Keen Perspective on Snowden

Paul Pillar is unexpectedly blunt in his rather disparaging portrait of Edward Snowden.

Snowden, and his collaborators such as Greenwald, had a shrewd public roll-out plan. They started with the stuff about NSA collection activity within the United States, to get on the good side of a lot of public opinion by having Snowden pose as a “whistle-blower” acting on behalf of personal privacy. It was only after scoring that public relations coup that they got on with the rest of their assault on U.S. (and British) national security. Since then there has been a steady flow of divulged stolen secrets, ranging from descriptions of the entire U.S. intelligence program to details about overseas political intelligence targets or NSA’s ability to decrypt coded material. Nearly all of this is far removed from any issues of privacy or civil rights or anything else that should be the least bit controversial. It is about normal, legitimate activity by arms of the government performing their assigned missions on behalf of national defense and the conduct of foreign relations. Mainstream media, feasting on the red meat, keep publishing the material. The material may be interesting, titillating, and occasionally even educational. But it is not scandalous.

The revelation of the material, however, is scandalous. The damage from the disclosures is major, including tipping off adversaries to the vulnerabilities they would need to correct to impede the collection of information about them, tipping off those same adversaries to our own vulnerabilities that they can exploit, causing a host of difficulties in relations with foreign governments, and much more. Those inside the U.S. government doing damage assessments will be kept busy for a long time by just this one case. Say what you want about whether this or that particular item ought to have been classified; the great bulk of the revealed material was classified for very good reasons.