Would You Feel Differently About Snowden

8/12/2019 Would You Feel Differently About Snowden

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Would You Feel Differently AboutSnowden, Greenwald, and Assange If You

Knew What They Really Thought?

bySean Wilentz | January 19, 2014
http://www.newrepublic.com/authors/sean-wilentzhttp://www.newrepublic.com/authors/sean-wilentz


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We live in the age of the leaker. Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, and Julian

Assange are celebrated as heroes on op-ed pages and across glossy magazine

spreads.

By exposing the secrets of the government, they claim to have revealed its

systematic disregard for individual freedom and privacy. Theirs are not the politics

of left against right, or liberals against conservatives, or Democrats against

Republicans, but of the individual against the state. To oppose them is to side with

power against liberty, surveillance against freedom, tyrannical secrecy against

democratic openness.

Whats astonishing about their ascent to heroism is the breadth of their support.

The embrace of the antiwar left and the libertarian right was to be expected. But

effusions of praise for the leakers can also be found throughout the liberal

establishment. The New York Times, which has come to rely on the leakers as prize

sources, is now crusading on Snowdens behalf. Its editorial page has celebrated

him for having done his country a great service and supports clemency for the

crimes he has committed. A stellar array of liberal intellectuals and pundits, from

David Bromwich and Robert Kuttner to Richard Cohen and Ezra Klein, have

hailed Snowden, as have elected officials, including Senators Bernie Sanders and

Ron Wyden. To criticize the leakers, as the legal journalist Jeffrey Toobin and a

few other writers have done, is to invite moral condemnation. Even mild objections

to their methods are dismissed as damning proof of either corruptionprinciple-

free, hackish, and opportunistic, in Greenwalds wordsor outright complicity

with Big Brother.

So far, the adulatory treatment the leakers have received closely mirrors their own

self-presentation. But important caches of evidence have gone largely unexamined

by the media. Documents are, of course, the leakers stock-in-tradeand they have

produced quite a few documents of their own. The Internet houses a variety of their

writings for message boards, blogs, and magazines. Much of this writing was


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produced before the leakers entertained the possibility of a global audience. They

are documents in which one can glimpse their deepest beliefs and true motives.

What they reveal is at odds with the flattering coverage the leakers have received,

and goes beyond personal eccentricities or dubious activities in the service of noble

goals. They reveal an agenda that even the leakers most dedicated admirers should

question.

Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange hardly subscribe to identical beliefs, and differ

in their levels of sophistication. They have held, at one time or another, a crazy-

quilt assortment of views, some of them blatantly contradictory. But from an

incoherent swirl of ideas, a common outlook emerges. The outlook is neither a

clear-cut doctrine nor a philosophy, but something closer to a political impulse that

might be described, to borrow from the historian Richard Hofstadter, as paranoid

libertarianism. Where liberals, let alone right-wingers, have portrayed the leakers

as truth-telling comrades intent on protecting the state and the Constitution from

authoritarian malefactors, thats hardly their goal. In fact, the leakers despise the

modern liberal state, and they want to wound it.

Edward Snowden has presented his decision to steal nearly two million files from

the National Security Agency (NSA) and release them to the world as a simple tale

of a political awakening. He recounts the story this way: While working for the

CIA in Geneva in 2007, he began having serious misgivings about the Bush-erasurveillance state. Even then, Snowden considered leaking classified material. He

stayed his hand because of the election of Barack Obama, who had vowed to

reform the intelligence system. When the changes he had hoped for didnt arrive,

hebecame bitterly disillusioned. [I] watched as Obama advanced the very policies

that I thought would be reined in, Snowden later toldThe Guardian. I got

hardened.


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Thats when Snowden hatched his plan for crippling the NSA. According to a

Reuters report, in April 2012, while working as an NSA contractor for Dell, Inc.,

he began downloading information about eavesdropping programs. Then, last

March, Snowden took a job in Hawaii with the government contractor Booz Allen

Hamilton, intending to steal an even vaster collection of classified material. [The

job] granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked.

That is why I accepted that position, he later confessed to theSouth China

Morning Post. Of course, as he explains it, he undertook his illicit mission with the

most principled of motivations. The NSAs activities pose an existential threat to

democracy, he said. Closer examination of Snowdens background, however,

suggests that his motives were more complicated.

Snowdens history is very difficult to piece together, not least because the CIA and

the NSA are prohibited from confirming or denying details of his work for them.

Still, there is enough information available to assemble a provisional profile.

By 1999, a 16-year-old Snowden had moved with his family from North Carolina

to Maryland. He had dropped out of high school in his sophomore year and

become enamored with computers. Snowden spent increasingly large swaths of his

time onArs Technica, a technology news and information website for self-

described alpha geeks. Soon, he was posting regularly in the sites public chat

rooms under the user name TheTrueHOOHA.1Snowden, it seems, mostly

engaged in postadolescent banter about sex and Internet gamingand occasionally

mused about firearms. I have a Walther P22, he wrote. Its my only gun, but I

love it to death. The Walther P22, a fairly standard handgun, is not especially

fearsome, but Snowdens affection for it hinted at some of his developing

affinities.

In May 2004, Snowden enlisted in an Army Special Forces program. He did so, he

later told The Guardian, because he felt an obligation as a human being to help
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free people from oppression. But he failed to complete the training and was

discharged five months later. (He broke both of his legs in a training accident.)

After his discharge, Snowden found work as a security guard for the NSA at its

Center for Advanced Study of Language at the University of Maryland, and, later,

as an I.T. security specialist for the CIA. In 2007, he was posted to Geneva.

Writing onArs Technica, he described Switzerland as pretty cool but also

horrifically classist. (He was, however, impressed with the countrys Nigerian

immigrants: Motherfuckers have been there like eight months and speak all three

languages.)

Snowden has traced his political conversion to the Bush years. And by the end of

Bushs second term, Snowden certainly held the president in low esteem. But not,

apparently, his intelligence policies. Nor, it seems, was he drawn to insiders who

exposed details of these programs. Quite the opposite: Snowden vilified leakers

and defended covert intelligence ops. In January 2009, Snowden lambasted The

New York Timesand its anonymous sources for exposing a secret Bush

administration operation to sabotage Irans nuclear capabilities. Such infuriating

breaches had occurred over and over and over again, Snowden complained.

The Times, he railed, was like wikileaks and deserved to go bankrupt; sources

who leaked classified shit to theTimesought to be shot in the balls. When an

online interlocutor suggested that it might be ethical to report on the

governments intrigue, Snowden replied emphatically: VIOLATING

NATIONAL SECURITY? No. He explained, that shit is classified for a reason.

TheArs Technicaposts also complicate Snowdens narrative about Obama. It

seems as if he never invested great faith in him. It is true that, during the 2008

election, TheTrueHOOHA compared him favorably to Hillary Clinton, whom he

called a pox. But in the end, he votedfor an unspecified third-party candidate.


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And nearly as soon as Obama took office, Snowden developed a deep aversion to

the new president. TheTrueHOOHA reacted furiously when Obama named Leon

Panetta as his new director of central intelligence. But it was Panettas credentials

he objected to, not his stance on surveillance matters. Obama just named a

fucking politician to run the CIA, Snowden erupted. And he became furious about

Obamas domestic policies on a variety of fronts. For example, he was offended by

the possibility that the new president would revive a ban on assault weapons. See,

thats why Im goddamned glad for the second amendment, Snowden wrote, in

another chat. Me and all my lunatic, gun-toting NRA compatriots would be on the

steps of Congress before the C-Span feed finished.

At the time the stimulus bill was being debated, Snowden also condemned

Obamas economic policies as part of a deliberate scheme to devalue the currency

absolutely as fast as theoretically possible. (He favored Ron Pauls call for the

United States to return to the gold standard.) The social dislocations of the

financial collapse bothered him not at all. Almost everyone was self-employed

prior to 1900, he asserted. Why is 12% employment [sic] so terrifying? Inanother chat-room exchange, Snowden debated the merits of Social Security:

Later in the same session, Snowden wrote that the elderly wouldnt be fucking

helpless if you werent sending them fucking checks to sit on their ass and lay in

hospitals all day.

Snowdens disgruntlement with Obama, in other words, was fueled by a deepdisdain for progressive policies. The available postings by TheTrueHOOHA do

show concerns about societys unquestioning obedience to spooky types, but

those date to 2010. Contrary to his claims, he seems to have become an anti-

secrecy activist only after the White House was won by a liberal Democrat who, in

most ways, represented everything that a right-wing Ron Paul admirer would have

detested.


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After Snowden revealed himself as the NSA leaker,Ars Technicaeditor Joe Mullin

published an in-depth investigation of hisArs Technicapostings, which concluded,

The Snowden seen in these chats is not the man we see today. Mullin was

referring to Snowdens views about leaking governmentsecrets, and to that extent,

he was certainly correct. However, there is no reason to doubt that, when Snowden

stole the files from the NSA, he still held many of the same views that he

expressed as TheTrueHOOHA. Snowdens politics seemed to still be libertarian-

right: He sent Ron Paul two contributions of $250 during the 2012 presidential

primaries.

Other evidence challenges Snowdens trustworthiness. Snowden implied that,

despite his lack of formal education, he had won posts of considerable authority

within the NSA, due to his advanced skills as a programmer. But as Reuters has

reported, Snowden gained access to mountains of classified material through more

prosaic means: obtaining log-ins and passwords from a small number of highly

trained co-workers, some of whom have since been fired from their posts. One of

Reuterss sources suggested that Snowden acquired the log-ins by telling hiscolleagues that he needed them to do his job as a computer systems

administrator.

Reading Snowdens selection of writings onArs Technica, its hard to see evidence

of a savvyor even consistentmind at work. Snowden doesnt seem like a man

prepared to become a global spokesman against government surveillance. And the

posts certainly dont indicate a man with a master plan. But over a year ago, he

began communicating with Glenn Greenwald, a blogger at The Guardian, who

possessed precisely the sophistication about politics and media that Snowden

lacked.


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In the mid-90s, Glenn Greenwald was an associate at the prestigious corporate law

firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, where he had a reputation as a hard-

knuckled combatant. But the job bored himhe would later admit to spending

hours at work devouring political commentary on the Web.

Greenwald had the background of a conventional liberal. Raised in modest

circumstances in South Florida, his first role model was his paternal grandfather, a

local city councilman with a socialist bent. At New York University Law School,

he was an outspoken advocate for gay rights. Yet in his online travels, he

gravitated to right-wing sites such as Townhall, where he could engage in cyber-

brawls with social conservatives. Over time, he met some of his antagonists in the

flesh and, to his surprise, liked them.

By 1996, Greenwald had co-founded his own litigation firm, where he would

spend the next decade. The firm did well, although by Greenwalds own

admission, many of the cases he worked were shitty. It was in his pro bono work

that Greenwald discovered his true passion: defending the civil liberties of

extremists.

In several cases over a five-year span, Greenwald represented Matthew Hale, the

head of the Illinois-based white-supremacist World Church of the Creator, which

attracted a small core of violently inclined adherents. In one case, Greenwald

defended Hale against charges that he had solicited the murder of a federal judge.

Hale was eventually convicted when the federal prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald,produced the FBI informant with whom Hale had arranged the killing.

Greenwalds other clients included the neo-Nazi National Alliance, who were

implicated in an especially horrible crime. Two white supremacists on Long Island

had picked up a pair of unsuspecting Mexican day laborers, lured them into an

abandoned warehouse, and then clubbed them with a crowbar and stabbed them

repeatedly. The day laborers managed to escape, and when they recovered from

their injuries, they sued the National Alliance and other hate groups, alleging that


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they had inspired the attackers. Greenwald described the suit as a dangerous

attempt to suppress free speech by making holders of unconventional views

liable for the actions of others. His use of a euphemism like unconventional to

describe white nationalists was troubling, but on First Amendment grounds, he had

a strong case and he made it successfully.

Greenwalds pro bono work is not evidence of anything more than a principled

lawyer providing hateful people with constitutionally guaranteed counsel. To me,

its a heroic attribute to be so committed to a principle that you apply it ... not

when it protects people you like, but when it defends and protects people that you

hate, he recently toldRolling Stone. But Greenwald soon grew restless with

litigation of any kind.

In 2005, Greenwald wound down his legal practice and launched his own

blog, Unclaimed Territory, producing the sort of impassioned political writing that

had fascinated him for a decade. His early postings included detailed accounts of

the unfolding Valerie Plame affair and unsparing criticism of Lewis Scooter

Libby. The blogs chief interestsintelligence policy, civil liberties, media

criticism, and national securitywere largely the same as Greenwalds today. So

was its style: several lengthy, deeply informed postings a day, pitting the forces of

light against the forces of darkness; mixing lawyerly analysis with bellicose

hyperbole. Greenwald seemed to take pride in attacking Republicans and

Democrats alike; hence, presumably, the title of his blog.

It wasnt long before Greenwald had acquired a dedicated following. In 2007, he

became a regular columnist for Salon, where his slashing attacks on the Bush

White House made him very popular on the left. Over the coming years, he would

win enthusiastic praise from, among others, Christopher Hayes, Michael Moore,

and Rachel Maddow, who dubbed him the American lefts most fearless political

commentator.


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On certain issues, though, his prose was suffused with right-wing conceits and

catchphrases. One example was immigration, on which Greenwald then held

surprisingly hard-line views. The parade of evils caused by illegal immigration is

widely known, Greenwald wrote in 2005. The facts, to him, were indisputable:

illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a

mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.

Defending the nativist congressman Tom Tancredo from charges of racism,

Greenwald wrote of unmanageably endless hordes of people [who] pour over the

border in numbers far too large to assimilate, and who consequently have no need,

motivation or ability to assimilate. Those hordes, Greenwald wrote, posed a threat

to middle-class suburban voters.

Greenwald has since reversed his position and renounced the post about the

parade of evils. (In his characteristically combative way, though, he blamed the

recent rediscovery of his immigration writing on Obama cultists out to discredit

him.) He ascribes that particular outburst to callow ignorancea rather inadequate

defense of remarks made by a seasoned 38-year-old New York lawyer.

By this point, Greenwald had come to reside in a peculiar corner of the political

forest, where the far left meets the far right, often but not always under the rubric

of libertarianism. He held positions that appealed to either end of the political

spectrum, attacking, for example, U.S. foreign policy as a bipartisan projection of

empire. Like most of his writings, his critique of America abroad was congenial

both to the isolationist paleo-Right and to postNew Left anti-imperialists. His

social liberalism struck an individualist chord pleasing to right-wing libertarians as

well as left-wing activists. Greenwald began to envisage bringing these groups

togetherto dissolve the usual lines of political loyalty and unite the anti-

imperialists and civil-liberties activists on the left with the paleoconservatives and

free-market libertarians on the rightin a popular front against the establishment

alliance of mainstream center-left liberals and neoconservatives.


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Along those lines, Greenwald found common ground with the upper echelons of

right-wing free-market libertarianism. In August 2007, he appeared at the Cato

Institutes headquarters in Washington. Im a real admirer of Cato, Greenwald

declared, and of the work that Cato does and has done for the last six years under

the Bush presidency. He was not only referring to Catos criticism of the war on

terror. Under Bush, Greenwald explained, a political realignment had occurred,

one that rendered traditional ideological disputes irrelevant. Politics now turned

on a fundamental question: Are you a believer in the constitutional principles on

which the country was founded and a believer in the fact that no political leader

can exercise vast and unchecked powers? To this question, Greenwald had a

ready answer: I find myself on the side of the Cato Institute and other defenders

of what in the 1990s was viewed as a more right-wing view of limited government

power.

Greenwald had identified a vehicle for a political realignment: the presidential

candidacy of the old libertarian warhorse Ron Paul. In November 2007, Greenwald

called Paul as vigilant a defender of Americas constitutional freedoms ... as anynational figure in some time. He acknowledged that there is at least something in

Pauls worldview for most people to strongly dislike, even hate, and he described

Paul as an anti-abortion extremist and near the far end of the rights stance on

immigration policy. Still, he believed Paul to be a rare truth-teller, prepared to

buck a corrupt bipartisan consensus.

This portrayal required highly selective political reasoning, not to mention a basic

ignorance of U.S. history. Paul, a longtime supporter of the John Birch Society, is a

quintessential paleoconservative, holding prejudices and instincts that predate the

postWorld War II conservative movement founded by William F. Buckley Jr. and

others. Paleoconservatives, in their hatred of centralized government and

consequent isolationism, regard U.S. history as a long series of catastrophes,

starting with the defeat of the Confederacy. From the 1940s to the present,paleoconservatism has thrived on the fringes, in an ideological family tree that


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extends from the America First Committee to the Birch Society to Pauls political

operation.

Savvy about media self-presentation, Paul usually obscures the dark underbelly of

this ideological legacy. Since the term isolationism has been discredited since

the days of America First, Paul calls himself a non-interventionist. But theres an

entire archive to confirm Pauls place in the far-right procession. His newsletters,

produced over the years under various titles, disclose a disturbing pattern of

racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia (proposing the slogan, Sodomy=Death), and

conspiracy-mongering. (Paul has implausibly denied writing the newsletters that

were published under his name.) The newsletters racial writings are voluminous:

It is human nature that like attracts like, read one edition of his newsletter. But

whites are not allowed to express this same human impulse. Except in a de facto

sense, there can be no white schools, white clubs, or white neighborhoods. The

political system demands white integration, while allowing black segregation.

Paul aims not to curtail the liberal state and the progressive taxation that

underwrites it, but to obliterate them: By the way, when I say cut taxes, heproclaims, I dont mean fiddle with the code. I mean abolish the income tax and

the IRS, and replace them with nothing.

After Paul dropped out of the presidential race in June 2008, Greenwald wrote

articles tepidly supporting the Obama campaign, emphasizing the vitally

important task of defeating John McCain. (Paul had gone on to endorse the racist

theocrat Chuck Baldwin of the Constitutional Party.) But he also sought to advance

the realignment he had described to Cato. Greenwald appeared in February 2008 as

a keynote speaker at Catos Annual Benefactor Summit, a conference of high -

rolling donors in Las Vegas. Later that year, he appeared at a conference sponsored

by the right-wing free-market libertarian Future of Freedom Foundation. In 2008,

Greenwald joined with the anti-conservative Firedoglake.com founder Jane

Hamsher to back the Accountability Now/Strangebedfellows PAC, with an assistfrom some of Ron Pauls fund-raisers.


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In 2010, Greenwald spoke to Julian Assange for a Salon column praising

WikiLeaks for its vital work. His enthusiasm for Assanges mission drew him

into the world of computer hackers and security leakersa world where it became

possible not simply to criticize the national security state, but to sabotage it.

In May 2010, Julian Assange delivered an address that neatly captured his bizarre

historical understanding and the messianic sense of mission that pervades

WikiLeaks. Speaking to the Oslo Freedom Forum about state censorship and

human rights in the West, Assange declared that the American slogan emblazonedon the gates of GuantnamoHONOR BOUND TO DEFEND FREEDOMis a

worse perversion of the truth than the signs at Nazi concentration camps

proclaiming that work makes you free.He went on to offer an eccentric sketch of

contemporary history. Thealliance that once existed between liberals and

libertarians and the military-industrial complex in opposing Soviet abuses in the

cold war is gone, Assange said. Since 1991, the natural interests of the

malevolent forces in the worldauthority, the intelligence agencies, and the

militaryhad taken over. The task for todays freedom fighters, he concluded, is

to find secret abusive plans and expose them where they can be opposed before

they are implemented. It is an animating ideology that could only have emerged

from Assanges own singular history.

Born and raised into the 1970s Australian counterculture, Assanges biologicalfather abandoned the family before he was born. In 1980, his mother, Christine,

became involved with Leif Meynell, a member of a new-age cult known as the

Family. The couple had a son together, but when the relationship broke down,

Christine became fearful that Meynell would seize their child. She took the boys

on the run, moving dozens of times during Assanges teenage years. Along the

way, Assange developed an entrenched distrust of authority and a prodigious talent


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for computer-programming. By the time he was 16, he was becoming a gifted

hacker.

Working with two other hackers under the name International Subversives,

Assange used the pseudonym Mendax to hack into the systems of various major

institutions, including the U.S. Air Forces 7th Command Group. In 1994, he was

charged with 31 counts of hacking and related crimes, which carried the possibility

of a ten-year prison term. When the case came to trial the following year, Assange

pleaded guilty to 25 of the hacking charges and was only required to pay a small

amount in damages. The experience set him on the intellectual path that would lead

him to found WikiLeaks.

Assange had never understood the charges against him. The way he saw it, he had

neither stolen information nor harmed the sites he accessed; his crime was

victimlessif it was a crime at all. While awaiting trial, he read Solzhenitsyn and

identified with the doctors and scientists who were thrown into the gulag. As Raffi

Khatchadourian observed in aNew Yorkerprofile, Assange came to see the

defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as

individual versus institution.

Assanges manifesto, Conspiracy as Governance, completed in 2006, lays out his

core philosophy. Authoritarian power, he wrote, was lodged in conspiracies of

operatives who, in collaborative secrecy, work[ed] to the detriment of a

population. In order to destroy that apparatus, Assange reasoned, the defenders oftruth, love, and self-realization must disrupt the authorityscommunication

systems and cut off its secret information flows. Stealing and leaking a regimes

secrets were thus vital tactics in the struggle against authoritarian evil. In 2006,

Assange launched WikiLeaks to put these ideas into practice.

The sites early scoops exposed a random mlange of material, including protocols

for the treatment of detainees at Guantnamo Bay, secret manuals of the Church of


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Scientology, the actor Wesley Snipess tax returns, and a list of contributors to

Minnesota Republican Norm Coleman. Then, beginning in February 2010, came

the Chelsea Manning leaks of a vast trove of classified documents, many of them

concerned with Iraq and Afghanistan. Over the next 18 months, WikiLeaks would

release hundreds of thousands of these documents, including the so-called Iraq

War Logs (until then the largest leak of classified material in the Defense

Departments history) and a quarter of a million unclassified, confidential, and

secret U.S. diplomatic cables. Five major news organizationsThe New York

Times, The Guardian,El Pais,Le Monde, andDer Spiegelpartnered with

WikiLeaks to run stories based on the Manning documents. Suddenly, Assange

was an international celebrity, and the accolades and awards poured in, including

the Sydney Peace Foundation Gold Medal and the Martha Gellhorn Prize for

Journalism.

And then, just as suddenly, the whirlwind veered off path. In August 2010, two

Swedish women leveled accusations of sexual violence against Assange, and

prosecutors sought his extradition from the United Kingdom. It was the beginningof a spectacularly weird sequence of events that landed Assange in asylum inside

the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in 2012, where he remains. He and his

defenders protested that the entire affair was a set-up; his U.K. lawyer, Mark

Stephens, claimed the heroic leaker had been caught in a honey trap laid by

dark forces.

In the wake of the WikiLeaks frenzy, Assange often tried to clarify where he stood

politically. His simultaneous embrace of leftist icons such as Noam Chomsky and

right-wing libertarians seemed to indicate that he was open to ideas from either end

of the political spectrum, so long as they were directed against authoritarianism.

Finally, in 2013, Assange proclaimed, The only hope as far as electoral politics

presently ... is the libertarian section of the Republican Party.


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Yet even that declaration was misleading. In practice, Assange has a history of

working closely with forces far more radical than the Republican Liberty Caucus.

Late in 2012, Assange announced the formation of the WikiLeaks Party in

Australia. The party nominated Senate candidates in three states, with Assange

running for office in Victoria. (He stumped via Skype from his refuge in the

Ecuadorian Embassy.) It had been expected that WikiLeaks would ultimately

throw its support to the Green Partyespecially after the partys National Council

voted in favor of such a move. Instead, WikiLeaks aligned with a collection of far-

right parties. One was the nativist Australia First, whose most prominent figure

was a former neo-Nazi previously convicted of coordinating a shotgun attack on

the home of an Australian representative of Nelson Mandelas African National

Congress. Members of the WikiLeaks Party blamed the flap on an administrative

error; mass resignations from the partys leadership followed. Those who quit

cited a lack of transparency in the partys operations, and some pointed to remarks

Assange had made blasting a Green Party proposal to reform Australias harsh

treatment of asylum seekers. For his part, Assange welcomed the walkout, saying

that it had eliminated elements that were holding the party back. He won 1.24

percent of the vote.

Even more disconcerting was Assanges expanding relations with official Russia.

In October 2010, just before WikiLeaks reached the acme of its influence with the

release of the State Department cables, Assange vowed that WikiLeaks would

expose the secrets not just of the United States but of all repressive regimes,

including that of Russia. In an interview withIzvestia, a formerly state-controlled

daily, he explained, We have [compromising materials] about your government

and businessmen. The same day, Kristinn Hrafnsson of WikiLeaks told a reporter,

Russian readers will learn a lot about their country.

Unlike the Americans, though, the Russians put WikiLeaks on notice. The day

after Hrafnssons interview appeared, an anonymous official from Russias secretpolice, the FSB, told the independent Russian news website LifeNews.ru, Its


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essential to remember that given the will and the relevant orders, [WikiLeaks] can

be made inaccessible forever.

Then, something strange happened: A few days after Assange was arrested on

sexual assault charges, Kremlin officials emerged as some of his most vocal

defenders. The Moscow Timesreported that Vladimir Putin himself had

condemned Assanges arrest: If it is full democracy, then why have they hidden

Mr. Assange in prison? Thats what, democracy? Putins indignation was echoed

by other top Russian politicians, including State Duma Deputy Gennady Gudkov,

who observed, The real reason for his arrest is to find out by any means who

leaked the confidential diplomatic information to him and how.

Within weeks, contacts commenced between WikiLeaks and elements favorable to

Putins ruling party. The promised damning documents about Russia never saw the

light of day. The Moscow Times article also recounted how theRussian Reporter, a

Putin-friendly publication, had gained privileged access to hundreds of

[American diplomatic] cables containing Russia-related information.

These contacts began when, according to The Guardian, Assange made batches of

the State Department cables available to Israel Shamir, a Russian-born Israeli

journalist who was involved with WikiLeaks. After Shamir took the cables to

Moscow, he traveled to Belarus. There, he met aides to the dictator Alexander

Lukashenko, who was then campaigning in a sham election. (Shamir, a

controversial figure within WikiLeaks, has evolved into a vociferous Holocaustdenier, obsessed with Jewish power.) Not long after Shamir arrived, according to

accounts published by the Index on Censorship and the American online

magazine Tablet, local news outlets started reporting that the official media was

preparing to publish secret documents about the Belarusian opposition.

On December 19, 2010, Lukashenko declared himself reelected with 80 percent of

the vote. His nearest opponent, the respected dissident Andrei Sannikov, carted off


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to jail, where he has reportedly been tortured. After the election, Shamir wrote a

glowing account of Lukashenkos government inCounterPunch, denouncing the

opposition as the pro-Western Gucci crowd. He also boasted that WikiLeaks

had exposed American agents in Belarus, according to an account in theNew

Statesman.

The boasts were ugly but not idle. The next month, a state-run newspaper

published what it claimed were excerpts from cables provided by Shamir, which

supposedly identified prominent dissidents, including Sannikov, as paid American

agents. James Ball, a former WikiLeaks employee who now works for The

Guardian, has written that when he and others raised questions about Shamirs

actions, we were told in no uncertain terms that Assange would not condone

criticism of his friend.

The Belarusian affair coincided with a deepening of Assanges connections to

Putins government. Without much public commentary, Assange has acquired

something like Russian government media sponsorship. In April 2012, he launched

a half-hour political TV showeventually named The Julian Assange Show

on the Kremlin-funded and -controlled RT television network and website. His

first guest was the normally furtive Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. At a

moment when Assanges bright light seemed to be fading, the Russians gave him

his own outlet on a network whose primary mission is to advance Putins political

line. (Greenwald has defended Assanges association with RT, arguing that

working for the Russian network is no different from writing for major U.S. outlets

such as The Washington Post, NBC, and The Wall Street Journal, all of them

supposedly corrupted by their right-wing corporate ownership.) Assanges

connections to Putins regime would appearto have something to do with the next

chapter in the NSA controversyhow and why Edward Snowden came to seek

asylum in Russia.


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On May 20, Snowden fled Hawaii with hard drives full of NSA material and

arrived in Hong Kong, where he was joined by Greenwald and his associate, the

filmmaker and activist Laura Poitras. The day after the pair revealed to the world

Snowdens identity as the NSA whistle-blower, Assange praised him as a hero

from within the Ecuadorian Embassy. In time, Assange would disclose that

WikiLeaks was paying for Snowdens travel and lodgings and providing him with

legal counsel. In mid-June, Assanges confidante, the WikiLeaks editor Sarah

Harrison, arrived in Hong Kong and joined Snowden. From this moment on,

Assange and WikiLeaks became central to the Snowden story.

In initial interviews with Greenwald and Poitras, Snowden said he willingly

accepted the risk of going to prison and that he wanted to end up in a country with

strong protections for privacy rights, possibly Iceland. But the Obama

administration indicated that it regarded Snowden as a serious criminal, and before

long, it became clear that Snowdens chief concern was in finding a country that

could safely get him out of Hong Kong, no matter how despicable its own record

on privacy rights.

On June 21, according to a report in the Russian newspaperKommersant, Snowden

took up residence at the Russian consulate in Hong Kong. Two days later, he and

Harrison boarded an Aeroflot flight for Moscow. Reports vary about who exactly

steered Snowden to the Russians. But WikiLeaks has claimed the credit, tweeting

that it had helped to arrange for Snowden to gain political asylum in a democratic

country.Izvestiadivulged that the Kremlin and its intelligence services, in

collaboration with WikiLeaks, had completed Snowdens escape.

Within days of Snowdens arrival in Sheremetyevo airport, powerful Russians

expressed interest in having him work with the Putin government. Senator Ruslan

Gattarov, a Putin ally, offered to hire Snowden as a consultant for a Duma working

group that would investigate whether U.S. Internet firms gave information about

Russians to Washington. Kirill Kabanov, a member of Putins so-called Human


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Rights Council, called for the Kremlin to grant Snowden political asylum; Putin

had offered to consider such a request soon after news broke about Snowdens

thefts.

On July 12, having been holed up at the airport for three weeks, Snowden held an

event widely described as a press conference to announce that he would be seeking

temporary asylum. He spoke not before the hundreds of journalists who had

flocked to the airport, but before a carefully selected group of invitees that

included pro-Kremlin figures in the guise of civic activists, according to a

posting on The New Yorker website by Russia expert Masha Lipman. Also in

attendance was Anatoly Kucherena, a prominent attorney who serves on the pro-

Kremlin Public Chamber and the body appointed to oversee the FSB, and who has

since become Snowdens lawyer and sole spokesman to the world.

In his statement Snowden praised the international resistance to historically

disproportionate aggression, by which he meant the U.S. attempts to bring him to

justice. Russia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador have my gratitude

and respect for being the first to stand against human rights violations carried out

by the powerful rather than the powerless. By refusing to compromise their

principles in the face of intimidation, they have earned the respect of the world.

No credible public figure has praised Russias increasingly vile record on civil

liberties for many years. For Snowden and for WikiLeaks, it appears, what really

counts in the field of human rights is a willingness to protect Edward Snowden.

The payoff of the Snowden affair for Putin and the Russians thus far has been

substantial. Just as the Kremlins human rights reputation, already woeful under

Putin, has spiraled downward, it is able to swoop in to rescue an American political

outlaw, supposedly persecuted by the Obama administration. The dissident

journalist Masha Gessen has observed, The Russian propaganda machine has not

gotten this much mileage out of a U.S. citizensince Angela Daviss murder trial in

1971.
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More than that, the Russians have used Snowden to embarrass the United States

with one very specific complaint. The Putin regime has long hated the central role

that the United States plays in setting the rules of the Internet through the Internet

Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and wanted to assert

maximum control over the Internet within its own borders. With Snowden, it had

scored the ultimate data point in its casethe crucial evidence that the United

States was manipulating the Internet for its own nefarious means. We need to

quickly put these huge transnational companies like Google, Microsoft and

Facebook under national controls, Gattarov told an interviewer. This is the

lesson Snowden taught us.

Some of the documents stolen by Edward Snowden have revealed worrisome

excesses on the part of the NSA. Any responsible whistle-blower, finding evidence

of these excesses, might, if thwarted by her or his superiors, bring the evidence of

those specific abuses to the attention of the press, causing a scandal, which would

prod Congress and the NSA itself to correct or eliminate the offensive program.

The leakers and their supporters, however, see things very differently. To them,

national security is not a branch of the government; it is the government, or it is

tantamount to being the government: a sinister, power-mad authority. As

Greenwald has argued: The objective of the NSA and the U.S. government is

nothing less than destroying all remnants of privacy. They want to make sure thatevery single time human beings interact with one another, things that we say to one

another, things we do with one another, places we go, the behavior in which we

engage, that they know about it. It is impossible, therefore, to reform this

clandestine Leviathan from the inside. And so the leakers are aiming at de-

legitimating and, if possible, destroying something much larger than a set of NSA

programs. They have unleashed a torrent of classified information with the clear

intent of showing that the federal government has spun out of control, thereby


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destroying the publics faith in their governments capacity to spy aggressively on

our enemies while also protecting the privacy of its citizens. They want to spin the

meaning of the documents they have released to confirm their animating belief that

the United States is an imperial power, drunk on its hegemonic ambitions.

According to the leakers own evidence, however, this interpretation is simply not

the case. The files leaked so far strongly indicate that the U.S. intelligence system,

although in need of major reform, is not recklessly spying on its citizens. The

Presidents Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies

found serious problems with the NSAs data collection, and recommended, among

other restrictions, outlawing the NSAs practice of amassing and storing the phone

records of virtually all Americans. Yet it also showed persuasively that the NSA

has acted far more responsibly than the claims made by the leakers and publicized

by the press.

There are many examples of such sensationalism. Early on in the affair, for

example, Snowdens most spectacular charge was that, at his desk, without a

warrant, he could eavesdrop on anyone even the president, if I had a personal

email. Several weeks later, Greenwald, writing in The Guardian, revealed a

document that purportedly substantiated that claimtraining materials for a

supposedly top secret program called xKeyscore, described in the document as

the NSAs widest-reaching system for developing intelligence from the

internet. The gist of Greenwalds article was widely reprinted in the American

press.

Inspected carefully, however, the documents are plainly not training materials.

Instead, they are more likely the PowerPoint version of a puffed-up marketing

brochure, possibly or even probably from an outside contractor trying to sell the

program to the NSA. The title slide dates from January 2007, which means that

they predate important legislation passed in August 2007 and July 2008 that

sharply checked the NSA. And the slides say absolutely nothing about giving users


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the power to read e-mails, with or without a warrant. Greenwalds article does cite

another set of xKeyscore materials which dates from 2012, and which might well

prove that the articles claims and Snowdens statement were accurate and truthful.

But Greenwald and The Guardianhave not made those materials public, and when

the defense writer Joshua Foust, who pointed out many of these criticisms,

subsequently questioned them about the documents, Guardianeditors replied that

they had no intention of releasing them. The champions of transparency have

been remarkably opaque when they choose to be.

A similar pattern recurs with other supposedly damning documents. Among those

cited by The New York Times, in its editorial supporting clemency for Snowden, is

one that purportedly proves the N.S.A. broke federal privacy laws, or exceeded its

authority,thousands of times per year,according to the agencys own internal

auditor. But theTimes was drawing on a Washington Postreport that failed to say

whether the thousands of violations amounted to a significant proportion of the

total uses of the database, or only a relative handful, within the margin for human

error. The Timesalso failed to emphasize that, according to the document, the vastmajority those violations, as audited in the first quarter of 2012, were due to simple

human or mechanical error and that there was no way of knowing whether the

balance involved serious, as opposed to technical, violations of law. The findings,

finally, came from an internal audit by the NSAan indication that the NSA takes

steps to police itself.

The leakers have gone far beyond justifiably blowing the whistle on abusive

programs. In addition to their alarmism about domestic surveillance, many of the

Snowden documents released thus far have had nothing whatsoever to do with

domestic surveillance. As Fred Kaplan has pointed out in Slate, Snowden has

exposed NSA operations to track the Taliban in Pakistan, monitor e-mails for

intelligence of developments in Iran, and more surveillance abroad. These

operations, Kaplan notes, were neither illegal, improper, or, in the context ofcontemporary global affairs, immoral. Regardless of whether any of these
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documents in any way compromised U.S. interests abroad, they were plainly not

the revelations of whistle-blowers seeking to secure Americans constitutional

rights. They are the revelations of leakers, out to damage their bugaboo national

security behemoth.

Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange have largely set the terms in the debate over

transparency and privacy in America. But the value of some of their revelations

does not mean that they deserve the prestige and influence that has been accorded

to them. The leakers and their supporters would never hand the state modern

surveillance powers, even if they came wrapped in all sorts of rules and regulations

that would constrain their abuse. They are right to worry, but wrongeven

paranoidto distrust democratic governments in this way. Surveillance and

secrecy will never be attractive features of a democratic government, but they are

not inimical to it, either. This the leakers will never understand.

Sean Wilentz is a contributing editor at The New Republic and the George Henry

Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton University.

Source URL: http://www.newrepublic.com//article/116253/edward-snowden-glenn-greenwald-julian-assange-what-

they-believe