I am sorry, but this is the stuff of bad airport spy fiction. (“Rendered”? The Triads? Please.) The most likely outcome? China decides to extradite him because it has higher priority issues on which it needs to deal with the United States than the future of Edward Snowden. Which, I suspect, is when he and his sponsors will discover that Hong Kong’s “spirited committment to free speech and the right of political dissent’ — which may be the funniest line to emerge from this whole saga — is not what they believe it to be. But there are issues beyond Edward Snowden, and whatever comes next, and these are issues worthy of an open and national debate, and they should be examined in the light of day.
First of all, it’s past time to re-examine everything that was done in such a panic after 9/11. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was warning us about the NSA and secrecy three decades ago. Jim Bamford has made his living writing about the NSA. These problems are not new. This re-evaluation especially includes the Patriot Act, which keeps getting renewed by a Congress which long ago abdicated its oversight role in intelligence as thoroughly as it has abdicated its War Powers. (Senator Mark Udall is all over this, and good for him.) The answer, “Well, we stopped a bunch of attacks we can’t tell you about” ought not the be adequate any longer. Second, it’s time for the president to differentiate, clearly, himself from his predecessor. What did he do that you haven’t? What have you done that he didn’t? The attempt to pry these revelations loose from the history that led to the programs that are now being revealed guarantees that the discussion will slide into commonplace political argument, which will get us approximately nowhere in discussing the real problem, which is the place of privacy in a democracy that insists on surveilling itself to death. If this whole thing comes down to Obama-is-better-than-Bush vs. Obama-is-history’s-greatest-monster,and there’s too much of both right now, then the opportunity goes a’glimmering.
(Oh, and Senator Aqua Buddha, you’re a U.S. Senator. If you want to do something about this state of affairs, you have more serious means to which you can resort than a futile lawsuit, although that will add some names to your fundraising database for 2016. Grow the fk up, please.)
Unfortunately, the real test will come after the next terrorist attack that succeeds. It seems as though the surveillance stepped up in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing. I don’t recall anyone warning about that in the immediate aftermath. If you want to see what effect, if any, Edward Snowden’s revelations have had on the country, and on what it’s doing to itself, look for it there. I would almost guarantee you that you won’t like what you see. Fear is the new normal. I lived through the Church Committee hearings. That was the last time the secret state-within-a-state was revealed to this extent, and that was by an empowered congressional committee. Business as usual opened again in 1980. We are not the country we say we are. What we are arguing about is the distance between the two.
The Snowden Effect: