By
Norman Solomon
Edward
Snowden’s disclosures, the New York Times reported on Sunday, “have renewed a longstanding concern: that young Internet
aficionados whose skills the agencies need for counterterrorism and
cyberdefense sometimes bring an anti-authority spirit that does not fit the
security bureaucracy.”
Agencies like the NSA and CIA — and
private contractors like Booz Allen — can’t be sure that all employees will
obey the rules without interference from their own idealism. This is a basic
dilemma for the warfare/surveillance state, which must hire and retain a huge
pool of young talent to service the digital innards of a growing Big Brother.
With private firms scrambling to
recruit workers for top-secret government contracts, the current situation was
foreshadowed by novelist John Hersey in his 1960 book The Child Buyer.
When the vice president of a contractor named United Lymphomilloid, “in charge
of materials procurement,” goes shopping for a very bright ten-year-old, he
explains that “my duties have an extremely high national-defense rating.” And
he adds: “When a commodity that you need falls in short supply, you have to get
out and hustle. I buy brains.”
That’s what Booz Allen and similar
outfits do. They buy brains. And obedience.
But despite the best efforts of those
contractors and government agencies, the brains still belong to people. And, as
the Times put it, an “anti-authority spirit” might not fit
“the security bureaucracy.”
In the long run, Edward Snowden didn’t
fit. Neither did Bradley Manning. They both had brains that seemed useful
to authority. But they also had principles and decided to act on them.
Like the NSA and its contractors, the
U.S. military is in constant need of personnel. “According to his superiors . .
. Manning was not working out as a soldier, and they discussed keeping him back
when his unit was deployed to Iraq,” biographer Chase Madar writes in The
Passion of Bradley Manning. “However, in the fall of 2009, the occupation
was desperate for intelligence analysts with computer skills, and Private
Bradley Manning, his superiors hurriedly concluded, showed signs of improvement
as a workable soldier. This is how, on October 10, 2009, Private First Class
Bradley Manning was deployed . . . to Iraq as an intelligence analyst.”
In their own ways, with very different
backgrounds and circumstances, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden have
confounded the best-laid plans of the warfare/surveillance state. They
worked for “the security bureaucracy,” but as time went on they found a higher
calling than just following orders. They leaked information that we all have a
right to know.
This month, not only with words but
also with actions, Edward Snowden is transcending the moral limits of
authority and insisting that we can fully defend the Bill of Rights,
emphatically including the Fourth Amendment.
What a contrast with New York
Times columnists David Brooks, Thomas Friedman and Bill Keller, who
have responded to Snowden’s revelations by siding with the violators of civil
liberties at the top of the U.S. government.
Brooks
denounced Snowden as “a traitor” during a June 14 appearance on the PBS NewsHour,
saying indignantly: “He betrayed his oath, which was given to him and which he
took implicitly and explicitly. He betrayed his company, the people who gave
him a job, the people who trusted him. . . . He betrayed the democratic
process. It’s not up to a lone 29-year-old to decide what's private and public.
We have — actually have procedures for that set down in the Constitution and
established by tradition.”
Enthralled with lockstep compliance, Brooks preached the
conformist gospel: “When you work for an institution, any institution, a
company, a faculty, you don't get to violate the rules of that institution and
decide for your own self what you’re going to do in a unilateral way that no
one else can reverse. And that's exactly what he did. So he betrayed the trust
of the institution. He betrayed what creates a government, which is being a
civil servant, being a servant to a larger cause, and not going off on some
unilateral thing because it makes you feel grandiose.”
In sync with such bombast, Tom Friedman and former Times executive
editor Bill Keller have promoted a notably gutless argument for embracing the
NSA’s newly revealed surveillance programs. Friedman wrote (on
June 12) and Keller agreed (June
17) that our government is correct to curtail privacy rights against
surveillance — because if we fully retained those rights and then a big
terrorist attack happened, the damage to civil liberties would be worse.
What a contrast between big-name journalists craven enough to
toss the Fourth Amendment overboard and whistleblowers courageous enough to
risk their lives for civil liberties.
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Norman
Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute
for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and
Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”