by Glenn Greenwald
The
Guardian
The US government
has
charged Edward
Snowden with three felonies, including two under the Espionage
Act, the 1917 statute enacted to criminalize dissent against World
War I. My priority at the moment is working on our next set of stories,
so I just want to briefly note a few points about this.
Prior to Barack
Obama’s inauguration, there were a grand total of three prosecutions
of leakers under the Espionage Act (including the prosecution of
Dan Ellsberg by the Nixon DOJ). That’s because the statute is so
broad that even the US government has largely refrained from using
it. But during the Obama presidency, there are now seven
such prosecutions: more than double the number under all prior US
presidents combined. How can anyone justify that?
For a politician
who tried to convince Americans to elect him based on repeated pledges
of unprecedented transparency and specific
vows to protect “noble” and “patriotic” whistleblowers, is this
unparalleled assault on those who enable investigative journalism
remotely defensible? Recall that the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer said
recently that this oppressive climate created by the Obama presidency
has brought investigative journalism to a “standstill”, while James
Goodale, the General Counsel for the New York Times during its battles
with the Nixon administration, wrote
last month in that paper that “President Obama will surely pass
President Richard Nixon as the worst president ever on issues of
national security and press freedom.” Read what Mayer and Goodale
wrote and ask yourself: is the Obama administration’s threat to
the news-gathering process not a serious crisis at this point?
Few people
– likely including Snowden himself – would contest that
his actions constitute some sort of breach of the law. He made his
choice based on basic theories of civil disobedience: that those
who control the law have become corrupt, that the law in this case
(by concealing the actions of government officials in building this
massive spying apparatus in secret) is a tool of injustice, and
that he felt compelled to act in violation of it in order to expose
these official bad acts and enable debate and reform.
But that’s
a far cry from charging Snowden, who just turned 30 yesterday, with
multiple felonies under the Espionage Act that will send him to
prison for decades if not life upon conviction. In what conceivable
sense are Snowden’s actions “espionage”? He could have – but chose
not – sold the information he had to a foreign intelligence service
for vast sums of money, or covertly passed it to one of America’s
enemies, or worked at the direction of a foreign government. That
is espionage. He did none of those things.
What he did
instead was give up his life of career stability and economic prosperity,
living with his long-time girlfriend in Hawaii, in order to inform
his fellow citizens (both in America and around the world) of what
the US government and its allies are doing to them and their privacy.
He did that by very carefully selecting which documents he thought
should be disclosed and concealed, then gave them to a newspaper
with a team of editors and journalists and repeatedly insisted that
journalistic judgments be exercised about which of those documents
should be published in the public interest and which should be withheld.
That’s what
every single whistleblower and source for investigative journalism,
in every case, does – by definition. In what conceivable
sense does that merit felony charges under the Espionage Act?
The essence
of that extremely broad, century-old law is that one is guilty
if one discloses classified information “with intent or reason to
believe that the information is to be used to the injury of the
United States, or to the advantage of any foreign nation”. Please
read this
rather good summary in this morning’s New York Times of the
worldwide debate Snowden has enabled – how these disclosures have
“set off a national debate over the proper limits of government
surveillance” and “opened an unprecedented window on the details
of surveillance by the NSA,
including its compilation of logs of virtually all telephone calls
in the United States and its collection of e-mails of foreigners
from the major American Internet companies, including Google, Yahoo,
Microsoft, Apple and Skype” – and ask yourself: has Snowden actually
does anything to bring “injury to the United States”, or has he
performed an immense public service?
June
24, 2013
Copyright
© 2013 The
Guardian
This article originally appeared on: Lew Rockwell