I have been reading the praises of Edward Snowden

[struggle4progress]

22. Here's my run-down of the issues:

The prospect of a gigantic NSA infrastructure that could be abused to track anybody's social network should worry us

A good administration will tend to obey the law and respect privacy rights; a bad administration will tend to ignore the law and disregard privacy rights -- but when the infrastructure exists, the possibilities for serious abuse by a bad administration are much increased

The security-privacy trade-offs are extraordinarily complicated. We can state platitudes nobody in their right mind wants to trade enormous governmental intrusion for minor security gains, and similarly no one should want exposure to enormous security risks to avoid minimal governmental intrusion. Beyond such platitudes, the trade-offs may require judgments calls that simply reduce to pure opinion

Transparency is a good for democracy, and opaqueness often covers corruption, but the world is also a bit of a poker game, and it can be quite unwise to tip your full hand to all the other players. We either need to modify our laws to protect the sort of whistle-blowing that exposed the Bush administration's torture of prisoners and its illegal wiretapping activity, or we need a whistleblower protection movement with enough political clout to protect such people. On the other hand, activities such as Bradley Manning's release of 750K documents, the vast majority of which he cannot possibly have examined, and which he seems to have released for purely ideological reasons or perhaps because he was personally disturbed, do not really qualify as whistleblowing and do not deserve protection

Mr Snowden's activity has encouraged Americans to discuss some of these issues, though unfortunately his activities also seem to have had all manner of other effects, such as possibly alerting the Chinese to US infiltration of some Chinese nuclear weapons policy sites, which seems a clear violation of the law. My current guess is that Snowden is a technically-competent fellow but very green regarding international relations and counter-intelligence work. I incline to the view that he is well-intentioned, and I do not know what damage he has actually done. On the other hand -- unless one wants to say that nothing should be secret and that every short-term government contractor with a security clearance has the right to take what he learns on the job and use it to promote his own personal foreign policy -- we cannot really tolerate little escapades like Snowden's