Having called Edward Snowden a traitor once, conservative radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt did not hesitate to do so again when I questioned his claim during the Security and Privacy session of last week’s CCA.
Hewitt then challenged the audience to find a definition of a traitor under which Snowden did not fall. In response, Dr. Arnn quipped to Hewitt that Thomas Jefferson was a traitor to England.
In all seriousness, however, Snowden, like Jefferson, knew a respectable government mustn’t tolerate embarrassing leaks, but he also realized that this consideration was secondary to government’s duty to secure its citizens natural rights. Moreover, the Constitution exists to protect our right to privacy: Privacy of beliefs (First Amendment), privacy of the home against the invasion of soldiers (Third Amendment), privacy of the person and possessions as against “unreasonable searches” (Fourth Amendment).
These rights are far more sacred than any so-called “government rights to privacy” because the individual’s resources for securing his rights are nothing compared to our government’s.
While some of us at Hillsdale could get the opportunity to challenge the policies uncovered by Snowden in the realm of politics, likely many more will wonder why the Snowden issue is any more than only vaguely relevant, considering it certainly disconnected from a career in mathematics or biology.
Consider Snowden’s words: “I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no privacy, and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity.” This echoes Hillsdale’s own Honor Code: “to defend, as the College founders declared, the “civil and religious liberty (privacy included) of the American order; and to live with ‘intelligent piety’ as self-governing citizens and scholars.”
During his tenure as an analyst for the National Security Agency’s information-sharing office in Hawaii in 2011-13, Snowden released information showing that our government forced Verizon, AT&T and most other US phone companies to reveal their phone records without any legal means to fight the requests publicly. While Snowden exposed many other NSA violatations of Americans’ right to privacy, this is one of the most alarming prospects because private phone calls have one of the highest expectations of privacy of any form of communication.
Many Americans are glad that they have the information from the leak, but have voiced their opinion (which is perhaps disproportionately loud due to the media’s megaphone, if Mr. Groseclose’s comments about media bias last week are correct) that Snowden should have waited until someone else in a more official capacity could release the information, to avoid compromising American interests abroad.
There is some truth to this, because the sheer quantity of information released would have been impossible for a single citizen to safeguard in a foolproof way, especially because Snowden was not all-knowing about US foreign interests.
However, Snowden was not some loose cannon. The NSA has revealed Snowden’s email questioning “whether executive orders have the same precedence as federal statutes.” Snowden explains that, leading up to the release, he took deliberately-planned steps within the NSA and was told to stop asking questions. Americans responded with far more fervor to Snowden’s leaked documents and privacy violation claims than to Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden’s complaints about the surveillance state, which he had been raising the alarm about for years.
We must remember that Snowden did not have enough confidence in anyone in the American media. This perhaps calls into question our CCA speakers’ (Hewitt and Groseclose) claim that conservative radio and TV are always eager to push back against big government because they want to break news liberal networks won’t.
We must remember that Snowden thought his best shot at warning the American public was through a foreign news outlet: UK’s The Guardian. Too often, conservative pundits are ever so selective about which big-government policies they raise a ruckus about, and their partial selectivity leads them toward a neglect, or — dare I say it — encouragement of the policies that lead government to dictate our lives. Until the media can do a better job at keeping an eye on the government, we need people like Snowden to keep the government accountable.
