The penny drops

It’s not looking good for young Edward Snowden. Flees Hong Kong ahead of an extradition request from the US – and color me shocked that the Chinese government punted – only to fly through Russia en route to – where? Ecuador, apparently, via Cuba. The optics are not good.

Far worse than the optics, though, is the prospect that he is now leaking information about how the US spies on other counties. It’s one thing if you’re concerned about how much the US is intruding on the lives of its own citizens – that’s a conversation that needed to be had ten years ago when Rob Watson of the BBC was interviewing me about it on a street corner in Georgetown, but as with so many things, let’s overlook how long it took Americans to notice there was an elephant in the bathtub and instead celebrate the realization that the circus is, in fact, in town.

But.

Other nations don’t have Fourth Amendment rights. Foreign countries – some actively hostile to US interests, many additional ones passive-aggressive in ways that would draw the envy of any southern sorority girl – are in fact legitimate targets of espionage. The days of “Gentlemen do not read each others’ mail” are long past. Intelligence gathering beyond our borders is a huge part of the reason we have a National Security Agency in the first place.

More to the point, it’s going off the page. Edward Snowden depicted himself as a martyr to privacy and the rights of the individual, and his defenders pointed out that he was hardly the indiscriminate naïf that Bradley Manning proved himself to be, because he was detailing the surveillance of Americans by their own government. But if he’s now discussing our intelligence arrangements vis-a-vis other nations, it seems to me he’s gone frog-sticking without a light. One almost expects him to pull the same “citizen of the world” dodge that jerk from Facebook tried to employ in the interest of ducking his taxes.

Nevertheless: buy the ticket, take the ride. Actions have consequences. Blowing the lid off the American intelligence machine at home and abroad is likely to have even more. Doing so in conjunction with a jaunt through countries whose leaders make up a nontrivial chunk of the USA’s official Legion of Doom for the last fifty years…it’s not the best way to present yourself as a simon-pure defender of constitutional liberty.

There is a very real possibility that when the smoke clears, Edward Snowden will prove to be a highly idealistic, highly unrealistic Millenial techie too far up his own ass to contemplate the real-world consequences of what he has done.

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