Last night, I joined friends at the Synagogue at 6th and i street in DC for a talk by Glen Greenwald, the Lawyer-turned-blogger who met with Edward Snowden and broke the story of the NSA monitoring program and who continues to release Top Secret documents at a pace of his choosing and in a fashion that allows for him to receive maximum attention and financial benefit from the releases. Now, Greenwald has written a book and this was part of his promotion tour. He signed copies after the event.
The crowd was extremely receptive and enthusiastic. Mr. Greenwald was met with a standing ovation. His speech received frequent head-nods from bearded, pasty-faced men (of whom there seemed to be an abundance) and spontaneous applause.
In many ways, the head nodding and applause was apropos. The man was brilliant, erudite, sophisticated and glib. He spoke with clarity and passion and, to all appearances, earnestness. I enjoyed him thoroughly and admired his polish and poise. Part of me wanted to join in the enthusiasm of the crowd and suspend my disbelief, buy into the narrative. But I, ever the analyst, and someone whose life has been personally affected by privacy violations and the fallout from the Snowden affair, began to feel discomfort from an undercurrent of inconsistencies in the narrative he gave. I know something of the world that Snowden inhabited, and I have met with quite a few lawyers in my time. And the story that Greenwald told does not make sense to me.
Greenwald gave the legend of Edward Snowden: a patriotic and brilliant young man who was troubled by the abuses he witnessed in the course of his normal duties. He was intelligent and skilled enough to protect himself from the government's privacy intrusions, but he realized that most Americans did not have these capabilities. He had a high-paying job, a loving family and long-term girlfriend, but he was willing to risk the loss of these things and spend a lifetime "in a cage" in order to warn his fellow Americans. Greenwald had formed an impression of Snowden from a cryptic e-mail correspondence and he believed that his "Deepthroat" was an older, seasoned operative - possibly at the end of this career and life. Only an octogenarian, he believed, would have the intelligence and wisdom, well-developed moral sense, cynicism of the system, access to high-level information, and willingness to sacrifice the small number of his remaining years in service of a greater cause. When he met Snowden in Hong Kong, Greenwald said that it took him a complete day to recover from the cognitive disconnect between his assumptions and the reality of the 29-year-old he met. Greenwald said that Snowden was a thoughtful young man who was well aware of the possible consequences of his behavior. He said that Snowden had a history of patriotism - evidenced by his enlisting in the Army and going through training. Greenwald said that Snowden had dictated his desired endstate and the terms of the document release. There were three categories of documents: those which Snowden wanted to ensure that the American public accessed, those which he desired to withhold due to National Security reasons (they gave specifics of classified technology used to track Al Qaeda or disclosed the names of innocent people who could be harmed) and those which fell into a "grey area" and which Snowden wanted Greenwald to decide. He says that he is restraining his response according to Snowden's plan for the information release.
Greenwald's story requires that Snowden be clever, patriotic, ethical, and wise and that Greenwald be credulous and driven primarily by the desire to change things for the better. From what I know from other elements of the story and from what I have learned in the defense community, I cannot believe either.
Greenwald's claim that Snowden behaved according to his ethics can only be true if Snowden's actual job required that he legitimately access and work on those programs which caused his ethical dilemma. But Snowden lacked formal education and training. In the defense community, only rank and education will justify work on those programs and he would have been excluded. As I.T. support, Snowden would have been responsible for file management - not file creation. He would have worked the "help desk", fixing people's computers when they broke down, installing system updates, and making sure that the links in the file-share system weren't broken. Snowden's access to classified material was not a necessary part of his work - and information about the programs he professed to have ethical concerns about were, according to Reuters, obtained through deception: he took the log-in information from other personnel under the pretext that he needed it to do his job as a systems admin. Using their log-in information, Snowden indiscriminately pillaged mountains of classified material. It's possible and likely he didn't know what the files contained until he'd already taken them. Righteous indignation is a nice cleansing emotion to purge any guilt you may feel from sneaking around to get other people's personal log-in codes.
So if he wasn't motivated by ethics or patriotism, then what spurred Snowden on? Why steal so much classified material and leak it? I think we apply Occam's razor: the simplest explanation is the most likely. In the world of contracting for government/defense, access, rank and education are currency. You get to be important if the title before your name is sufficiently impressive. Snowden had neither rank nor education. He was low man on the totem pole. Perhaps it was humiliating to spend his days on the outside looking in: paid well enough, but ignored or disregarded by the people whose work actually mattered. His girlfriend and family probably were impressed that he'd done so well for himself but, in his workplace, nobody sought his opinion or advice unless their hard drive stopped working and they needed him to swap it out. There was no way for him to be "special". Men who are unattractive and otherwise unremarkable are able to gain a sense of self-importance if they can carry high-level clearances and look at information marked (S) or (TS) or related. It is a heady experience to feel that you're part of an exclusive club and that you know something secret and possibly dangerous. Snowden was part of that club in name only. He had "clearances" because he had to work on other people's computers but he wasn't required to conduct analysis on anything significant. The media was wrong when they characterized Snowden as a fame-seeking narcissist. The guy just wanted to feel like he was "special" - even in his own mind. The flash drive in his pocket with all that information and access made him feel powerful - and if he could make himself believe that his motives were pure and noble, well then he had a winning combination for self-confidence. Now that he has the world's attention (and, in many instances, its adulation) he's set for life.
If Snowden were clever or wise, he certainly would have planned his coming-out party better. He clearly had no intention of coming back to the U.S. but he didn't really plan beyond that. Pick someplace warm with nice sandy beaches, preferably someplace favorable to your politics and without an extradition treaty with the U.S. Take an additional 24 hours to get there and get settled, and then hold your press conference. The poor fool picked a geographical mousetrap. There was no place for him to go. So then he was stuck in a Russian airport for a month and now is the play-thing for our new Russian dictator and psychopath to march out every time he's feeling anti-Western and considering which country to annex next (which is, pretty much, every day). Congratulations, sir. Well considered. Well done!
So then there is this fellow Greenwald. Clever, articulate, charismatic Greenwald. That man is so incredibly sharp - I would certainly lose an out-and-out argument with him. I'm thinking that there's no way in hell that I.T.-support guy Snowden managed to pass himself off as a high-level operative via e-mail to Greenwald. No way Greenwald is that naive. And no way Greenwald hops on a plane to Hong Kong to meet with Snowden unless he knows exactly what he's in for. Greenwald may be many things, but gullible is not one of them. And he had an agenda. Greenwald knew exactly what he was doing when he met Snowden. He could sum up the other man in an instant: Snowden craved validation and was too stupid to tell when the validation came with strings attached. Here was the perfect rube. Greenwald just had to play it right - and that wasn't hard because the intellect differential between the two of them was outstanding.
Did Snowden lay out the rules for Greenwald? Did he convince Greenwald about his nobility and ethical reasoning, and sort through the documents and say, "publish this, not that."? I don't believe it for a second. Greenwald had too much personality, intelligence, and experience: three things that Snowden lacked. Greenwald would have dictated the terms: "Okay, Ed. There's a right way to do this and a wrong way to do this. In the right way, you get attention and support on a regular basis. You keep the attention of the public and the sympathy of the world. And you protect yourself from outright retaliation from the U.S. Government because you become legend and a battle-cry. This means three things: first, we have to make sure that your image is well-groomed. People have to believe that you're doing this for the right reasons. Next, we have to be very choosy about the documents we let out. If you release information about specialized systems or ways that the U.S. has taken down terrorists, or give information that can harm innocents, then you lose public support and the U.S. Government has a good case for treason against you. Finally, we can't let this be a one-time release of information because you lose your bargaining position and you lose the story. We put this out in stages. Agreed? Good. Now tell me some things about yourself that will help me show people that you are a patriot."
If Greenwald had been motivated to change the system, rather than to enrich himself, he certainly had the education and experience to know what to do. He knew that Snowden could (and should) reach out to his Congressional Representative or to the Senate Intelligence Committee first. This would have protected Snowden because it is the appropriate action - and Snowden would have been covered under particular whistleblower statutes. If Greenwald was motivated by a disinterested desire to change things for the better, then he would have advised Snowden to do this - perhaps offering to be an emissary on Snowden's behalf. But Greenwald risked losing control of the information and the man. Greenwald had exactly what he needed to make his career right in front of him. There was no way he was going to surrender this golden opportunity. He was so greedy and self-interested, he didn't even deploy his brilliant deductive reasoning to get Snowden someplace safe before the disclosure.
In a sense, Snowden got both what he wanted and what he deserved. He wanted to be special and validated as being special. So now he gets to be specially trapped in Russia, waiting for his marionette strings to be picked up by Greenwald or Putin as the mood suits.
And Glen Greenwald writes articles and books and collects exorbitant fees for speaking, and builds his reputation as an honest broker. And he sells the story of the legend of Snowden: a necessary lie to package the feat he's accomplishing now.
And behind Greenwald, on the wall of the Synagogue are written the words, "Remember the Law of Moses". Something about False witness, wasn't there?
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