s story, because I remember that people like John Boehner called Snowden a “traitor” not a “spy” for several months, and that he was mocked early on as a youthful idealist.
I think that Snowden is probably pretty much what he appears to be. A government contractor who—for a mix of reasons, most likely—decided he’d rather expose the NSA than keep working in the position he had. How much was driven by personal problems with his employer? How much by a guilty conscience due to the work he did? How much by a twisted desire for adventure? We don’t know, and I’m not convinced that’s as important as what he did.
Glenn Greenwald, on the other hand, seems to be a serious idealist. Or is he a commie spy, too?
Snowden isn’t the point.
True, if he is a spy that in no way discredits what he found and was published.
Unless you want to change the subject.