Mick Hartley

Paul Berman, on Edward Snowden:

To listen to the acclaim for Snowden and his heroism, you would imagine that, until the moment he revealed the NSA’s powers to the world, we were living under tyrannical conditions. But we were not. The NSA, pre-Snowden, possessed the ability, in principle, to look into your phone calls; even so, you were not persecuted. Big Brother evinced no interest in being Big Brother. The NSA looked for terrorists and for Chinese and Russian conspiracies and such, and tried not at all to limit or shape the political debate in any of the democratic countries. Nor did anyone in the government try to limit or shape your own political opinions. The despotism of the NSA did not exist.

Edward Snowden, though—here is the despot, in my eyes. Certainly, he is the sign of despotism to come, regardless of the Republicans and the Democrats and whatever they may do. The despotism of Big Brother may come about, or not. But we have already learned that we are going to be subject to the despotism of self-righteous megalomaniacs without any official status at all—the despotism of people who feel they have a duty to reveal other people’s secrets. This will be the despotism of Very Little Brother. Snowden, for instance.

Here is a man who, like everyone else, has opinions. Only, in his case, his technical skills allow him to act on his opinions. The United States elected and re-elected Barack Obama to determine the policies of the NSA, subject to all kinds of legal limitations and congressional meddlings. But Snowden happened to disapprove of the president’s determinations. Therefore he appointed himself to override the president and reveal the NSA’s secrets to the world. He and ex-Pvt. Chelsea Manning are two of a kind, in this respect. A few years ago, while stationed with the Army in Iraq, Pvt. Manning decided she disapproved of various additional United States policies, got hold of hundreds of thousands of military and State Department documents, and passed them along to WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, whose views Pvt. Manning evidently preferred. And, as a result, we are living through an era in which the foreign and military policies of the United States have been shaped in meaningful degree by Edward Snowden, by Pvt. Manning, by Julian Assange, and by (in addition) Snowden’s protector, the president of the Russian Federation. Here is something to fear: the collapse of democratic structures and decision-making in favor of the capricious actions of random individuals and the Czar of All Russia.