In the wake of 9/11, the National Security Agency (NSA), authorized under the Bush administration, the USA PATRIOT Act, and under their surveillance program PRISM, found itself with more power and oversight than it previously held. Its reach was more pervasive: the agency could monitor all the activities of the average citizen, both domestically and abroad, via the citizens’ cell phones, laptops, and myriad other forms of technology. It could and can trace one’s history of locations and the nature of all of one’s interactions. In 2014, this has not since changed.
In his first interview with journalist Glenn Greenwald from British newspaper The Guardian, whistleblower and former NSA intelligence analyst Edward Snowden explained the motives behind his high-profile leak of confidential U.S. government documents:
“When you’re in positions of privileged access [like I was]…you’re exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale than the average employee. Because of that, you see things that may be disturbing….you see them on a more frequent basis, and you recognize that most of these things are actually abuses….Over time, that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up and you feel more compelled to talk about it….You eventually realize that these things need to be determined by the public, not somebody who was simply hired by the government.”
Snowden, upon seeing these abuses so routinely, began to feel more and more compelled to address this issue. And indeed he did “raise concerns, regularly and widely…both laterally and vertically” in his workplace, as he mentioned in a July 2014 interview with more Guardian journalists.
“Isn’t this unconstitutional?” he told the journalists, expressing what his thoughts were upon seeing these abuses. “Isn’t this a violation of rights?”
Feeling more and more the feverish urge to address this issue with a farther reach than he could attain in the States, Snowden went through with the massive document leak. He felt this was the only way to accomplish his mission.
The question emerges: Why did Snowden take it upon himself to release this information in such a dramatic fashion? Why did he not broach these issues before a judge, rather than expose such subversive information to the world, potentially harming the national security of the United States?
Snowden has pointed out the 1917 Espionage Act, which is designed to prosecute leakers. Furthermore, he has noted the lack of whistleblower protection for government contractors and, ultimately, his lack of faith in the “internal reporting mechanisms of the US government,” which could have “destroyed him and buried his message forever,” as an article in The Guardian reported.
All of these factors led him to his decision, and he says the greatest fear he has regarding the outcome for America “is that nothing will change,” and that people “won’t be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things, to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests.”
Upon hearing the news of Snowden’s revelations, many US citizens scoffed at the importance of what Snowden was revealing, saying that, “I’m not doing anything wrong, so why should I care about being watched?”
But when asked about why the average citizen should care, Snowden said, “because even if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’re being watched and recorded…. You don’t have to have done anything wrong, you simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call, and then they can use the system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made and attack you on that basis to derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.”
Besides this fact, what the matter ultimately comes down to is that the nature of activity in itself is also, as Snowden phrased it, “a serious violation of the law. The 4th and 5th Amendments to the Constitution of my country, Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and numerous statutes and treaties forbid such systems of massive, pervasive surveillance. While the US Constitution marks these programs as illegal, my government argues that secret court rulings, which the world is not permitted to see, somehow legitimize an illegal affair. These rulings simply corrupt the most basic notion of justice – that it must be seen to be done. The immoral cannot be made moral through the use of secret law.”