For society to function well, there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures. By deciding to unilaterally leak secret N.S.A. documents, Snowden has betrayed all of these things.
He betrayed honesty and integrity, the foundation of all cooperative activity. He made explicit and implicit oaths to respect the secrecy of the information with which he was entrusted. He betrayed his oaths.
He betrayed his friends. Anybody who worked with him will be suspect. Young people in positions like that will no longer be trusted with responsibility for fear that they will turn into another Snowden.
He betrayed his employers. Booz Allen and the C.I.A. took a high-school dropout and offered him positions with lavish salaries. He is violating the honor codes of all those who enabled him to rise.
He betrayed the cause of open government. Every time there is a leak like this, the powers that be close the circle of trust a little tighter. They limit debate a little more.
He betrayed the privacy of us all. If federal security agencies can’t do vast data sweeps, they will inevitably revert to the older, more intrusive eavesdropping methods.
He betrayed the Constitution. The founders did not create the United States so that some solitary 29-year-old could make unilateral decisions about what should be exposed.
I’m not really interested in turning Edward Snowden into a hero or anything, but seriously?
Edward Snowden is a whistleblower. He didn’t betray honesty and integrity. If anything, it takes a lot of integrity to betray a powerful institution at the risk of losing everything because you take moral exception to what they are doing. There is no integrity in staying silent about something you find morally reprehensible. He didn’t betray open government. If anything, the myth of open government betrayed him…and everyone else. And the founding fathers absolutely believed that if not one, then a comparatively small handful of young men could decide the destiny of a nation. How do you think we ended up being our own country? I don’t know how Snowden betrayed the Constitution. The Constitution has far more to say about unreasonable search and seizure than it does about whistleblowing.
What bothers me more is the argument that if the government decides to start investigating his friends and ramping up their invasions of privacy and secret doings to an even greater degree, Edward Snowden is responsible for this. No. The people who run our country are responsible for their own actions, not a single 29-year-old. They’ll use him as a justification for ever-increasing invasions of our privacy, but if it weren’t him, it would be someone else. They’ve been finding “reasons” to erode privacy protections for decades now.
The only thing I feel has betrayed me in this scenario is my government. Edward Snowden just did me the favor of letting me know it was happening.