Snowden not a traitor: Payoff justifies risks and broken laws

By Kenny Phipps

Edward Snowden simply cannot be classified as a traitor to the American people.

While disclosing classified government documents is not legal, and in the worst case scenario could aid our nation’s enemies, Snowden’s particular case deserves much more attention than a blatant dismissal of the context or content of his disclosures.

What the National Security Agency was doing before Snowden’s actions has been almost universally agreed on to be horrendous.

Monitoring the emails, texts, and phone calls of millions of Americans who, by and large, had (and have) no objective relation to terrorist or “subversive” activities is objectively wrong.

The difference between the information released by Snowden and that released by, say, actual traitors, is that Snowden revealed to the American public that their own government was spying on them.

In the strictest sense of the word, Snowden is a traitor to the federal government, but he is a champion of the American people.

These revelations sparked public outrage and greatly increased the national debate on the legitimacy of mass surveillance.

Snowden performed a public service, not a crime worthy of life in prison.

In fact, the news source The Guardian actually won the Pulitzer Prize for journalism after publishing his disclosed documents.

One can argue that these clandestine activities that the NSA perpetrated were in the best interest of the people of the United States, that what they were doing keeps us safe and protects us from terrorism.

What Snowden achieved by the release of these documents was a national moratorium of sorts into the effectiveness of mass surveillance.

Similar to the Senate investigation into the use of torture by government agencies to extract information from terrorists, the national examination into the NSA’s practices revealed that they weren’t effective in any significant capacity.

Snowden did not endanger the American people. Snowden cast a light into the shadiest of operations of the government. If Snowden had released nuclear missile codes, or the location of military outposts in Iraq, or even where the President hides his baseball cards, there might be a legitimate case to be made in favor of imprisoning him as a traitor against the American people.

However, what he did has proven to be beneficial to the basic rights of Americans.

This is why the movement to have him pardoned by President Obama is being spearheaded by the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International.

If he did face a trial for treason, Snowden would be tried under the Espionage Act of 1917.

This antiquated law, originally intended to silence anti-war voices during World War I, has been almost exclusively used to crush legitimate objections to the national government’s operations.

Snowden violated this law, but the law itself is unjust.Along with a presidential pardon, the Espionage Act itself should be repealed.

In the most literal sense of the word, Snowden committed treason against the government. And the American people owe him immensely for it.

Snowden’s cowardly response to punishment earns him traitor title

By Michael Lockett

In the strictest legal sense, yes, Edward Snowden is a traitor.   What he did, while not as threatening as it was initially thought to be, compromised the American security apparatus at a time where it’s fighting a multi-headed conflict war against people even mildly described as pretty appalling.

There are outlets and mechanisms in place to protest the actions of an agency. We are, after all, a democracy, and even if it’s necessary for entities like the CIA, the NSA, and the special forces community to move in the shadows, what they do is done for good, for stability, and for the freedom and well being of the world.

Snowden’s actions may have been intended to do well, or to expose what he perceived as injustice, but that is not the way it’s done. We are not some monolithic, soviet state, where protesting actions of the system you’re part of will get you disappeared or sent to the gulag.

But Snowden skipped all of those steps, did not pass go, did not collect $200, and instead released information that allowed terrorist organizations- not citizen’s rights groups, avowed terrorists whose stated goal is the death of westerners- to steal a march, and degraded the effectiveness of our counterterrorist operations.

And to top it off, he’s sought asylum in Russia, who, speaking of enemies of the west, are not on our Christmas card list now.

Whose current head of state is an ex-intelligence officer himself who, I doubt, would have little qualms about exploiting Snowden’s breach of operational security, if not outright extracting wholesale information from him in order to gain more leverage over the United States and her allies.

As nauseatingly punchable as Pvt. Chelsea Manning is, she approached her crime, the disclosure of classified operational files from Iraq and Afghanistan, in a straightforward manner. She believed it was going to help change the world for the better, and, when found guilty (as she was) of violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice under the articles of treason, she took her lumps.

Snowden did no such thing. He did his crime, made his bird, and sought asylum with a competitor (if not outright opponent) of the United States. This is not the act of a patriot, of a man standing up for what’s right. This is something confused and pusillanimous, and I find it execrable.

Snowden is a traitor to what the country stands for, and no matter what good it’s caused, that fact is salient to any discussion of his actions.