Snowden Relook

For John, BLUF:  Edward Snowden, the gift that keeps on giving.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Over at the Lawfare Blog we have a review of an article from Sunday's edition of The Washington Post.  The author of the post is Lawyer Benjamin Wittes.

Going to the last paragraph from the blog post:

Finally, I want to say a word here about the ethics of this leak.  Snowden here did not leak programmatic information about government activity.  He leaked many tens of thousands of personal communications of a type that, in government hands, are rightly subject to strict controls.  They are subject to strict controls precisely so that the woman in lingerie, the kid beaming before a mosque, the men showing off their physiques, and the woman whose love letters have to be collected because her boyfriend is off looking to join the Taliban don’t have to pay an unnecessarily high privacy price.  Yes, the Post has kept personal identifying details from the public, and that is laudable.  But Snowden did not keep personal identifying details from the Post.  He basically outed thousands of people—innocent and not—and left them to the tender mercies of journalists.  This is itself a huge civil liberties violation.  And we should talk about it as such.  I suspect, alas, that we won’t.

A friend of mine wrote:

A very thoughtful analysis of the Washington Post NSA article from this weekend.  Well worth the couple of minutes to read it.  There is analysis you will read here that will not be read anywhere in the mainstream media, particularly the concluding paragraph.  All the Snowden supporters should read that paragraph if they do not read anything else.

While Mr Edward Snowden is a hero to some, and a traitor to others, for the undecided but interested he is slipping in stature.

Regards  —  Cliff