<nettime> Tamsin Shaw: Edward Snowden Reconsidered (NYRB)

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

Original to:
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/09/13/edward-snowden-reconsidered/


Edward Snowden Reconsidered
Tamsin Shaw
New York Review of Books, Sept 13, 2018

This summer, the fifth anniversary of Edward Snowden’s revelations about 
NSA surveillance passed quietly, adrift on a tide of news that now daily 
sweeps the ground from under our feet. It has been a long five years, 
and not a period marked by increased understanding, transparency, or 
control of our personal data. In these years, we’ve learned much more 
about how Big Tech was not only sharing data with the NSA but collecting 
vast troves of information about us for its own purposes. And we’ve 
started to see the strategic ends to which Big Data can be put. In that 
sense, we’re only beginning to comprehend the full significance of 
Snowden’s disclosures.

This is not to say that we know more today about Snowden’s motivations 
or aims than we did in 2013. The question of whether or not Snowden was 
a Russian asset all along has been raised and debated. No evidence has 
been found that he was, just as no evidence has been found that he was a 
spy for China. His stated cause was the troubling expansion of 
surveillance of US citizens, but most of the documents he stole bore no 
relation to this avowed concern. A small percentage of what Snowden 
released of the 1.7 million documents that intelligence officials 
believe he accessed did indeed yield important information about 
domestic programs—for example, the continuation of Stellar Wind, a vast 
warrantless surveillance program authorized by George W. Bush after 
9/11, creating legal structures for bulk collection that Obama then 
expanded. But many of them concerned foreign surveillance and 
cyberwarfare. This has led to speculation that he was working on behalf 
of some other organization or cause. We can’t know.

Regardless of his personal intentions, though, the Snowden phenomenon 
was far larger than the man himself, larger even than the documents he 
leaked. In retrospect, it showed us the first glimmerings of an emerging 
ideological realignment—a convergence, not for the first time, of the 
far left and the far right, and of libertarianism with authoritarianism. 
It was also a powerful intervention in information wars we didn’t yet 
know we were engaged in, but which we now need to understand.

In 2013, the good guys and bad guys appeared to sort themselves into 
neat and recognizable groups. The “war on terror” still dominated 
national security strategy and debate. It had made suspects of thousands 
of ordinary civilians, who needed to be monitored by intelligence 
agencies whose focus throughout the cold war had been primarily on state 
actors (the Soviet Union and its allies) that were presumed to have 
rational, if instrumental intentions. The new enemy was unreason, 
extremism, fanaticism, and it was potentially everywhere. But the 
Internet gave the intelligence community the capacity, if not the legal 
right, to peer behind the curtains of almost any living room in the 
United States and far beyond.

Snowden, by his own account, came to warn us that we were all being 
watched, guilty and innocent alike, with no legal justification. To 
those concerned primarily with security, the terrorists were the hidden 
hostile force. To many of those concerned about liberty, the “deep 
state” monitoring us was the omnipresent enemy. Most people managed to 
be largely unconcerned about both. But to the defenders of liberty, 
whether left liberals or libertarians, Snowden was straightforwardly a 
hero. Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian at the time, said of 
him:

His motives are remarkable. Snowden set out to expose the true behaviour 
of the US National Security Agency. On present evidence he has no 
interest in money… Nor does he have the kind of left-wing or Marxist 
sentiments which could lead him to being depicted as un-American. On the 
contrary, he is an enthusiast for the American constitution, and, like 
other fellow “hacktivists,” is a devotee of libertarian politician Ron 
Paul, whose views are well to the right of many Republicans.

The patriotic right, the internationalist left: these were the 
recognized camps in the now far-distant world of 2013. Snowden, who kept 
a copy of the US Constitution on his desk at the NSA, could be regarded 
by his sympathizers as a patriot engaging in a lone act of bravery for 
the benefit of all.

Of course, it wasn’t a solitary act. Snowden didn’t want to be purely a 
whistleblower like Mark Felt or Daniel Ellsberg; he wanted to be a 
figurehead. And he largely succeeded. For the last five years, the 
quietly principled persona he established in the public mind has 
galvanized opposition to the American “deep state,” and it has done so, 
in part, because it was promoted by an Academy Award-winning documentary 
film in which Snowden starred, a feature film about him directed by 
Oliver Stone in which he made an appearance, and the many talks he gives 
by video-link that have become his main source of income. He now has 
3.83 million Twitter followers. He is an “influencer,” and a powerful 
one. Any assessment of the impact of his actions has to take into 
account not just the content of the documents he leaked, but the entire 
Edward Snowden Show.

In fact, most of what the public knows about Snowden has been filtered 
through the representations of him put together by a small, tight circle 
of chosen allies. All of them were, at the time, supporters of 
WikiLeaks, with whom Snowden has a troubled but intimate relationship. 
He initially considered leaking documents through WikiLeaks but changed 
his mind, he claims, in 2012 when Assange was forced into asylum at the 
Ecuadorian embassy in London under heavy surveillance, making access to 
him seem too difficult and risky. Instead, Snowden tried to make contact 
with one of WikiLeaks’ most vocal defenders, the independent journalist 
Glenn Greenwald. When he failed, he contacted the documentary filmmaker 
Laura Poitras, whom Greenwald had also vociferously defended when she 
drew unwanted government scrutiny after making a documentary film that 
followed a man who had been Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard. The scrutiny 
turned into harassment in 2011, she claims, when she began making a film 
about WikiLeaks.

Poitras had been a member of the Tor Project community (which developed 
the encrypted Tor web browser to make private online interactions 
possible) since 2010 when she reached out to Jacob Appelbaum, an 
important  member of both the Tor Project and also WikiLeaks, after 
becoming a close friend and ally of Assange. We know from Wired’s Kevin 
Poulsen that Snowden was already in touch with the Tor community at 
least as early as 2012, having contacted Tor’s Runa Sandvik while he was 
still exfiltrating documents. In December 2012, he and Sandvik hosted a 
“crypto party” in Honolulu, where Snowden ran a session teaching people 
how to set up Tor servers. And it was through Tor’s Micah Lee (now 
working for The Intercept) that Snowden first contacted Poitras. In 
order to vet Snowden, Poitras turned to Appelbaum. Given the overlap 
between the Tor and WikiLeaks communities, Snowden was involved with the 
latter at least as early as his time working as a contractor for the 
NSA, in a job he took specifically in order to steal documents, in 
Hawaii.

Few people knew, when Citizenfour was released in 2014, how deeply 
embedded in both Tor and WikiLeaks Poitras was or how close an 
ideological affinity she then had with Assange. The Guardian had 
sensibly sent the experienced news reporter Ewen MacAskill with Poitras 
and Greenwald to Hong Kong, and this helped to create the impression 
that the interests of Snowden’s confidants were journalistic rather than 
ideological. We have subsequently seen glimpses of Poitras’s complex 
relationship with Assange in Risk, the version of her WikiLeaks film 
that was released in 2017. But Risk is not the movie she thought she was 
making at the time. The original film, called Asylum, was premiered at 
Cannes in 2016. Steven Zeitchik, of the Los Angeles Times, described it 
as a “lionizing portrait,” presenting Assange as a “maverick hero.” In 
Risk, on the other hand, we are exposed more to Assange’s narcissism and 
extremely unpleasant attitudes toward women, along with a wistful 
voiceover from Poitras reading passages from her production diary, 
worrying that Assange doesn’t like her, recounting a growing ambivalence 
about him.

In between the two films, Assange lost many supporters because of the 
part he played in the 2016 US elections, when WikiLeaks published stolen 
emails—now believed to have been hacked and supplied by Russian 
agents—that were damaging to Hillary Clinton. But Zeitchik discovered, 
when he asked Poitras about her own change of heart, that it wasn’t 
political but personal. Assange had turned his imperious attitude toward 
women on her, demanding before the Cannes screening that she cut 
material relating to accusations of rape by two women in Sweden. His 
tone, in particular, offended her. But her view of his actions leading 
up to the US election remained consistent with that of WikiLeaks 
supporters; he published the DNC emails because they were newsworthy, 
not as a tactic in an information war.

When Snowden initially contacted Poitras, she tells us in Risk, her 
first thought was that the FBI was trying to entrap her, Appelbaum, or 
Assange. Though Micah Lee and Appelbaum were both aware of her source, 
she tells us that she left for Hong Kong without Assange’s knowledge and 
that he was furious that she failed to ensure WikiLeaks received 
Snowden’s documents. Although Poitras presents herself retrospectively 
as an independent actor, while filming Snowden in Hong Kong she 
contacted Assange about arranging Snowden’s asylum and left him in 
WikiLeaks’ hands (through Assange’s emissary, Sarah Harrison). Poitras’s 
relations with Assange later became strained, but she remained part of 
the Tor Project and was involved in a relationship with Jacob Appelbaum. 
(She shows in the film that Appelbaum was subsequently accused of 
multiple counts of sexual harassment over a number of years.)

In Risk’s added, post-production voiceover, Poitras says of the Snowden 
case: “When they investigate this leak, they will create a narrative to 
say it was all a conspiracy. They won’t understand what really happened. 
That we all kept each other in the dark.” It’s not clear exactly what 
she means. But it is clear that “we all” means a community of 
like-minded and interdependent people; people who may each have their 
own grandiose ambitions and who have tortuously complex, manipulative, 
and secretive personal relationships with one another. Snowden chose to 
put himself in their hands.

If this group of people shared a political ideology, it was hard to 
define. They were often taken to belong to the left, since this is where 
criticisms of the national security state have tended to originate. But 
when Harrison, the WikiLeaks editor and Assange adviser, flew to Hong 
Kong to meet Snowden, she was coming directly from overseeing Assange’s 
unsuccessful electoral campaign for the Australian Senate, in which the 
WikiLeaks Party was apparently aligned with a far-right party. The 
WikiLeaks Party campaign team, led by Assange’s father and party 
secretary John Shipton, had made a high-profile visit to Syria’s 
authoritarian leader, Bashar al-Assad, and Shipton had heaped praise on 
Vladimir Putin’s efforts in the region, in contrast to America’s, in an 
interview with the state radio network Voice of Russia. The political 
historian Sean Wilentz, in what at the time, in 2014, was a rare 
critical article on Assange, Snowden, and Greenwald, argued that they 
shared nothing so coherent as a set of ideas but a common political 
impulse, one he described as “paranoid libertarianism.” With hindsight, 
we can also see that when they first became aligned, the overwhelming 
preoccupation of Poitras, Greenwald, Assange, and Snowden was the 
hypocrisy of the US state, which claimed to abide by international law, 
to respect human rights, to operate within the rule of law internally 
and yet continually breached its own purported standards and values.

They had good grounds for this view. The Iraq War, which was justified 
to the public using lies, fabricated evidence, and deliberate 
obfuscation of the overall objective, resulted in hundreds of thousands 
of deaths, as well as the rendition and torture of suspected “enemy 
combatants” at CIA black sites and their indefinite detention at 
Guantánamo Bay. The doctrine of preemptive war had been revived, along 
with imperialist ambitions for a global pax Americana.

But cynicism about the rule of law exists on a spectrum. At one end, 
exposing government hypocrisy is motivated by a demand that a 
liberal-democratic state live up to its own ideals, that accountability 
be reinforced by increasing public awareness, establishing oversight 
committees, electing proactive politicians, and employing all the other 
mechanisms that have evolved in liberal democracies to prevent arbitrary 
or unchecked rule. These include popular protests, the civil 
disobedience that won civil rights battles, and, indeed, whistleblowing. 
At the other end of the spectrum is the idea that the law is always 
really politics in a different guise; it can provide a broad set of 
abstract norms but  fails to specify how these should be applied in 
particular cases. Human beings make those decisions. And the 
decision-makers will ultimately be those with the most power.

On this view, the liberal notions of legality and legitimacy are always 
hypocritical. This was the view promulgated by one of the most 
influential legal theorists of the twentieth century, Carl Schmitt. He 
was a Nazi, who joined the party in 1933 and became known as the “crown 
jurist” of the Third Reich. But at the turn of the millennium, as Bush 
took America to war, Schmitt’s criticisms of liberalism were undergoing 
a renaissance on both the far right and the far left, especially in the 
academy. This set of attitudes has not been limited to high theory or 
confined to universities, but its congruence with authoritarianism has 
often been overlooked.

In Risk, we hear Assange say on the phone, regarding the legality of 
WikiLeaks’ actions in the US: “We say we’re protected by the First 
Amendment. But it’s all a matter of politics. Laws are interpreted by 
judges.” He has repeatedly expressed the view that the idea of legality 
is just a political tool (he especially stresses this when the one being 
accused of illegality is him). But the cynicism of the figures around 
Snowden derives not from a meta-view about the nature of law, like 
Schmitt’s, but from the view that America, the most powerful exponent of 
the rule of law, merely uses this ideal as a mask to disguise the 
unchecked power of the “deep state.” Snowden, a dissenting agent of the 
national security state brandishing his pocket Constitution, was seen by 
Rusbridger as an American patriot, but by his chosen allies as the most 
authoritative revealer of the irremediable depth of American hypocrisy.

In the WikiLeaks universe, the liberal ideal of the rule of law, both 
domestic and international, has been the lie that allows unaccountable 
power to grow into a world-dominating force. Sarah Harrison insists that 
the US, with the help of its allies, has constructed “a huge global 
intelligence, diplomatic, and military net that tries to see all, know 
all, govern all, decide all. It reaches all, and yet it is acting 
without [sic] impunity. This is the greatest unaccountable power of 
today—the United States and our Western democracies.” Greenwald has 
gradually shifted toward a similar position. Having initially supported 
the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but then been appalled by the civilian 
casualties and the use of torture, he asked in 2017: “Who has brought 
more death, and suffering, and tyranny to the world over the last six 
decades than the US national security state?”

This view of the US as the most malign actor in the world has now made 
him reluctant to criticize the actions of foreign states like Putin’s 
Russia. For example, asked about the Novichok poisoning of a former 
Russian spy in Salisbury, England, an attempted assassination attributed 
to the Kremlin, he responds that Obama’s drone strikes were morally no 
different—a gambit that, perhaps inadvertently, mimics the 
“whataboutism” of the Kremlin itself. But it wouldn’t make sense for 
Greenwald to refuse to condemn the misdeeds of other states on the 
grounds that America’s are worse unless he had come to feel that all 
such judgments are a moralistic charade, that power politics is the only 
game in town.

In this light, it is extremely significant that Snowden’s famous leak of 
documents revealing the NSA’s PRISM surveillance program was 
misinterpreted when it was first disclosed by Greenwald and Barton 
Gellman of The Washington Post in a way that implied total lawlessness 
at the NSA. (According to Greenwald’s book on the Snowden leaks, Gellman 
was put under significant pressure by Snowden to publish before the Post 
had made the rigorous checks it wanted.) The initial story, as run by 
both Gellman and Greenwald, claimed that through PRISM, the NSA and FBI 
had direct access to the servers of the nine leading US Internet 
companies (Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, 
YouTube, Apple). The term “direct access,” implying that these agencies 
could delve into the companies’ servers at will, with no legal 
authorization, was inaccurate, and although corrections were published, 
it created a false impression in the public mind that has never fully 
dissipated. Snowden himself has never used his platform to correct the 
error. Charlie Savage covers the episode in the updated edition of his 
Power Wars: The Relentless Rise of Presidential Authority and Secrecy. 
His comprehensive history of US government surveillance is not at all 
reassuring to those concerned about a lack of checks on executive power, 
but in describing the PRISM program specifically, he acknowledges that 
it was misunderstood.

The program operated within the existing FISA system and secured 
cooperation between the Internet companies and the NSA at the point when 
an individual suspected of involvement in terrorism had been targeted 
and the NSA wished to retrieve that suspect’s messages from the 
companies’ servers. Many Americans will still feel that this program 
constituted an unwarranted breach of privacy, but what PRISM does not do 
is vindicate the idea of a “deep state” operating entirely independently 
of the rule of law. Although this might seem like a fine distinction to 
some, it is an extremely significant one. But the narrative of 
deep-state lawlessness was too appealing.

Seumas Milne, then a Guardian journalist (now the British Labour Party’s 
executive director of strategy and communications), wrote an opinion 
piece on the Snowden leaks that poured scorn on the idea that American 
and British politicians are in any sense “law-abiding.” “Claims that the 
intelligence agencies are now subject to genuine accountability, rather 
than ministerial rubber stamps, secret courts and committees of 
trusties, have been repeatedly shown to be nonsense,” he said, going on 
to claim that since democratic institutions had “spectacularly failed to 
hold US and other Western states’ intelligence and military operations 
to account,” it had been left to whistleblowers to take on this role, 
and it was “up to the rest of us to make sure their courage isn’t 
wasted.” Given his despair of liberal-democratic institutions, that 
final exhortation seems worryingly open-ended.

Assange’s allies, Milne included, have made clear that their allegiance 
doesn’t lie with liberal democracies and their values. They have taken 
sides with authoritarianism in their fight against the hypocrisy of 
liberal democracies. Milne has been a prominent, expenses-paid guest of 
Putin’s Valdai discussion club, where Putin, Foreign Minister Sergey 
Lavrov, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, and other Kremlin insiders meet 
to discuss Russian foreign policy with invited sympathetic Westerners. 
Assange, a former libertarian, has called Russia under Putin “a bulwark 
against Western imperialism.” He has for a long time been the 
beneficiary of Russian state resources (in 2012, when WikiLeaks ran out 
of money, the Russian state broadcaster RT hosted The Julian Assange 
Show, in which he interviewed controversial political figures), while 
subtly supporting Putin’s foreign policies, particularly in Syria. In 
2016, he revealed just how effectively he could help the Kremlin attack 
US democracy by leaking stolen emails on their behalf in order to help 
sway the election. Assange has denied that a state was the source, but 
Justice Department indictments of twelve Russian military intelligence 
officers have identified an avatar created by the GRU, Guccifer 2.0, as 
the source.

For his part, Greenwald has repeatedly, in the face of overwhelming 
evidence to the contrary, decried as Russophobia the findings that Putin 
ordered interference in the 2016 US presidential election—even appearing 
on Fox News to do so. The very term “Russophobia” obfuscates the 
distinction between Vladimir Putin’s regime and Russia; the two clearly 
can’t be identified with one another. If open criticism of Putin by 
Russians were tolerated, it would presumably be vehement and widespread, 
as the effort it takes to suppress it—the murder of dissident 
journalists, the imprisonment, exile, and murder of political opponents 
and even financial rivals—suggests. In an interview with RT on the 
occasion of a visit to Snowden in Moscow last year, Greenwald said:

In the United States for a long time this shift has been taking place. 
Two of the most important protest movements in the US—one was the Tea 
Party, the other was Occupy Wall Street—were both perceived to be on 
different ends of the political spectrum. Yet they had very similar 
issues in common. They were protesting the bailout of Wall Street after 
the Wall Street crisis, the domination of corporations. When Donald 
Trump ran for president, even though he was perceived as a right-wing 
candidate, he did so by criticizing the Iraq war, by criticizing 
American militarism, by promising to “drain the swamp” of corporate 
influence.

The distinction between left and right, he argues, will increasingly be 
replaced by the opposition between people who are pro-establishment and 
anti-establishment. But being anti-establishment is not a politics. It 
defends no clear set of values or principles. And it permits 
prevarication about the essential choice between criticizing and helping 
to reform liberal democracy from within or assisting in its demise. It 
encourages its partisans to take sides with a smaller, authoritarian 
state in order to check the power of the one whose establishment it 
opposes.

It seems clear that Putin has exploited this fissure in Western values. 
It wouldn’t take a political genius to manipulate the situation that 
arose around Snowden. And if Snowden’s supporters, as Poitras claims, 
didn’t conspire but all kept one another in the dark, how much easier it 
would have been for Putin to take advantage of them. Snowden himself 
claims that every decision he made he can defend and that he always 
acted in the interests of the United States rather than Russia. But the 
public narrative created around the leaks has served Putin’s purposes. 
This may have been more valuable to him than the actual intelligence 
that was disclosed.

Many states, including Russia, immediately used Snowden’s disclosures as 
justifications for expanding their own surveillance programs as they 
rushed to catch up with the rapid expansion of America’s cyber-powers. 
Putin has exploited the PRISM story to foster theories about the “deep 
state,” claiming that the Internet is “a CIA plot.” It was extremely 
valuable to him at the time to undercut global trust in the big Silicon 
Valley media companies that were spreading American soft power around 
the globe and to defend instead “cyber sovereignty,” or each nation 
controlling the flow of information within its own territory. Russia has 
long engaged in information warfare in Ukraine and the Baltic states, as 
well as at home, and needs to protect its sphere of digital influence, 
as well as to weaken the global reach of the tech companies that give 
America so much cyber-power.

And Putin has benefited from the appearance of being Snowden’s 
protector, presenting himself as a greater champion of freedom than the 
United States. In their book Red Web: The Kremlin’s War on the Internet, 
the Russian investigative journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan 
recounted the experiences of human rights activists who were summoned 
via an email purportedly from Snowden himself, to a meeting with him at 
Moscow airport when he surfaced there with Sarah Harrison, to find they 
were joining the heads of various pro-Kremlin “human rights” groups, 
Vladimir Lukin, the Putin-appointed Human Rights Commissioner of Russia, 
and the lawyers Anatoly Kucherena and Henri Reznik. It was clear to the 
independent activists that Kucherena had organized the meeting. 
Kucherena is a member of the FSB’s Public Council, an organization that 
Soldatov and Borogan say was established to promote the image of the 
Russian security service; he is also the chairman of an organization 
called the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation, which has branches 
in New York and Paris and was set up at Putin’s personal instigation, 
the authors tell us, for the purposes of criticizing human rights 
violations in the United States. This institute publishes an annual 
report on the state of human rights in the United States. Using 
misleading moral equivalences to attack American hypocrisy is one of the 
most common tactics in Putin’s propaganda war.

On the account given by Soldatov and Borogan, Snowden has appeared to 
cooperate with this strategy, barely deviating from Putin’s information 
agenda even as Putin has instigated extraordinarily repressive measures 
to rein in Internet freedoms in Russia. When Snowden agreed, for 
instance, to appear as a guest questioner on a televised 
question-and-answer session with Putin, he posed the Russian president a 
question that heavily criticized surveillance practices in the US and 
asked Putin if Russia did the same, which gave Putin an opening to 
assert, completely falsely, that no such indiscriminate surveillance 
takes place in Russia. Earlier this year, Snowden’s supporters trumpeted 
a tweet in which he accused the Russian regime of being full of 
corruption, but Putin himself will use such accusations when he wishes 
to eliminate undesirable government actors. To be sure, Snowden is in a 
vulnerable position: he is notably cautious in his wording whenever he 
speaks publicly, as someone reliant on the protection of Putin might be. 
But he speaks often, and he uses his platform. So whether we trust him 
matters. It matters whether we view him as a bad actor, or as a 
well-intentioned whistleblower who has shown bad judgment, or as someone 
who has allowed himself to become an unwitting pawn of the Russians.

Snowden understands how information wars work and what’s at stake. In 
Hong Kong, he told Greenwald and Poitras that he couldn’t trust The New 
York Times because he had realized that when James Risen and Eric 
Lichtblau wanted to report on the NSA’s warrantless eavesdropping, the 
paper sat on the story for a year—a decision that Snowden felt affected 
the outcome of the 2004 election. In the run-up to the 2016 election, he 
tweeted: “Politics: the art of convincing people to forget the lesser of 
two evils is also evil.” Three weeks before the election, he tweeted to 
his millions of followers, “There may never be a safer election in which 
to vote for a third option,” claiming, bizarrely, to trust the 
predictions of The New York Times.

Snowden’s tweets and lectures have real-world impact. After his 
disclosures, Tor’s usership shot up from a million to six million. He 
repeatedly tweeted to his followers that they should use Tor and Signal. 
Tor’s default search engine DuckDuckGo, which claims to protect privacy 
by refraining from the profiling that other browsers do in order to 
provide personalized searches, saw a 600 percent increase in traffic 
over just a few months. One of DuckDuckGo’s partners is Yandex, Russia’s 
government-controlled search engine, although the company says it does 
not allow the collection or sharing of user data by its partners. 
Certification by the Snowden brand may well be the chief reason that so 
much faith is now placed uncritically in these platforms.

In 2016, Snowden became president of an organization called the Freedom 
of the Press Foundation, an organization set up in 2012 to allow 
donations to WikiLeaks via Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal when those 
payment processors had cut off WikiLeaks. Snowden joined its board in 
2014, alongside Poitras, Greenwald, and Lee. Snowden’s old friend from 
Tor, Runa Sandvik, is on their technical advisory board. The FPF 
continued to support WikiLeaks until early 2018, when the board finally 
became split over Assange’s views and actions. Since the group was 
founded, it has used much of its $2 million annual budget to develop 
encryption software for media outlets. The group’s biggest success has 
been developing a Tor-based system called SecureDrop, used by The 
Guardian, The New York Times, and The Washington Post as a means for 
whistleblowers to submit documents. Given this degree of exposure, we 
need to consider whether Snowden’s is a brand we can trust.

Snowden claims to have started an important conversation about Internet 
surveillance in America. President Barack Obama himself has given 
Snowden credit for enabling this essential public discussion, one that 
can confer genuine legitimacy on the security measures taken by the 
state. But such legitimacy is not something Snowden and his allies value 
or grant. In a 2016 lecture by video-link at Fusion’s Real Future Fair, 
Snowden discouraged his audience from pursuing the legal and political 
remedies that liberal democracies offer:

If you want to build a better future, you’re going to have to do it 
yourself. Politics will take us only so far and if history is any guide, 
they are the least reliable means of achieving effective change… They’re 
not gonna jump up and protect your rights. Technology works differently 
than law. Technology knows no jurisdiction.

If there’s one thing Greenwald, Assange, and their followers got right, 
it’s that the United States became a tremendous economic and military 
power over the last seven decades. When it blunders in its foreign or 
domestic policy, the US has the capacity to do swift and unparalleled 
damage. The question then is whether this awesome power is better 
wielded by a liberal-democratic state in an arguably hypocritical way 
but with some restraint, or by an authoritarian one in a nakedly avowed 
way and with no restraint. In the five years since Snowden’s 
revelations, we have seen changes, particularly the election of Donald 
Trump with his undisguised admiration for strongmen, that compel us to 
imagine a possible authoritarian future for the United States. 
Democratic accountability, a system of checks and balances, and the rule 
of law may be imperfect measures but they look like our best hope for 
directing the American state’s power to humane ends. Previous failures 
are not a good reason to give up on this hope. Neither is faith in 
technology: it is a means; it doesn’t discriminate between ends. 
Technology is not going to save us. Edward Snowden is not our savior.



[An earlier version of this essay misstated the number of documents that 
Edward Snowden released; that number is not known. The figure of 1.7 
million was an intelligence estimate given to Congress of files accessed 
by Snowden. An earlier version also misstated that the DuckDuckGo search 
engine allows partners to collect user data; it does not. The article 
has been updated.]

September 13, 2018, 7:00 am
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