Morning Fog noted yesterday that the U.S. government is being rather unrealistic in expecting the news media to avoid stories that show that leaker-of-NSA-secrets Edward Snowden in a sympathetic light.
Unrealistic, and probably a bit hypocritical too. If Snowden's opposite number, a mid-level IT guy from Moscow or Beijing, had packed up a batch of Russian or Chinese intelligence reports and was making his way toward the U.S. by way of Canada, we would be doing just what Moscow and Hong Kong have done: ignoring, trying not to appear too gleeful, and hoping to score some secrets.
That's the game of intelligence.
In Washington, center of the federal bureaucracy, there is some confusion about what term best describes Snowden. Columns dedicated to the federal workforce are tending to call him a "whistleblower," and claiming whistleblower protections for him, even as they also admit he's a lawbreaker.
But for me, Snowden doesn't fit the definition of "whistleblower." That moniker implies a positive motivation to expose government (or sometimes corporate) misdeeds and illegal actions, but normally to call attention to the activity, not usually to benefit personally. Snowden, on the other hand, is playing the media for fame, and who's to say that he won't reap a bit of fortune along the way for accidentally leaving behind at each of his stops one of those many laptops he's reportedly carrying. Isn't it a bit odd that he found the need to spend several days in Hong Kong before moving on, and is now repeating the act at Moscow's airport?
So if the choice is between "whistleblower" or "traitor" to describe this case, I unhesitatingly choose the latter. The icing on the cake is that he fled, and the cherry on top of that is that his itinerary coincidentally took him to China and Russia, two places in the world that might value his wares most highly. He had other options, if he was truly focused on protecting the privacy of average Americans -- to resign from his job, and go to the press right here in this country to blow his whistle, without needing to steal a lot of "merchandise" that would have a high value to various enemies.
The whole Snowden affair is not very different from the famous 1970s episode of the "Pentagon Papers." Pentagon analyst Daniel Ellsberg, the "leaker" in that case, stayed in the country while still making documents public through the New York Times. To me, it's a big difference. Future whistleblowers, if they wish their motivation to be considered just a desire to reveal truth, should keep this mind: you can hide, but you shouldn't run.