ENEMY OF THE STATE PART ONE: THE LIAR

Snowden, a traitor? Check. Snowden, a true believer of what he claims to be his ideologies? That is up for debate. Snowden told Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald in an interview, “…you have to make a determination about what it is that’s important to you…You can get up every day, go to work, you can collect your large paycheck for relatively little work against the public interest, and go to sleep at night after watching your shows. But if you realize that is the world you helped to create, and it’s going to get worse by the next generation and the next generation.” Here, Snowden tries to defend his motives for exposing the NSA’s secret documents, claiming he did it all because he could not live with the secrets his job required him to keep from the American public. A member of the intelligence community similarly ties Snowden’s motives to his ideologies, saying, “Snowden to me is just like the spies in the Cold War who went to work for the Russians because they believed ideologically…with Snowden you seem to have a true believer driven by the proposition that all information should be free.” However, there is something here that does not seem to add up, regarding Snowden’s motives being tied to his ideologies. Why would a man, willing to put it all on the line to uphold his ideologies regarding all information being free, choose to work with the NSA – an organization that tries to deal with information in secret – in the first place? There are also people that say he was motivated in part by his ego. According to Vanity Fair, “For many of those who consider Snowden a traitor, he scores high on the ego motive. They cite the swagger in his Internet postings, the braggadocio of his public statements…” However, as Snowden says in his interview with Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, he had it all. He had the job, the money, the house in paradise, all a person could want – what bigger ego trip could there be? And yet, he chose to give it all away. Whatever Snowden’s true motives are, they seem to be unrelated to his ideologies or his ego.