The Ed Snowden Problem, or How I Learned To Stop Being A Douche And Love What He Did For All Of Us

Note to self, I’m writing this because the events of the past month are too important to not be recorded from a personal POV, not because I have any insight in them.

Twenty-one days ago, what had been a fairly prodigious output of writing from me suddenly stopped. To that point I had been writing short political opinion pieces, just trying to stay in some kind of writerly flow, trying to stretch myself. I was able to look at political stories and immediately prognosticate and dissect, in my mind, what I felt was correct or silly or whatever. I was sure of myself.

Then, in the middle of a stretch of “scandals”—which I argued were not scandals, and which have since been effortlessly eclipsed by worse blemishes—came Glenn Greenwald and his NSA leaks.

Since the Clinton administration at least, Republicans have sought to divest any competent domestic management by a Democratic president away from potentially good news and into small-time scandal. It is a war of attrition waged by one faction of pirouetting elites against a slightly more hapless rival. That’s what was going on exactly three weeks ago: the Obama administration was “mired in scandal,” which was a tired phrase when it was first used weeks prior. They had the old Benghazi thing, an abjectly manufactured non-story, the IRS targeting Tea Party groups, another dud, and the AP subpoenas. Now, this last one was disturbing, but it wasn’t a scandal. Look, I learned what oral sex was because the president during my childhood was a serial muff diver. That’s a scandal. The Justice Department notifying a news agency that it was the target of investigation, with a trail of authorizations standing firmly behind it, is not quite. Still, it was a good table-setter for what was to come, for the sole reason that it somewhat muted the football-game aspect of modern American politics—wherein I have bought the jersey and pennants for Team Obama—and raised actual ethical questions.

For example, the Obama administration has been supposedly tougher on whistleblowers than any previous, a gross violation of his campaign promise to make government transparent. I found myself wondering, does this all constitute a violation of my own conception of official ethics? Is this a gross departure from what I want government to do? At which point I realized that I had started dismissing such questions as naive a long time ago.

I was wrong to do so, Glenn Greenwald single-handedly convinced me of that. On June 6, his first reports came out about the fact that Verizon was being compelled to provide all of its metadata to the NSA. As soon as I saw the report on Twitter, I knew this was big: “Holy mother of God,” in my immortal tweeted words. I immediately got on the nearest keyboard and banged out a liberal tsk-tsk to Obama for allowing such a slothfully large program. It was just so big, it was obvious that they weren’t looking for anything, they just had access to it and wanted it.

As the story developed, we heard from various personalities about how grave this was or not. None moreso than the self-proclaimed hero of the saga, Edward Snowden. As it turned out, the NSA is tracking all of our online activities, essentially, with very little oversight.

It took a while to get over my personal dislike of Ed Snowden—he seems like a typical libertarian nerd who reads the Constitution by wrapping it tightly around his head, and worse yet he’s got a vainglory complex—but eventually I came to fully support the idea that he is an American Hero.

I didn’t know what to think at first. The only sure violation I initially recognized was of Barack Obama’s previously stated intent to open up government and combat our encroaching security apparatus. Both of those things need to be done, which happens to be why I thought his May 23rd national security speech was the single best I’ve seen him make: he addressed the need for this country to pivot away from 9/11’s mortgaging of our civil liberties and due process. I’m quick to defend him politically against criticisms that he hasn’t closed Gitmo yet, but its continued operation is morally and legally indefensible. Same goes for drone strikes: although basic human decency wholly impugns our high-collateral drone war, it’s what the politics wills out. Moreover, I’m not entirely dissuaded from the neoconish argument that we need to accept collateral in order to maintain our preponderance in the world. I say this all the time, possibly because I can sense the clock ticking on how long I believe it: if Americans woke up one day and were told that we could no longer exert our power anywhere on the globe, at any time, that we were no longer the world’s superpower (and, reasonably, some other country now was) it would majorly depress the national psyche. Our military might is fundamental to the American cosmology. The military itself is only the outward-facing of this immense power, though. The internal-facing is the security apparatus. I don’t know enough about the Military-Industrial Complex to eloquently indict it, other than to recognize that it is a Janus-faced superpower with PR achieving domestically what bullets achieve abroad.

So this NSA business is that. And we don’t need it, it needs us. I do not think that the terrorism we’ve experienced thus far warrants the invasion of privacy of this spying program. Also, I seriously question whether there isn’t a more efficient and targeted way to achieve the same protections. The problem is that we people—in this case mostly meaning the media—gave an ultimatum to our officials in the wake of 9/11: keep this from happening again. I like Ed Snowden. At first I didn’t, because he seemed like a libertarian douchebag, but as I learned more about him I kind of came to see him as a hero, not even in a national sense but in a personal one too. He really seemed to have gone to great lengths to expose what he knew was going on, and did it brilliantly.

Lastly: I’m saying all this so as to put a date next to it. I always wonder, when you read about some persecution or social upheaval in the past, how I would have reacted to it contemporaneously. Would I have been slightly seduced by Joe McCarthy? Would I have understood the actions of carpetbaggers in the 60’s? You’d like to think so, but I can never be sure; I do, after all, have some conservative views today, and conservatism generally ends up on the wrong side of history. At least as it pertains to a social evolution, at least. I’m convinced that what’s going to happen is some variation of the following: Ed Snowden will eventually fall away into the background as the novelty of such a person diminishes and his revelations take center stage; we will discuss things which would have NEVER come to light if not for someone like him; eventually this will mark a turning point in what was until now the 9/11 era, hopefully bringing it to a complete end; he will eventually be lionized, pardoned, and welcomed back a hero.

There are a lot of people right now who just can’t bring themselves to trespass the comforts and distrust the reassurances of the D.C. political mainstream. These people think that finding out about the NSA’s vast surveillance is inviting terrorism. I disagree. I’m fairly sure that I’m standing on the RIGHT side of history for this, so I want to make sure I get this in there.