Snowden’s clearly an anarchist and traitor. Those who endorse him are just as dangerous
NEARLY two years ago, CIA traitor Edward Snowden fled to hopedfor sanctuary in Moscow, having begun broadcasting his employers’ secrets like leaves on the wind.
Liberal newspapers in the West, headed by the Guardian in Britain and the Washington Post in the U.S., proclaimed him to be a crusader for freedom, because he revealed the scale of government electronic monitoring of all our lives.
He had alerted every terrorist on the planet to the methods used by intelligence services on both sides of the Atlantic to probe their plots. He disgracefully even blamed a ‘f***-up’ by the newspapers involved for failing to redact sensitive operational details.
Almost everybody else — including security chiefs past and present, the Prime Minister and Foreign and Defence Secretaries from both main parties — have denounced Snowden for wreaking havoc with the cause of public safety.
Catastrophic
Sir David Omand, Britain’s former intelligence supremo, described Snowden’s revelations as ‘the most catastrophic loss to British intelligence ever’.
One direct consequence is that Al Qaeda now publishes a manual instructing its supporters on how to evade government eavesdroppers.
Yet the Guardian has always insisted that Snowden ‘performed a public service’. Meanwhile, a group of the type that Lenin used to call ‘ useful idiots’ appealed for funds in London to raise a statue to him.
Snowden himself gave a solemn assurance that he had screened every document he released to journalists, to ensure that no information that might identify Western intelligence officers — and thus put their lives at risk — got into the public domain.
At the weekend, however, interviewed on American TV by British comedian John Oliver, the renegade admitted he has not read the material he blithely unloads. He merely ‘ evaluated’ two million files stolen from the U.S. National Security Agency — about 68,000 of them from GCHQ, Britain’s intelligence agency.
At a stroke, the traitor thus stripped away his own fig-leaf defence for his actions.
Snowden continues to publish batches of material: the latest, last week, addressed potential British disinformation techniques against Argentina.
Meanwhile, the controversy about his actions, and about the rightful limits of government eavesdropping, grows ever more fierce.
The United Nations Human Rights Council, spurred by Snowden’s disclosures, has appointed a ‘rapporteur’ on privacy, and published a resolution deploring the ‘negative input surveillance, when carried out on a mass scale, may have on the exercise and enjoyment of human rights’.
The Guardian applauded this as helping to establish the idea that ‘freedom from excessive surveillance is a fundamental right’.
We can all agree that tyrannies, including Russia and China, exploit surveillance to strangle personal freedom. But it seems hard to argue convincingly that law-abiding British and American citizens suffer at the hands of their own intelligence agencies.
These secret organisations merely download vast quantities of ‘bulk data’ — phone and email traffic — and ‘crunch’ it in search of terrorist activity which we know is all too real.
By far the most important and effective weapon in monitoring those within our own societies who wish us harm — and there are thousands of them — is electronic surveillance. Intelligence officers say this is the only edge they have over extremists, when it is almost impossible to use agents to penetrate their cells.
As a result of Snowden’s revelations, U.S. internet service providers are cynically trying to cash in by aggressively marketing to any customer encryption techniques which defy government surveillance technology.
The big U.S. companies which used to co-operate closely with British intelligence agencies are now extremely wary of doing so.
Robert Hannigan, director of GCHQ, made an important speech last November in which he highlighted the manner in which, thanks to their wake-up call from the activities of Snowden, the jihadi terror group ISIS and other extremist forces have become highly securityconscious — using couriers instead of phones and emails and exploiting encryption.
Under pressure from the civil libertarians, big internet companies such as Google now strive to protect their customers without discriminating between the interests of the law-abiding and those of terrorists.
Hannigan says: ‘ Techniques for encrypting messages or making them anonymous which were once the preserve of the most sophisticated criminals or nation states now come as standard.’
Some apps proudly advertise themselves as ‘ Snowden-approved’. ‘There is no doubt that young foreign fighters have learned and benefited from the [Snowden] leaks,’ he adds.
The GCHQ director concluded that law-enforcement agencies need much more help and access than they currently receive from the U.S. service providers that dominate the net.
Many of us believe that they should get it. Privacy is not an absolute.
Governments throughout history have had to do unwelcome things to protect their citizens from harm.
In times gone by, the need was for the construction of a series of defence forts — Martello towers — on the Channel coast or antiaircraft guns in London’s Hyde Park. Today, different threats demand different remedies.
It is essential that the intelligence services act within the law and remain subject to Parliamentary scrutiny.
Grievous
As a citizen, I feel much less comfortable with the huge knowledge amassed by banks and online traders about every detail of our lives than with the idea of GCHQ or MI5 reading my emails or listening to my phone.
I am willing to take on trust that the intelligence services are on our side. They do what they do in the interests of our society. I certainly prefer to place my faith in their judgment than in that of the Guardian and Edward Snowden. Indeed, the Commons’ Intelligence And Security Committee agreed that the agencies had acted in a ‘lawful, necessary and proportionate way’. What’s more, Snowden blew the gaff about himself by refusing to accept the consequences of his own actions as a supposed ‘champion of freedom’, and staying to fight his case in a U.S. court.
Instead, he set himself up like a monkey perched on a stick on the Kremlin Wall, cavorting for the delectation of Vladimir Putin and his friends — and the grievous embarrassment of Britain and America.
The Russians are delighted by the mischief Snowden continues to make, as are other foes of democracy around the world.
This IT geek’s recent actions and statements make nonsense of his claims to be a standardbearer for human rights. He is, instead, an anarchist, delighting in the promotion of disorder in Washington and Whitehall.
Menace
The bad news is that he still holds many thousands more files that he will drip-feed into the market-place for ISIS, Al Qaeda and Guardian readers.
There always have been — and always will be — people such as him, who seek to cloak treason in the guise of a higher loyalty.
It is those who endorse and applaud them who are harder to understand, because they seem blind to the imperatives of protecting our society from the menace of Muslim extremism.
When the intelligence services say that Snowden has done substantial damage to their capabilities, most of us believe them.
Yet later this year, a cluster of civil liberties groups will challenge in court GHCQ’s computerhacking operations.
An independent review of anti-terrorist legislation is due after the election and, in December 2016, last July’s emergency legislation empowering the intelligence agencies to collect bulk electronic data will expire and require renewal.
Human rights lobbyists will agitate incessantly, meanwhile, for tighter curbs on surveillance.
If their campaign to make privacy an absolute succeeds, they will equate the protection of terrorists from scrutiny with that of law-abiding citizens.
Those of us who believe the intelligence services deserve our support in this argument must ensure that our voices are heard as clearly as those of the Snowden fan club.
Some small loss of privacy seems a fair price to pay for defence against the fanatics, who have already shed innocent blood enough.