EPILOGUE
The world has changed in many ways since Daniel Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971. The Cold War is over, and fear of communist expansion has been replaced by the menace of international terrorism. Relations between the United States and Vietnam are now friendly. The documents that took Ellsberg weeks to photocopy would fill a fraction of the space on a ten-dollar flash drive.
But big questions raised by Ellsberg’s story are alive and well. Governments must keep some information secret in order to function—but how much secrecy is too much? When, if ever, are citizens justified in leaking information the government has deemed secret? Suppose a citizen leaks information that exposes government wrongdoing, but breaks the law in doing so. Should that person be dragged into court or hailed as a hero?
In January 2013, an American documentary filmmaker named Laura Poitras was at her desk in Berlin, Germany, when she got a mysterious email.
“I am a senior member of the intelligence community,” the anonymous note stated. “This won’t be a waste of your time.”
Poitras proceeded with caution. Using sophisticated encryption software, she began corresponding with the secret source. “I don’t know if you are legit, crazy or trying to entrap me,” she wrote.
“I’m not going to ask you anything,” responded the source. “I’m just going to tell you things.”
That May, many encrypted email exchanges later, Poitras flew to Hong Kong with journalist Glenn Greenwald. As instructed by her source, she and Greenwald waited outside a specific restaurant in a mall, watching for a man holding a Rubik’s Cube.
The man walked up. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. He looked, to Poitras and Greenwald, like a kid. The young source led the way to a nearby hotel, and up to his room. He told his guests to remove their cell phone batteries, to ensure the phones’ signals could not be tracked. He pushed pillows against the door to prevent sound from leaking into the hall. Then he sat down and began to tell his story.
His name was Edward Snowden. A former employee of the CIA, the twenty-nine-year-old technology specialist worked as a contractor for the highly secretive National Security Agency (NSA). He had come to Hong Kong with a stack of flash drives containing classified NSA documents—documents that detailed a vast system of surveillance the American public had no idea existed. The U.S. government, Snowden explained, was secretly monitoring the phone and Internet activities of millions of Americans. The original objective had been to detect terrorist plots, but now the NSA was raking in and storing data on citizens not suspected of any crime. Snowden himself had been a part of this system of domestic spying. Now he wanted it exposed.
Edward Snowden
Poitras filmed interviews and Greenwald typed articles for the Guardian, a British newspaper. Within days, the story was headline news around the globe.
“I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded,” Snowden told the world from his hotel room. “That is not something I am willing to support or live under.”
“What do you think is going to happen to you?” Greenwald asked.
“Nothing good.”
As Snowden anticipated, American law enforcement agencies were eager to arrest the leaker and haul him home to face charges of violating the Espionage Act. The press started calling him “the most wanted man in the world.” Snowden jumped on a plane to Moscow and was granted asylum by the Russian government, putting him out of reach of U.S. authorities.
In the United States, debate raged. Was Snowden a hero for blowing the whistle on a perilous threat to the basic liberties guaranteed to all Americans? Was he a villain for stealing secrets and undermining the government’s ability to protect the public?
President Barak Obama’s position was clear: he considered Snowden a dangerous criminal. “If any individual who objects to government policy can take it in their own hands to publicly disclose classified information,” Obama charged, “then we will not be able to keep our people safe, or conduct foreign policy.” Secretary of State John Kerry, who more than forty years before had been the first Vietnam War veteran to testify before Congress against the war, put it more bluntly. “Edward Snowden is a coward, he is a traitor, and he has betrayed his country.”
To many Americans, this was starting to sound very familiar.
“What Edward Snowden did wasn’t the first time an American has leaked secret government data,” CNN news anchor Don Lemon told his audience on June 9, 2013. Forty-two years earlier, Lemon explained, another government insider had set off a firestorm by leaking secret documents to the press. “Daniel Ellsberg joins me now live from Berkeley, California.”
Ellsberg appeared on the screen. His hair was white, his face lined, his blue eyes sharp and focused. At the end of his trial four decades earlier, he had told reporters he intended to live a fairly quiet life from that point on—quiet, at least, in comparison to the tumultuous Pentagon Papers years. He had done that. He and Patricia had settled in Berkeley and worked together in the peace and anti-nuclear weapons movements. By Ellsberg’s own calculations, he was arrested at protests at least twenty-five times. At eighty-two, he was as engaged in politics and as opinionated as ever.
Lemon began by asking Ellsberg’s opinion of Snowden.
“I think he’s done an enormous service,” Ellsberg said, “incalculable service—it can’t be overestimated—to this democracy.”
“You say you like what he has done. But he has broken the law.”
“I would have done just what he has done,” Ellsberg shot back. “I would have broken that law.”