Edward Snowden and the Dreyfus Affair

[frazzled]

3. I'm not asking for one-to-one

But the proverbial "apples and oranges" would be closer than this comparison. There is really nothing at all that connects these two historical cases. If the question in the Dreyfus case had been whether Dreyfus had been justified in stealing the state secrets, maybe there would be some sort of analogy to be drawn. But that was not the case at all. The controversy was entirely about a "wrong man" situation, and the anti-Semitism that led to it. It was not about the actual secrets that were revealed to the Germans.

As another thread today discusses, it's possible to be opposed both to the kind of large-scale mass theft of documents that Snowden undertook (which is not in question; only his motivation) and, at the same time, to be against the large-scale unfettered collection of data the NSA employs.