What Are We Supposed To Think About Snowden?

++A very frazzled-looking John Kerry appeared on television to say that Snowden should "man up" and return to the United States and make his case in court. He called Snowden a "traitor". So far Snowden's indictment includes stealing government property and giving classified materials to people who should not have them. It is unclear whether that refers to journalists like Glenn Greenwald or to foreign governments.

++In the Brian Williams interview,Snowden said he wasn't debriefed by Russian intelligence and that he wasn't a Russian spy. He defended his resume, which I thought was pointless, saying he had been trained as a spy for the CIA. Williams seemed focused on what Snowden will do now and whether he will seek an extension of his temporary asylum that runs out in August. Snowden said he did try and work the system to raise alarms about the extent of the NSA programs. 

++This morning Peter King, Republican from New York,blasted the NBC interview as an "informcial for Snowden" and challenged Snowden to name one American whose rights had been violated by the NSA. Unfortunately for King,Glenn Greenwald's last article on the subject will be precisely that all those Americans on whom the NSA collected information.

++Between yesterday's FCC disclosures on the extent of information gathered by American corporations on Americans and the NSA revelations, we are seeing the contours of a system that makes sense of the Supreme Court's decision on Citizens United, a vast of corporate and government control which does threaten the viability of a democratic system.

++Reading Glenn Greenwald's book and Harding's book on Snowden,I have to say I am faced with an enormous generation gap. Snowden in his twenties earned more income per year than I have ever made and he was a government contractor. He started as a libertarian who backed Ron Paul and has become the first of the digital generation to defect because of the very technology that generation has mastered.

++There remain a lot of questions about Snowden. For instance, is the Pentagon's claims about his theft of military secrets just disinformation or real. The real answer would cast his exploits into another realm. Why did he provide the Chinese with information about NSA activities against one of their internet companies when the U.S. has been concerned about it from the Bush days that it was run by military intelligence? Is Glenn Greenwald right that there was nothing on the four laptops he took to Hong Kong? Greenwald in his book claims they were a ruse.

++But while we can lay the blame on the Bush Administration for its prompting the NSA to expand its  programs, we have to admit new technology and the Obama Administration enabled the NSA to make a quantum leap in surveillance. It's one of those typical American things that just because you can you do without giving it a thought. President Obama's failure to reign in the surveillance state is probably his biggest failing as President. I would argue politically he couldn't with the forces arrayed against him and unfortunately I think he likes the wizardry of the NSA as much as any President.

++Whether one has an opinion about Snowden or not,it doesn't matter a bit. The issue is what are the implications for the society at large and the future.On the issue of terrorism, the verdict is in on the CIA's torture and rendition program--it did not yield operational intelligence on terrorist plots. From the revelations about the NSA, we understand it does a lot of economic surveillance but no one as yet demonstrated concretely that it's intercepts prevented a terrorist plot. In both cases, Humint have been the decisive factors. But I hope the NSA can prove me wrong.

++If Snowden's aim was to alert Americans to the threats to our freedom,why reveal that the entire country of the Bahamas is under surveillance and why pretend it isn't because of drug-running and money-laundering when the internal documents reveal this? Why go out of your way to reveal that the United States was interested in corporate secrets in Brazil? That revelation torpedoed the summit between President Obama and the Brazilian President. Why reveal that we had specific embassies under surveillance or for that matter the members of the United Nations Security Council? The natural response is "I hope so."

++Glenn Greenwald's "No Place To Hide: Edward Snowden,the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State",besides a great read,walks us through the variety of programs in Snowden's files. I would argue the meaty part of Greenwald's book is about the issue of privacy and its importance for our own system. I never could quite understand Michael Kinsley's review of the book in the New York Times. Are reporters or journalists supposed to be licensed? What if Greenwald had continued his writing his blog and had not contacted the Guardian? Would that make him less or more a journalist? I might argue with the scale  of Greenwald's revelations using the Snowden material but I don't doubt his right to write about them.

++We have not heard the last of the Snowden saga. Unfortunately, the so-called reforms of the NSA on the Hill are only cosmetic and do not address the issues raised by the revelations.