BnB .. first thought Daniel Ellsberg .. i understand, even empathize with your black and white .. yeah, trust, contract, constitution, country .. big things .. whistle-blowers? .. i've read you can't be one if you work for the NSA .. unless he exposed illegal goings on? .. was Clapper totally truthful in his Congressional testimony? .. misleading Congress is illegal .. about the stuff Snowden revealed .. most knew or suspected something along the lines existed .. politicians have alluded publicly to something bigger than had been revealed in the public domain .. i mean he didn't expose detailed plans of a secret nuclear weapon, even if many might feel even that would be a right thing to do .. he didn't expose any CIA agents as, who was it that did? .. the stuff he revealed some say sorta middle management stuff .. classified but not Top Secret .. yeah, the first one i thought of was Daniel Ellsberg .. then i got this one ..
Is Edward Snowden a Traitor? If he is, so was Daniel Ellsberg.
By Emily Bazelon|Posted Tuesday, June 11, 2013, at 4:46 PM
Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, speaks during a rally in support of Pfc. Bradley Manning on June 1, 2013, in Fort Meade, Md. Photo by Lexey Swall/Getty Images
Toobin writes that Snow “wasn’t blowing the whistle on anything illegal; he was exposing something that failed to meet his own standards of propriety.” Stone says, “There is no reason on earth why an individual government employee should have the authority, on his own say so, to override the judgment of the elected representatives of the American people and to decide for the nation that classified information should be disclosed to friends and enemies alike.”
Brooks: “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.” (Brooks also dings Snowden for being a lone wolf, which is hilariously at odds with his adulation of other solo radicals .. https://twitter.com/runofplay .)
The Obama administration is moving to charge Snowden with disclosing classified information, probably under the Espionage Act—the anti-sedition law from 1917 that has recently become the government’s favorite weapon. The government can count on this much: Once Snowden is charged with crimes that will surely carry a long prison sentence, it will be harder to see him as a hero .. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/06/why-edward-snowden-is-a-hero.html . That has certainly been true for Manning.
I understand that some government secrets must stay secret. And I recognize that the decision of one employee to reveal what many of his superiors have ruled classified is inherently troublesome for people in power. And I also know that whistle-blowers are rarely pure and innocent and lovable. They are often paranoid and obsessive. They fill up your inbox with confusing and demanding messages. They ask you to hack through thickets of confusing material. In other words, they are time-consuming zealots who are often trying to confront you with knowledge you wish wasn’t true.
But here’s my question for Snowden’s denouncers: What about Daniel Ellsberg? It’s only in retrospect that the leaker of the Pentagon Papers has acquired the status of a national icon. At the time he leaked the documents in 1969, Ellsberg was a man with top security clearance who was accused of betraying his government by exposing its greatest secrets. About an actual, troops-on-the-ground war. The Pentagon Papers showed that the Nixon administration knew that casualty figures in Vietnam would be much higher than the numbers the government publicly projected. Also, that the Johnson administration had lied about the war to Congress .. http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/04/13/reviews/papers-lessons.html .
No wonder, then, that Ellsberg too was prosecuted for breaking the law under the Espionage Act. "I expected to go to prison for life .. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/06/13/137156974/daniel-ellsberg-expected-life-in-prison-after-leaking-pentagon-papers ," he told NPR in 2011. The charges against him were dropped only because the Nixon administration egregiously violated his rights by breaking into his psychiatrist’s office to look for information that would embarrass him. “The bizarre events have incurably infected the prosecution of this case," the judge wrote.
If Nixon’s men hadn’t gone so completely off the reservation, how would we think about Ellsberg today? And how does his whistle-blowing stand up to the test posed by Toobin, Stone, and Brooks? Ellsberg and Snowden both acted unilaterally. They both ignored the collective judgment of the country’s duly elected representatives. I suppose you could argue that Ellsberg was exposing illegalities, if the Pentagon Papers showed Johnson administration officials lying to Congress. But if that’s the main test for being a whistle-blower, Snowden’s revelations seem to catch Director of National Intelligence James Clapper in misleading testimony, too .. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/11/clapper-under-fire-for-hill-testimony-suggested-didnt-know-about-fed-massive/ . I realize we can’t have rogue operators undermining the government at every turn. But I keep coming back to this question: How do we make room for the secret-tellers who only history can show were on the right side?
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