Despite Snowden leaks, spying continues
WASHINGTON — The first leak may have been only a single sheet of paper with a few paragraphs of text and a signature at the bottom, but it was still a bombshell.
It revealed a secret judgment handed down by a court operating under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act giving the U.S. National Security Agency the right to obtain the phone records of every client of one of America’s largest phone companies, Verizon.
That was on June 6, 2013. One year later, the leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden continue to flow.
The public has learned that the NSA has been obtaining — possibly illegally — metadata on phone records, emails, Facebook entries, Twitter and other Internet communication, plus photographs of pretty well every American. Also, through a covert operation code-named PRISM, the NSA collects data on foreigners from Internet providers. The evidence shows that the British — and probably Canadians — are doing the same thing.
The Snowden disclosures — which the U.S. initially denied before the flow of revelations became an avalanche — have awakened the world to the scary spectre of Orwell’s Big Brother state.
Twelve months after the first drips from the Snowden spring, we can look back on a flurry of activities and rhetoric, but very little action. Public concern sparked a hasty congressional panel investigation that produced a report this year recommending a list of safeguards and a pullback from the global vacuuming of private data.
But despite reassurances from U.S. President Barack Obama, only the promise of action is evident. While Obama admitted to the “risk of potential abuse,” he has never retreated from his unproven claim of necessity for security reasons. So the collection of metadata continues.
Snowden’s impact also unnerved a corporate world worried the disclosures would cost them customers. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and all the other data collectors scrambled to distance themselves from the NSA practices. They met with Obama in secret and have promised to disclose government requests for data, but that’s all. The data is still changing hands.
Meanwhile, Germany remains alone among NATO members to take seriously the violation of individual privacy and its threat to democracy. Shortly before a visit in January from U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, German Chancellor Angela Merkel delivered a speech to the Reichstag that strongly rebuked the U.S.
“Billions of people living in undemocratic states today are looking very closely at how the democratic world responds to security threats — whether it acts with selfconfidence and prudence, or whether it cuts off the branch that makes it so attractive in the eyes of billions: the freedom and dignity of the individual,” she said.
Merkel then discovered that the U.S. had tapped her cellphone. Last month, the Germans announced an investigation into the extent of these phone taps.
More recently, the U.S. government has stepped up its attacks on Snowden. Kerry gave a TV interview in which he called Snowden a “traitor” and a “coward” for not “manning up” and returning to the U.S. to face trial.
“A patriot would stand up in the United States and make his case to the American people,” Kerry said.
The trouble is U.S. justice won’t allow him to make his case. Snowden was charged last year under the 1917 Espionage Act, which does not recognize motivation or reason as a defence. In the absence of a public interest defence, Snowden likely would have no defence.
In his interview, Kerry used Daniel Ellsberg, who in 1971 disclosed the secret Pentagon Papers on the conduct of the Vietnam War, as an example of a patriot who stayed in the U.S. and went to trial. What he didn’t say was that Ellsberg’s prosecution collapsed because of illegal conduct by the Nixon administration.
Ellsberg has publicly rebuked Kerry and called Snowden “the greatest patriot whistleblower of our time,” adding that Snowden “can never come home safe and receive justice.”
The treatment meted out to WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning (now known as Chelsea Manning) serves as a cautionary tale for Snowden, Ellsberg said. A UN special rapporteur on torture concluded that the U.S. subjected Manning to “cruel and inhuman treatment” when it held the soldier in solitary confinement and used sleep deprivation, stress positions and sensory deprivation tactics prior to his court martial.
The NSA claims Snowden still has about 1.7 million unpublished documents. Some commentators claim he’s ready to plea-bargain a light sentence. But just as there’s no proof that his disclosures have harmed U.S. security, there’s no proof Snowden is eager to come home.
Journalists have complained that under George W. Bush and now Obama, the U.S. government has become increasingly secretive. In retaliation, they have created several websites inviting whistleblowers to reveal government secrets. The recent scandal over lineups at veteran hospitals is one example.
Norman Solomon, a journalist and executive director of the newly formed ExposeFact.org, says Obama has launched a “war on whistleblowers, which unfortunately has also become a de facto war on journalism.”
“If only the official story gets out then the First Amendment is largely crushed,” he said.
The website announced its opening last week by erecting a bus stop billboard ad in front of the state department urging employees to blow the whistle on their government.