Edward Snowden, rhetorician?

Edward Snowden turned the NSA's tools against it -- or, depending on your point of view, ultimately in service to it. He also knows how to turn a phrase inside out to assert a moral contrast -- or else, his ACLU lawyer (Ben Wizner?) does, or the two in concert do.  This little barb in today's NYT front-pager* about how Snowden caught his documents caught my eye:

Snowden, patriot; Obama, in denial

This is just to say, for the record, that I think Obama was shamefully disingenuous or self-deluded in declaring in his press conference yesterday that Edward Snowden is not a patriot and suggesting that he himself would have triggered the kind of inquiry into current surveillance practices that Snowden has unleashed if not pushed by Snowden's disclosures.

This, in particular, is a logical elision:

So the fact is, is that Mr. Snowden has been charged with three felonies. If, in fact, he believes that what he did was right, then, like every American citizen, he can come here, appear before the court with a lawyer and make his case

The moral carpet bombing of Edward Snowden has begun

David Brooks vents his prejudices and treats us to pop sociology in search of moral clarity this morning. Nice how some things don't change.

Brooks first reduces Edward Snowden to a social stereotype on flimsy evidence, then condemns him in high moral dudgeon, then undercuts the basis of his condemnation without noticing. For bonus points, he throws in a near-nonsense assertion about the founding fathers' original intent that, insofar as it has any meaning at all, is more false than true.

Brooks' lede intones, "From what we know so far, Edward Snowden appears to be the ultimate unmediated man." That's Brookspeak for 'not a good boy.'  He does not accept the authority and inherent benevolence of Institutions -- in Brooksworld, the repository of all moral value.

Condemning the world's anti-Boy Scouts does not exhaust Brooks' font of indignation. No, the charge must be generational and societal. We are All at Fault, for we are raising a generation of idiots (in the Greek sense of individuals isolated from society):

Intelligence's Heisenberg Principle

Two Times articles about the Edward Snowden leaks suggest variants of a kind of Heisenberg Principle of intelligence gathering. First: the better you share information, the more the information will be "shared" in unintended ways, perhaps affecting your ability to gather it:

Some outside experts said the push in recent years to break down barriers between spy agencies and share information across the government had greatly expanded the universe of government employees and outside contractors with access to highly classified intelligence. 

“In past years, someone like Snowden may not have had access to briefings detailing these collection programs,” said Cedric Leighton, a former deputy director of the National Security Agency, “but now with the push from a ‘need to know’ to a ‘need to share’ philosophy, it’s far more likely for an I.T. contractor like him to gain access to such documents.”

Snowden worked for the mega-intelligence services firm Booz Allen, which earns over a billion dollars a year in mostly intelligence-related work for the federal government.  Which suggests the second variant:

What Snowden sees, what Obama sees

Edward Snowden,the whistleblower on the NSA's surveillance programs, is brave, serious-minded, and capable, and was very selective in what he exposed, determined not to endanger individuals. I am glad he revealed what he did, to paraphrase James Fallows, though I'm not yet sure what I think the government ought to refrain from doing in its efforts to thwart terrorist plots. I just want to take a second to try to hold two ideas in the mind at once.

The first is this, from Snowden, in an exchange with Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman (Gellman's debriefing is a  remarkable read, as is a Q&A between Snowden and his contacts at the Guardian). Asked, "Did he impute evil motives to his former colleagues, or the White House?", Snowden responded:

“Analysts (and government in general) aren’t bad guys, and they don’t want to think of themselves as such,” he replied. But he said they labored under a false premise that “if a surveillance program produces information of value, it legitimizes it."