In their own ways, with very different backgrounds and circumstances, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden have confounded the best-laid plans of the warfare/surveillance state. They worked for "the security bureaucracy," but as time went on they found a higher calling than just following orders. They leaked information that we all have a right to know.
This month, not only with words but also with actions, Edward Snowden is transcending the moral limits of authority and insisting that we can fully defend the Bill of Rights, emphatically including the Fourth Amendment.
What a contrast with New York Times columnists David Brooks, Thomas Friedman and Bill Keller, who have responded to Snowden's revelations by siding with the violators of civil liberties at the top of the U.S. government.
Brooks denounced Snowden as "a traitor" during a June 14 appearance on the PBS NewsHour, saying indignantly: " He betrayed his oath, which was given to him and which he took implicitly and explicitly. He betrayed his company, the people who gave him a job, the people who trusted him. . . . He betrayed the democratic process. It's not up to a lone 29-year-old to decide what's private and public. We have -- actually have procedures for that set down in the Constitution and established by tradition."
Enthralled with lockstep compliance, Brooks preached the conformist gospel: "When you work for an institution, any institution, a company, a faculty, you don't get to violate the rules of that institution and decide for your own self what you're going to do in a unilateral way that no one else can reverse. And that's exactly what he did. So he betrayed the trust of the institution. He betrayed what creates a government, which is being a civil servant, being a servant to a larger cause, and not going off on some unilateral thing because it makes you feel grandiose."
In sync with such bombast, Tom Friedman and former Times executive editor Bill Keller have promoted a notably gutless argument for embracing the NSA's newly revealed surveillance programs. Friedman wrote (on June 12) and Keller agreed (June 17) that our government is correct to curtail privacy rights against surveillance -- because if we fully retained those rights and then a big terrorist attack happened, the damage to civil liberties would be worse.
What a contrast between big-name journalists craven enough to toss the Fourth Amendment overboard and whistleblowers courageous enough to risk their lives for civil liberties.
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