This weekend, one of the greatest news leaks in the history of the United States took place.
As the first week of military whistleblower Bradley Manning’s trials came to a close, 29-year-old Edward Snowden stepped forward as the leaker of material from the National Security Agency.
The material, which he gave to the British newspaper the Guardian, contains information about top-secret programs, including widespread domestic surveillance. The NSA, Snowden said, collects everyone’s information by default and even stores it for a time.
“Any analyst at any time can target anyone, any selector anywhere,” Snowden said in a video interview with the Guardian. “I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you, or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the president, if I had a personal email,” he said.
In the same interview, Snowden said the documents reveal that “the NSA routinely lies in response to congressional inquiries about the scope of surveillance in America.”
“These things need to be determined by the public, not by somebody who was simply hired by the government,” Snowden said.
“I think that the public is owed an explanation of the motivations behind the people who make these disclosures that are outside of the democratic model,” he said. “When you are subverting the power of government, that that’s a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy.”
So, why is so much data being unconstitutionally seized up in the first place? Surely they must be doing it for our own good, we hope. Despite our hope, we understand the dangers of such unbridled power. A dystopian surveillance state may not be here quite yet, but the groundwork for one is laid: It’s only a matter of time before the wrong people get their hands on these powers.
Snowden said “And the months ahead, the years ahead, it’s only going to get worse...a new leader will be elected, they’ll flip the switch, say that ‘Because of the crisis, because of the dangers that we face in the world...we need more authority, we need more power.’ And there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it, and it’ll be turnkey tyranny.”
Forty years ago, Daniel Ellsberg secretly photocopied classified documents and gave them to The New York Times. The corpus of documents was an unprecedented 7,000 pages and told a secret history of the Vietnam War. These are now known as the Pentagon Papers.
In an op-ed for the Guardian, Ellsberg wrote “In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material – and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago.”
From all of us at the Alligator, thank you, Daniel Ellsberg.
A tired adage has been repeated by several officials throughout the course of the weekend with regard to surveillance: If you’re not doing anything wrong, then there’s nothing to fear.
Well, government, right back at you.
