Everyone is under surveillance now, says whistleblower Edward Snowden

[JDPriestly]

96. My post had two points.

The first is to point out that, as in the Eichmann and Nuremburg and other subsequent war crimes trials, the excuse that a war criminal was following orders, obeying the law is to no avail if the defendant has committed a war crime. That means that there is a higher moral law than our military or criminal laws. Of course, whether a criminal is punished or even prosecuted depends on the power structure. If the military or power that is prevailing at the moment orders a person to do something wrong such as deprive, in a democracy, the public of information that the public needs in order to wisely fulfill their civil duty to vote, then there is a higher moral and social law that tells the person to follow the higher moral and social law and not the order of the power of the moment.

In our law, we believe in punishing crimes that are committed. But as you know, the prosecutor has the discretion not to prosecute actions that could be found to be criminal by a jury.

I am asking which crime would you prosecute first, the crime of killing an obviously unarmed man on the battlefield, or maybe leaving an innocent child to die in the front seat of a van that your troops attacked or Snowden's letting people know they are under constant surveillance and have no privacy.

I believe that sometimes people choose to follow what they believe to be a higher moral imperative than the institutional law. I also believe that when they do that, as in Manning's case, they usually resign themselves to answering to the wrath of the institutional law that they have knowingly broken. The civil rights protestors were marched off to jail. We often forget Martin Luther King's letter from the Birmingham Jail. We forget the many Viet Nam war protestors who spent time in prison for refusing to serve when drafted. The does not make what they did morally wrong. It makes it wrong in terms of civil or military justice.

Whether Snowden will come back to the US and "face the music" is not yet known. Not all the documents he brought with him have been released. They may not yet have all been vetted.

You speculate that he may have become a Russian operative. I strongly disagree. But neither of us knows for sure. In any event, the longer the US makes it difficult for Snowden to come back to the US, the more Putin can use Snowden's very presence in Russia as a propaganda tool. We both know, and Snowden knows, and Putin knows that Putin's denial that Russia has its population under surveillance is only limited by Russia's infrastructure (probably doesn't have as many cameras located on its streets, not as many as in London or Los Angeles), technological and production capacities.

But what happens to Snowden has to be seen in terms of that higher moral law. Let's say he makes a deal that allows him to come back to the US after all his documents have been published provided he agrees to a reduced prison sentence. Maybe that will happen. Maybe not.

Two facts till remain.

First, the prosecutor's discretion with regard to bringing charges for specific crimes is being used in our country to protect people in high places. Whether it is the members of the Bush administration who authorized cruel torture or the people who commit war crimes even if they violate military law (such as friendly fire or covering up war crimes) or civil law (forging signatures or fraudulently signing on foreclosure documents), increasingly in the US, justice is aimed to punish those who reveal the corruption of the rich and powerful. Our justice is frightfully focused on punishing the poor, the weak, the middle class. The eyes of justice are supposed to be blindfolded, but it appears that our justice system is peaking out from the bottom of the blindfold to punish the weakest. Our prisons are full of them.

So I am exploring several issues. How a person should be treated when they follow a sense of a higher justice and obey a law that may not be the law of the institutions of their country? (Think in terms of the Nuremburg trials and the Eichmann trial. Do we honor the military law, for example, that requires a soldier to decline to follow an illegal order?) What laws should be enforced? In which cases should laws be enforced? And why does it appear to me that not only are the rich and powerful writing or buying the writing of laws that favor them but that when it comes to enforcing the law, prosecutors prefer to bring to trial cases against the powerless and poor, not against the powerful and rich?

What do you think about these issues.

As for Snowden, I am grateful for the fact that he let me know just how extreme the surveillance is in the US. I do not believe that surveillance is really aimed at terrorists or extremist movements. Were that true then surely the NSA would have picked up on the organization of Occupy and this Bundy bunch. The US would not have sent a group of BLM officers to enforce the court orders against Bundy had they known that he was organizing a small insurrection. So their massive collection of data was a big failure in that case. Had they been observing the organization of Occupy, they would have known it was not an insurrection and not violent but rather merely the exercise of free speech and perhaps a rather messy use of public space (although Occupiers tried to be orderly, their numbers created a mess). So what in the world are they collecting all that information for. Politics? That's my guess although who knows?

I am active in political discussion in part in the hope that our civil law will become as closely aligned with moral law as possible. People like Manning and Ellsberg and Snowden should not have to make the choices they had to make.

A lot of people think that Snowden should have used some sort of mythical whistleblower protection mechanism. Had he done that, the public would never have learned the extent to which everything we do via electronic media is under surveillance. I am very grateful, not so much because of anything I do or say in my communications, but for my children and grandchildren, that we all know that now.