ENEMY OF THE STATE PART ONE: WHO IS THIS SNOWDEN AND WHAT HAS HE DONE?

Edward Snowden is no criminal. That is, according to the Constitution of the United States, also referred to as the Supreme Law of the Land. By terms laid out in the Constitution, Edward Snowden did not commit treason against the government of the United States. In Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution, it is said that treason “shall consist only in levying War against them [the United States], or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” Did Snowden declare war on the U.S.? Did he head over to an enemy country with gun in hand as he took up arms against the U.S.? No and no. What he did goes beyond the Constitution’s definition of treason, for he did not aid enemies in acts of war but rather in his revelation of thousands of documents he stole and handed over to three journalists – Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, and Barton Gellman. The Federalist Papers, another set of documents of great importance to the United States, go a bit further with their definition of treason, saying “…treason is a crime leveled at the immediate being of the society when the laws have once ascertained the guilt of the offender…” This definition takes into account not only whether one is waging war against the United States in some capacity in order to convict one of treason, but also the impact that the person’s actions have upon American society. In this case, the finger is pointed a bit more at Snowden, for the information he revealed affected most if not all Americans. Despite what the Constitution as well as the Federalist Papers say about treason, are there not other ways to define a criminal, a traitor, an enemy? Snowden, even if his impulsive decision does not make him an enemy of the state or a man guilty of treason, has proved himself to rather be an enemy of the people. He caused unrest around the world, and exposed the United States’ method of national security that goes against its own Bill of Rights. But did he offer an alternative to protecting the nation from the terrorist threat? No, he did not. Did he consider how other nations deal with suspicion? Did he consider the alternative to the U.S.’s method of national security, or imagine getting followed around by government thugs, living constantly in fear – the method used in too many countries? No, he did not. He failed to see this, and proceeded to put the people he claimed to be protecting at rest. Snowden: enemy of the state? Nope. Snowden: enemy of the people? Check. 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. Edward Snowden, as a person, can be hard to define, mostly due to his questionable motives. For example, can Snowden be considered a hacker? Yes and no, for a variety of reasons. One reason why Snowden could very well be considered a hacker is due to the details of his young career. In The New York Time’s article entitled “Résumé Shows Snowden Honed Hacking Skills”, an account of Snowden’s career as a hacker is detailed – from his taking “a course that trains security professionals to think like hackers and understand their techniques” to choosing to work with and be a contractor for the NSA, an organization that is all about hacking into other peoples’ information. Many people also can attest to his classification as a hacker, for without being a hacker, he would have never been able to gain access to the classified NSA documents that he proceeded to steal and leak. They also define his job in relation with the government as being a hacker. For example, former NSA official John R. Schindler blatantly referred to Snowden as a hacker when he questioned the legitimacy of Snowden’s background check and allowance for top security clearance. He said, “For years, N.S.A. and now the Cyber Command have struggled with how to relate to the hacker community. It’s obvious that some sort of arrangement to allow hackers to work for N.S.A. and the intelligence community in a systematic way is needed.” Contrarily, when defining a hacker, one must look past the mere facts of a person’s life, and consider the stereotypical definition of a hacker as well. This definition seems only to provide for the kind of tech wizards that live by a different set of rules – hackers who live on the dark side of the Internet whose moral compass seems to be malfunctioning. Does Edward Snowden fit this definition of a hacker? Certainly not. No matter how large the secrets were that he leaked, he does not live the life that most hackers tend to live. Snowden, once again, is ever difficult to define, and hacker is a title that suits him in some ways, and in others, does not. Regardless of who Snowden is or what his motives were for unveiling the dirty secrets of the NSA, there is another, more important question to ask, and that is whether all that he claimed to have done for the betterment of society and the benefit of others was in vain. Did he truly protect Americans from an NSA that was spying just to spy rather than to protect people the often referenced, looming terrorist threat over the United States? Or did he just put an end to spying that was essential for Americans’ safety? The answer lies within the facts. The predominant question that may be asked in regard to this controversy is whether it is more important to be free or to be safe. Those who seem to side with Snowden consider freedom to be of more import than national security. Some even take this argument a step further, saying that in reality, Americans are no safer than they were before and that the disillusioned NSA is fighting a phony war against terrorism. One of these such doubters of the NSA’s alleged intentions is the Cato Institute. In their opening remarks within their article entitled “The Terrorism Delusion” by John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart, they say, “This article is a set of ruminations on the post–September 11 years of delusion. It reflects, first, on the exaggerations of the threat presented by terrorism and then on the distortions of perspective these exaggerations have inspired—distortions that have in turn inspired a determined and expensive quest to ferret out, and even to create, the nearly nonexistent. It also supplies a quantitative assessment of the costs of the terrorism delusion and concludes with a discussion of how anxieties about terrorism persist despite exceedingly limited evidence that much fear is justified.” Made evident in this preliminary argument, the Cato Institute considers not only the NSA’s but the response in general to the extreme displays of terrorism that took place September 11, 2001, was similarly extreme and yet unnecessary. They continue to develop this argument as they reference multiple statistics that do not stand in favor of the NSA’s post-9/11 actions against terrorism. For example, they say, “In the eleven years since the September 11 attacks, no terrorist has been able to detonate even a primitive bomb in the United States.” On the other hand, an organization that seemed to assert that Snowden and his actions in particular put America and its relationship with other countries at risk – thus, choosing national security over freedom is the Brookings Institution. On their page dedicated to the Snowden ordeal entitled “The Big Snoop”, they made a case against Snowden’s actions in which he chose liberty over freedom, as they say, “America's diplomacy has been hobbled, its image abroad tarnished, its alliances strained, its government's standing in the eyes of its own people damaged, its policies challenged in court and, in some cases, already undergoing major revision at the behest of the White House.” The Brookings Institute also referenced several statistics in their article in an attempt to support their argument that Snowden’s actions, while having detrimental national and international repercussions, also did not have the effect for which Snowden was allegedly hoping. For example, data from Pew Research was featured in the article stated that Edward Snowden’s leaks had very little effect on Americans’ views and disapproval of government surveillance – the percentage of Americans that disapprove government surveillance only increased from 44% to 53%. All In all, with his recent actions, Snowden deepened the fault lines between people in the United States as they take opposing sides on the issue of national security versus freedom.