In early June, British journalist Glenn Greenwald, writing for The Guardian, published an interview with Edward Snowden, the employee for Booz Allen hired to work on PRISM, a mass electronic surveillance data mining program operated by the National Security Agency. In it, he alleges that the NSA intercepts and stores private emails and phone conservations and does so without a warrant. Snowden contends that the NSA does this “as a matter of course” and has amassed an enormous database.

These allegations are not new. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been making this claim since 2005, and the New York Times ran a story on NSA eavesdropping in December of that year. New or not, the Snowden story has touched off an international controversy. There has been outrage in some quarters, but in Congress, the House of Representatives recently narrowly defeated, by a vote of 205 to 217, the Amash amendment to bill HR 2397 that would have curtailed the NSA’s ability to spy on American citizens. West Virginia Rep. Rahall voted for the amendment while Reps. McKinley and Capito voted against it. Go figure.

Snowden initially fled to Hong Kong, where he interviewed with Greenwald. He then moved on to Russia where he has been stranded in the Moscow airport for over a month. He has applied to the Russian authorities for political asylum. I find this aspect of the story to be troubling.

It is also ironic, as this Saturday, August 3rd marks the fifth anniversary of the death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the famous Russian dissident. He was a twentieth century figure; a novelist and historian who was a fierce critic of totalitarianism, which put him at odds with the government of the Communist former Soviet Union.

In 1945, Solzhenitsyn was arrested for writing comments critical of Stalin in a private letter to a friend. He was tried and convicted for “anti-Soviet propaganda” and “founding a hostile organization” and was sentenced in absentia to eight years in a labor camp by the “Special Council of the NKVD”, a tribunal endowed with special rights to apply punishments “through administrative means” - in other words, without trial. His famous work, The Gulag Archipelago, came from his experiences in the forced labor camp.

After his release from the Gulag, he remained in constant trouble with Soviet authorities. However, at this point, having achieved international fame, rather than being imprisoned, he was deported in 1974 and arrived in the US the following year. The Senate voted to confer honorary citizenship to him, the implementation of which was blocked by the State Department. He was granted political asylum status, however, and spent most of the next couple of decades living in Vermont.

Originally a darling of the American media, their ardor cooled when they discovered that his experiences in the Gulag had caused him to return to his Christian roots. He harshly criticized American pop culture, especially television, as being decadent. Can’t say as I blame him, but the networks were not amused. And while he admired our tradition of individual freedom, he was disappointed by what we chose to do with it. After the fall of the Soviet Union he returned to his beloved Mother Russia.

Are there similarities between Solzhenitsyn and Snowden? Let’s say there are a couple of eerie parallels. Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned in the Gulag for comments contained in a private letter intercepted by the Soviet authorities. He wrote an expose about it and was forced to flee Russia. He came to the US where he was granted political asylum. Today, Edward Snowden has fled the US after blowing the whistle on the NSA for intercepting our emails, and is in Russia, awaiting a response to his request for political asylum. How times have changed.

Congress recently enacted legislation that gives our government the power to label anyone, including you and me, an “enemy combatant”. The National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 gives the government the power to indefinitely imprison anyone so labeled, without trial. There’s even an administrative process with which to do this, a secret court similar to the “Special Council of the NKVD” that convicted Solzhenitsyn. At what point does the NSA start going through all of those emails and electronic correspondence in that massive database to determine who is an “enemy combatant” - and isn’t the Bill of Rights still the law of the land?

A recent Quinnipiac University national poll asked whether Snowden is a whistleblower or a traitor. 55% responded that he is a whistleblower, while 34% think he is a traitor. The rest couldn’t decide. Time will tell, but as the government continues to prosecute the war on terror, we might ponder one of Solzhenitsyn’s most famous quotes: “A state of war serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny”.

Individual Privacy vs Government Secrecy

2013-08-07

Thank you for the feedback regarding last week’s column. It is great to know that there is concern regarding the National Security Agency and its proper role. There certainly is a divergence of opinion as to whether or not Edward Snowden is a hero or a traitor. While I hope that he is a hero, I concede that only time will tell.

As I stated previously, one of the troubling aspects of the Snowden affair is that he has applied for political asylum in Russia. Russia has granted his request, at least on a temporary basis. I’m a firm supporter of the concept of stand your ground and I would have preferred that Snowden stand his ground here in the United States against whatever charges the government might have brought against him.

On the other hand, the Obama administration has an abysmal record regarding whistleblowers. Its war on whistleblowers is generally acknowledged in the media, even the mainstream media. According to the Guardian, the British publication that broke the story, Snowden has been charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 and that the Obama administration has prosecuted more whistleblowers under it than all previous administrations combined.

President Woodrow Wilson pushed through The Espionage Act in 1917 after convincing congress to enter WWI. It was the Patriot Act of its day and its intent was to give government the means to prosecute anyone giving aid to the enemy. Wilson was able to get it passed, along with the “Trading with the Enemy” Act because we were at war. It was extended by a set of amendments passed under the name of the “Sedition Act of 1918”. Those amendments, which in essence made it a crime to criticize the government, were eventually repealed, but the Espionage Act remains.

One of the more noteworthy prosecutions under the Espionage Act was that of Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times during the Nixon administration. The Times decision to publish them on First Amendment grounds was controversial. Said publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger at the time: “I just didn’t feel there was any breach of national security, in the sense that we were giving secrets to the enemy.” Not unless the enemy was the American public. The prosecution by the Nixon administration ended in a mistrial.

Fast forward to 2010 to the Times coverage of the case of whistleblower Thomas Drake, a former NSA employee charged by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act for revealing to the press that the NSA spent $1.2 Billion on a contract for a data collection program called Trailblazer. According to Drake, the work could have been done in house for $3 Million. The government eventually dropped all charges against Drake in exchange for a guilty plea on a minor misdemeanor - unlawful use of a government owned computer.

President Obama ran for office promising government transparency. The Sunlight Foundation reported on July 25th that the website created by the Obama transition team in 2008, www.change.gov had been down since June 8th. There was speculation that it was because of this promise posted on the site:

“Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.”

So much for government transparency and campaign promises. By the way, on July 30th, after their post went viral on the internet, the Sunlight Foundation reported that change.gov suddenly and magically reappeared.

The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote an article in 1997 called “Culture of Secrecy” stemming from the report issued by the Commission on Government Secrecy that he chaired. It described a culture of secrecy that pervades the US government and its intelligence community going back 80 years to the Espionage Act. The Commission reported that approximately 400,000 new secrets are created annually - and that’s only at the “Top Secret” level. In other words, virtually anything can be “classified”.

While no one would question the need for intelligence, where is the accountability? The NSA claims the right to keep secrets from American citizens, while Edward Snowden has revealed that the NSA believes that Americans have no right to keep secrets from them. Is he a traitor or a hero? That appears to be classified information. While there are those that appear to want to shoot the messenger, let’s focus on the message. Something is amiss in the land of the free, and we need to find out why.