Edward Snowden - How Much Does He Really Care About Citizen's Rights?

There are more than one ways to skin a cat. Oprah Winfrey once said she always wanted to be a star. Naturally she was drawn to Hollywood but she didn’t like what stars had to do to achieve fame. Nobody does, but some suck it up, believing they don’t have another option. Not Oprah. She chose another route and got nicely rewarded for that bit of lateral thinking.

What about Edward Snowden? Did he reveal US surveillance secrets for a noble cause? Was he a traitor to or a martyr for his country? He has denied that he’s either and insisted he’s just an ordinary guy wanting to protect ordinary Americans from their Big Brother nasty spying government.

Regardless of whether he’s succeeded in doing that or not and whether or not he actually believes his own motives to be pure, he’s created a diplomatic nightmare for the US, China and Russia and possibly even Eduador. More importantly, the choices he’s made since the revelation show him as not being so fundamentally noble after all.

In protecting Americans from having their privacy violated, Snowden chose to seek asylum first in a country with horrific human rights and gargantuan freedom of speech violations. Granted Hong Kong has autonomy but it answers to the Chinese government, which Snowden has got to have known, given the work he did. 

China didn’t want him and he’s been neatly shuffled out of Hong Kong. Under the pretext of the arrest warrant not being properly filled out, which allegedly left the Hong Kong authorities no option but to let him go. The US and Hong Kong are huffing and puffing at each other, but the reality is, they’ve neatly averted a situation that would impede the trade relationship they’re both trying to build. Ironically, they both cyber-spy on each other and they both know they do. It’s unlikely China would want somebody like Snowden in the country.

From China, it was onto Russia. Another country whose human rights record is atrocious and where freedom of speech is severely curtailed. A country whose leader supports Bashar Al-Assad. Nice work, Snowden.

They apparently don’t want him either. Putin has been accused of taking pleasure in sticking his middle finger up at the US for even allowing Snowden into the country without a passport, but he’s just stuck in a transit lounge at the airport. That’s a pretty clear message from Putin. I doubt he has feelings of affection for Snowden who has put him in a right spot. Obviously he doesn’t want to wave that finger too close to the US nose, otherwise he would have granted Snowden asylum. But officially ganging up against him would discredit him with his voters.

He chose a pretty wise diplomatic option. A kind of halfway measure that lets him off the hook in both directions. He’s no fool, Putin. So it’s on to Ecuador for Snowden.

Which has defamations provisions in its criminal code that allow the government to persecute its critics. In 2011 journalist Emilio Palacio wrote an opinion piece in El Universo in which he accused Ecuadorean President Correa of being a dishonest dictator. Correa sued Palacio and three of the newspaper’s board members, brothers Carlos Eduardo Pérez Barriga, César Enrique Pérez Barriga, and Carlos Nicolás Pérez Barriga. They were jailed with 3 year sentences and ordered to pay $40 million in fines altogether.

In an interview with The Guardian, where Snowden talked about his motives, he said "I don't want to live in a society that does these sorts of things..." Really? China, Russia and Ecuador don't do these sort of things?  

Predictably, Jullian Assange and his lawyers and friends were behind getting Snowden out of Hong Kong and attempting to get him asylum in Ecuador. Whether it’ll work or not is debatable. Assange is still holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he’s been for almost a year. He’s obviously not that bothered about freedom of speech in Ecuador either. 

You can’t tell much about a person from what they say. You can’t even always tell who they are from what they do, especially in the beginning, when the ramifications of their behaviour haven’t kicked in. But you can tell a lot from the company they keep. That Assange and Snowden happily accept help from countries with atrocious human rights and freedom of speech violations  makes a mockery of the cloak of nobility they wear as whistle-blowers hell-bent on protecting everybody’s freedom.

What Price Freedom? President Obama Defends NSA Surveillance

There’s been a riot of protest about the Obama Administration’s invasion of privacy lately, with the media milking it for all it’s worth. Protestors see it as the end of America and American freedom, the confirmation that the US is a police state, proof that President Obama is a thug, illustration that all your emails and your internet activity are being read and filed, andyou’re your telephone calls listened to and saved.
  
One wonders if anybody has thought about how many employees it would take to do all of that,  how long it would take, and how physically impossible it actually is, considering that we’re talking about all the phone and email activity of 313 900 000 people. 

Some research cited that on average Americans spend 7 hours a month talking on the phone. That’s 2 197 300 000 hours a month that would have to be listened to. Which would take one person 91 554 166 days to cover, listening 24 hours a day. So the Obama Administration must be employing millions of people just to listen into phone calls. 

What about emails? The figures are too astronomic to even contemplate, and the whole scenario is unutterably absurd.

The truth is that the content of phone calls isn’t being listened to, just who’s making them and who to. Which still doesn’t mean that every single call is being scrutinized. The information is mined for alerts. To catch terrorists. And the internet data of Americans isn’t being scrutinized at all. Plus, the reality of intelligence gathering is probably nowhere near as glamorous or sinister as many seem to fear, and as Hollywood has projected. It’s hard to separate fiction from fact most of the time, which I think is partly why so many people are going ballistic.

President Obama is keeping his head, however. He pointed out that surveillance is nothing new and that society sometimes has to make compromise if it wants ultimate protection. It makes sense to me. 

There seem to be two options to counter terror: intelligence or military invasion. The latter makes other people pay for your freedom. It maims or destroys - mentally and physically - huge numbers of US soldiers and innocent civilians, and enables illegal kidnap and torture. It’s conveniently far from home – except for the soldiers and their families, of course – and everybody can get on pretty much with their lives, adapting to paranoia, hoping a bomb doesn't blow up in their back yard. 

Not letting themselves really consider what this option is doing to innocent people. Not really thinking that their freedom comes at a horrible price, paid by somebody else.

But it creates more enemies, generates incendiary hatred and fosters more terrorist attacks. The  military industrial complex continues to make a profit, becomes more powerful, more controlling of politicians. That option will never free America from terrorism. Violence begets more violence. 

Intelligence, on the other hand, doesn’t maim or destroy anybody so integrity is preserved as well as lives and sanity. It doesn't make more enemies, and it has a chance of succeeding. That's a no-brainer.

In 2009 US intelligence analysts were alerted by an email which they traced to a young man, Najibullah Zazi, who asked an Al Qaeda operative how to make a flour-based bomb. Later, he sent another email saying the marriage was ready. He was traced and later confessed to having plotted to bomb New York subways. I find that both sobering and encouraging. 

One of the critics of this invasion of privacy said that the failures to catch terrorists far outnumber the successes and concluded that the intelligence gathering was a waste of time.  But that's the nature of success, that's how it happens in reality. You keep trying even when you fail, and you always fail more times than you succeed. But you do eventually succeed and your successes are noteworthy.
And I guess to the New York inhabitants who took the subway and were saved from losing body parts and/or their lives, the surveillance wasn’t a waste of time at all. 

I know that if I'd been one of those who would have been dismembered by a terrorist bomb if it hadn't been intercepted by intelligence I'd be grateful, not critical.

In World War II, people sacrificed their lives for freedom from fascism. Now all people are being asked to sacrifice is a tiny bit of freedom, so their lives and integrity can be preserved. It doesn’t seem like a very big price to ask, to me.