MINNEAPOLIS — On Wednesday, NBC News aired an interview with National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. The interview, conducted by NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams in a Moscow hotel after months of planning, has been interpreted by many as an attempt to positively spin Snowden’s image.
It has also set off a “tit-for-tat” set of exchanges with the federal government over the alleged truth about the situation surrounding Snowden’s disclosure of classified information.
In the interview, Snowden indicated that he felt he had no choice but to leak the classified intelligence documents he downloaded while working as an NSA subcontractor with Booz Allen Hamilton.
“The reality is, the situation determined that this needed to be told to the public. The Constitution of the United States had been violated on a massive scale,” Snowden told Williams.
Snowden suggested that the U.S. government was using the threat of terrorism “to justify programs that have never been shown to keep us safe but cost us liberties and freedoms that we don’t need to give up and our Constitution says we shouldn’t give up.”
The publishing of Snowden’s leaked files did reveal that the United States is and was aggressively and — at times, illegally — surveilling the electronic communiques of both Americans and the international community, including active eavesdropping against foreign heads of state.
Snowden’s disclosure revealed the nature of the “Five Eyes” Alliance — a cooperation pact based on the UKUSA Agreement, in which the U.S., the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand worked together to monitor and analyze the global communication framework. While the U.S. and the other members of “Five Eyes” assert that this is necessary to maintain their national security, Snowden’s documents showed this espionage to be the single largest known surveillance effort in history and to be dangerously unregulated and potentially unconstitutional — at least, according to one federal judge.
Snowden argued that he attempted to go through official channels with his concerns about overreaches with the NSA and with the authority the White House was asserting in justifying its approach on intelligence-gathering — which has been shown to be partially in contradiction with the governing law — before deciding to leak the documents.
“Many, many of these individuals were shocked by these programs,” said Snowden, who indicated that he did not just speak with the appropriate complaints officers in the NSA, but to his supervisors and colleagues, as well, about his concerns. Snowden added that he was advised: “If you say something about this, they’re going to destroy you.”
On Thursday, at the urging of Senate Intelligence Chair Dianne Feinstein, the NSA released emails between Snowden and the NSA’s legal office which showed Snowden raising questions about the NSA’s legal training programs’ definition of equivalency between legislation and executive orders.
“The e-mail did not raise allegations or concerns about wrongdoing or abuse, but posed a legal question that the Office of General Counsel addressed,” read a statement from the NSA, as reported by Reuters.
Snowden argues that the email release was incomplete. In an email to the Washington Post, Snowden said there were other emails “and not just on this topic. I’m glad they’ve shown they have access to records they claimed just a few months ago did not exist, and I hope we’ll see the rest of them very soon.”
In the interview with NBC News, Snowden also stated that he considers himself a patriot and that he was not just a “low-level analyst” — as the government has described him — but a trained spy who worked under assumed names overseas. He also said he has no ties with the Russian government, and the choices he made in regards to the whistleblowing were forced upon him in the name of duty to the U.S. Constitution.
While this back-and-forth over Snowden’s public image is interesting for reasons of historical context, it is ultimately meaningless compared to the most pressing fact: Snowden revealed that the federal government has been actively spying against American citizens. As a result, the federal government was forced to address outrage at home and abroad and adjust the way it collects intelligence.
Regardless of the justifications he may have for disclosing the classified information — the largest one-time alleged theft of intelligence in American history, amounting to more than 1.7 million files — he still did the deed. While it can be debated whether he is a traitor or a hero, what he did significantly changed the relationship the American people have with their government.