The more I listen to American intelligence officials, the more I edge toward Snowden

I've been really ambivalent about Edward
Snowden, especially since he landed in Russia. At the
outset I thought he
clearly was wrong, akin
to British defectors Kim Philby or Guy Burgess. Yet I have been struck that
everyone under the age of 30 I've asked thinks he's a hero. That has made me
think some more.

I am not
yet on his side, but I think I am becoming more
sympathetic to him. I thought a lot about this over the Christmas break. I see
four questions here:

Did he do the right thing?




Did he at the same time commit a crime?




Are the activities of the U.S. intelligence
community that he exposed legal?




If so, are they wise?

It is possible that Snowden did the right thing
but in the wrong way. Indeed, he may have helped the United States but
committed a crime in doing so.

Yet that begs the question: What would have been the right way?
Especially given the reckless disregard for the law shown by American national
security officials over the last decade, he was right to be wary of going the
civil disobedience route. We've seen the killing of American citizens held to
be "enemy combatants," and intelligence officials certainly talk about Snowden
as an enemy who has inflicted severe damage on their operations. Add two and
two and you get a secret execution warrant for one Edward Snowden. Is that
speculative? Absolutely. Ridiculous? Not if you have been paying attention to
the erosion of boundaries (between civilian and military, war and peace, public
and private, and most especially the militarization of intelligence
operations).

I also think that the
U.S. intelligence community, by simply insisting that it is doing the right
thing and that Snowden is a contemptible traitor, end of discussion, is going
to wind up the loser in this conversation. One well-informed person I know comments that this
failure to engage seriously now presents "an existential threat to the entire
USIC's ability to operate with the support of the American people, Congress and
the media." (He says the solution is to strengthen the director of
national intelligence and give that office the powers actually envisioned by
the 9/11 Commission, such as budget authority and direct regulatory oversight
over all member agencies. That is, of course, another issue, but an important
one.)

I especially am becoming more sympathetic to
Snowden the more current and former American intelligence officials talk about
killing Snowden and holding
forth in other ways. Bart
Gellman, one of the reporters who has broken a lot of
Snowden's news, wrote of a confrontation with a self-righteous general last
summer, who angrily said to him, "We didn't have another 9/11 [because intelligence enabled
warfighters to find the enemy first]. Until you've got to pull the trigger,
until you've had to bury your people, you don't have a clue."

First, we have
buried our people.

Second, until there is more
accountability for the crimes committed by U.S. intelligence officials over the
last 10 years, I am not inclined to let secret policemen and spies be the moral
arbiters of our society or the interpreters of our constitutional rights -- in
fact, I think the burden is on them, not on me. I was not the one who tortured people, kidnapped others,
delivered captives into the hands of governments we knew would torture them,
and also wormholed some of our constitutional rights. And I didn't allow 9/11
to happen in the first place, and then get all panicky after that. If we are to
ask if Snowden damaged U.S. intelligence operations, we also need to ask how
much U.S. intelligence operations damaged the United States over the last 10
years. They will tell you that there is secret evidence of all the attacks they
stopped. I will tell you that there is secret evidence of all the laws they broke
-- or at least, there was such evidence, until the tapes were destroyed. There
are a lot of people calling for accountability for Snowden who seem blind
to the much larger crimes committed by U.S. intelligence officials.