NWC co-founder and leading whistleblower attorney, Stephen M. The Espionage Act is not such a tool. Originally designed to prosecute spies bringing military secrets back home, this Act has been used against whistleblowers, not spies, who release information that they believe is in the American interest. Without clear guidance on the matter, wielding the Espionage Act against Snowden seems to clash with the free speech protections in the First Amendment that Snowden is and was entitled to.
Additionally, at the time Snowden blew the whistle, U. In late , President Obama signed the executive order, Presidential Policy Directive 19 or PPD, which created administrative procedures to protect whistleblowers who work for U. Snowden leaked this information that provided whistleblower protection to the intelligence community — for the first time. So, there were other avenues available for somebody whose conscience was stirred and thought that they needed to question government actions.
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Your Reason has been Reported to the admin. Fill in your details: Will be displayed Will not be displayed Will be displayed. Share this Comment: Post to Twitter. New game. Online in the nineteen-nineties, he could be anonymous, on bulletin boards, and on massively multiplayer online role-playing games like Ultima Online, which he played so constantly that his parents installed a second phone line so that he could have unlimited access.
Online, he could be whoever he wanted to be. And he could make the world be the way he wanted it to be. Disillusionment, in this life story, is watching the wrecking of the Internet. He left high school after a year. He went to community college for a while. I like Japanese, I like food, I like martial arts, I like ponies, I like guns, I like food, I like girls, I like my girlish figure that attracts girls, and I like my lamer friends.
In the spring of , Snowden joined the Army reserves but, five months later, washed out of basic training. Not long afterward, on an early dating site called HotOrNot, he met a twenty-year-old photographer and pole dancer named Lindsay Mills. They married in In , he became a contractor for American intelligence services, working as a security guard.
Whistle-blowing is very often an upstanding act of courage, undertaken at great personal cost, and resulting in great public good. Democracies have checks and balances, including investigations, ethics committees, and elections. Businesses have regulations, compliance departments, and inspections.
Whistle-blowing is necessary when these safeguards fail. But to celebrate whistle-blowing as anything other than a last resort is to give up on institutions. Most discover abuses while holding positions of power within their organizations, often in oversight roles. They typically report those abuses to their superiors, repeatedly, for months and even years, before seeking help outside their organizations, usually from lawyers or other advocates.
Less frequently, they go straight to the press. Early in his training, he was upbraided for failing to follow the chain of command. He never held a position of influence or oversight within the intelligence community. He went looking for it. Snowden says he began searching for evidence of a mass-surveillance program before being posted to Japan, later that year, where he worked for Perot Systems which was acquired by Dell soon afterward , at the N.
He began prowling around. So he kept digging. Snowden has claimed that he alerted more than ten officials at the N. He has provided no support for this claim. The classified documents Snowden released to the press contained a good deal more than evidence of the surveillance of American citizens; they included, for instance, a memo detailing the N.
He unsheathed Excalibur. The U. At every point in American history when the government has stepped up those efforts, clandestine or not, citizens have protested and resisted, some number of Americans greeting each new regime as marking the end of American freedom.
They complained in the nineteen-teens, after the founding of the F. But data surveillance endured. In , Senate hearings on federal data banks revealed the existence of a vast program of domestic surveillance conducted by the U. Concern about the capture of personal data seemed to be directed only at the government. Bell Telephone Company, for instance, had been collecting bulk data about its customers to the best of its ability since its founding, in In , after four years of living abroad, Snowden returned to the United States.
Working at Dell, under a contract for the C. Snowden subscribes to the theory of a Once Great Internet, a techno-utopia in which boys and men could be free and anonymous and undiscoverable and ungovernable. And it was up to each individual user to determine for themselves where one ended and the other began.
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