This is a very thoughtful article in the New York Review of Books from Tamsin Shaw, which takes us through the Snowden saga from its beginnings to the present. It concerns Snowden, Greenwald, Assange, and others in the orbit. It shows these people needed a course of left and right politics of the 1930s. They fell into the trap of American Stalinists and America Firsters who were so angry with their own nation, the USA, that they decided to come under the wing of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. My theory, which I never had a chance to develop in a book--owing to my not being a professor, and life and medical illnesses getting in the way--is, in the 1930s, there were a significant number of people in elite positions throughout American society who had lost faith in open government values (meaning "republican" and "democratic" with a small "r" and a small "d"), and felt it was so necessary to expose American hypocrisy they ended up deciding they must embrace, however tentatively, and only on a short-term basis, foreign dictators elsewhere as a bulwark against American power and corruption, both in domestic policies and foreign policies. This is what happened to Snowden, Assange and Greenwald, though, in fairness, this trio had to face a powerful American government that wanted to do at least as much as they did to Bradley now Chelsea Manning, and likely worse to Snowden and Assange. Still, the trio did not think through the way in which Russian or Chinese dictators may find them useful for their own imperial and dictatorial goals, and how to gain control over the trio. Laura Poitras, an acolyte of Greenwald and Assange, protested when quoted in Shaw's article that she does not think she was engaged in a "conspiracy" because each of the participants never really knew everything any other person in the group knew. Perhaps Ms. Portias should study the law of conspiracy while she is studying the history of America in the 1930s.
My general, though perhaps not specific, sympathies remain, however, with Snowden, Assange, Greenwald, and Portias as individuals caught up in a world more powerful than each of them. Whether they are dupes or useful idiots is less important than recognizing how American national security policies drove these people out of their main goals for western societies, which, in that isolation, may be seen as fairly admirable and even reasonable. Snowden, Assange, Greenwald, and Portias are not "communists," "fascists" or any other label than what they give themselves. The problem they face is, by their actions, they ended up in a twilight zone which eventually pulled them onto a "side" they really did not want, either. Assange, for example, will never admit the obvious, which is his hostility against Obama and Clinton over their hypocrisies and, most specifically, their wanting Assange captured and even dead, led Assange to being used by Putin. Had Assange really been wanting to promote transparency and expose hypocrisies in the US government and its political duopoly, Assange could have gotten hold of RNC emails, and not just DNC emails. He could have said to Guccifer 2.0, I am not publishing the DNC hacked emails without the RNC hacked emails. The RNC emails would have been fun to read, wouldn't they? Greenwald, in his anti-anti-Trump position, ends up going on FoxNews promoting the theory FoxNews wants promoted, which is that Trump is not a compromised president. Snowden, meanwhile, is clearly in a loose fitting strait-jacket, and is conscious of it, even as he carefully chooses his words so as not to offend Putin, who Snowden knows could turn Snowden over to American authorities any time he chooses.
The answer, which Shaw assumes more than says, is we citizens of the US have to challenge what the late Gore Vidal often referred to as the National Security State here at home, which, if we are moderately successful in reforming, may allow Snowden and Greenwald to return home. Assange is sure a jerk and perhaps worse to women, but Assange too needs to be able to go home, if not to Australia, then perhaps here. It remains lost on too many flag wavers (including those who only began noticing the National Security State when it turned its sights on Donald Trump for what, to me, appear to be a reasonable concern about Trump's relationship with Russians, including Putin) that the true strength of US and Western nations' has always been our relative openness, notwithstanding domestic racism and other oppressions that continue to exist in our and other Western societies (flag wavers get nervous at this caveat, I know...:)).
Shaw herself is also a bit credulous in her talk of American foreign and domestic policies as a series of "blunders," which shows she needs to read more Chomsky, who explains how, when one gets into the bowels of memoranda from American government advisers and officials, the idea of a "blunder" loses force, and the actions are recognized as more intentional, and based upon a worldview which may reasonably be seen as imperialistic, oppressive, and often racist. The conspiracy theory of American foreign policy and implications for domestic policy, for example, is overripe in Captain America: Winter Soldier, particularly in this scene, but the writers of that film are closer to a truth about American imperial policy than those saying our policies have been a series of mere "blunders." When Shaw is finished with some Chomsky reading, she may find illuminating the work of Christopher Simpson in Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and its Effects on the Cold War and The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, and of David Talbot's more recent The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government, for example. Talbot, however, has very recently and sadly fallen into the same intellectual trap as Glenn Greenwald, i.e., becoming an anti-anti-Trumpist. Oh well. Even those who know History sometimes fall into the trap of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend...." Again, with Snowden and Assange, by the nature of their acts to provide information to the American and Western oriented peoples, they had to run from American police and military authorities, and ended up imprisoned or at least compromised by those who do not mean to promote openness and transparency in the least.
This is why we as citizens should push for more openness in our society, and an acceptance of what David Brin speaks of when he promotes the idea, first proposed by a Canadian technology researcher, of"sousveillance," which essentially means watching the watchers. As I have long said, secrecy is overrated (see Daniel Patrick Moynihan's book, Secrecy) and most often misused and abused (see the late ACLU lawyer, Frank Donner's Age of Surveillance, for starters). Where a Cold Warrior, such as Moynihan, and a left civil libertarian, such as Donner, agreed is we need honest security analyses and a strengthening of openness as a legally protected and promoted value. Moynihan also eventually began to realize, as his own life flame burned low, that maybe our nation needs to stop bombing people, meddling in other nations' affairs--often and mostly to the detriment of people in those other nations--and maybe stop training dictators to kill people around the globe. Yes, Senator Moynihan, that would definitely help, as the excuse for secrecy at home is lessened when we stop acting as one of the world's corrupt and murderous policeman.
