Now You Know

                                                                               

I have no idea what the implications of the government's telephone monitoring program are. I don't know if it's good or bad, right or wrong, legal or illegal.ⁱ I know that there are many who believe it to be contrary to the Constitution, and they make very good arguments. As do those who view it as a necessary step to ensure our country's security. I admit to lacking the expertise to make an independent judgment regarding the classified information he revealed, and a smooth talker could probably convince me of almost anything. But no one can persuade me that Edward Snowden is a hero.

No. Edward Snowden is a vigilante. True, he had top-secret clearance and a $122,000 annual salary and true, he believed that what he was doing was for the good of the country, but he is a vigilante – just like Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manningⁱⁱ and so many others before him.

Vigilantes usually believe that what they do is right and good – whether the Ku Klux Klan, the Guardian Angels, or Bernhard Goetz – and their acts may actually improve a situation of lawlessness.ⁱⁱⁱ But what they're doing is wrong.^iv The virtue of their cause, even if real, doesn't change that.

“The government of the United States has been emphatically termed a government of laws, and not of men. It will certainly cease to deserve this high appellation if the laws furnish no remedy for the violation of a vested legal right.”^v

When Chief Justice John Marshall wrote those words in 1803, in the famous Marbury v Madison case, he was citing John Adams who used the phrase “a government of laws and not of men.”^vi The more than two centuries that have passed since then do not change this. No one is above the law, whatever the nature of the law and the righteous rhetoric of the violator.

Snowden and others who leak classified information should be heavily punished (eg a year a document with fines for documents exceeding the violator's anticipated life span or harder prison conditions). And legal means should be formulated to evaluate and to deal with the problems that they consider to require rectification.^vii

There are those who view his as an example of civil disobedience,^viii an action taken despite the knowledge, that it was against the law. They liken him to the “Freedom Riders,” Martin Luther King, and Mohandas Gandhi. They, however, bravely faced the consequences. They were willing to reap the whirlwind for their actions in order to try to get the rest of us to face what they viewed as injustice.

Civil disobedience is honored because violators draw attention to unjust laws but are ready to be punished for their acts. Those who sat down at the Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro knew they'd be punished and might even suffer physically. They didn't run away to Hong Kong. That Snowden revealed his act while on foreign soil and is determined to fight extradition is evidence that he knew he was violating the law, but wants to avoid any penalties.

Edward Snowden did not practice civil disobedience. He broke the law and should be punished.

i       It's too important an issue for me to address without giving it some thought, so I won't do so at this time. I shall, however discuss the program and the whole question of classification of documents, the Constitution, “whistle-blowers,” and “transparency” in a few days. There may be some legal remedies which can be formulated.

ii      And the entire WikiLeaks staff.

iii    A single example – although many exist – are the Bakassi Boys of Nigeria, a group of vigilantes formed in 1998, who were viewed as instrumental in lowering the region's high crime rate when the police were ineffective. Their success, however, doesn't excuse their actions. The end does not justify the means.

iv    The results of vigilantes' actions are too often tragic (“The Oxbow Incident” is a fictional account, but a well written account of what can happen) and vigilantism should be condemned not only for the means of its practitioners, but sometimes for its results as well.

v      Similarly, it will lose any claim to “this high appellation” if we “furnish no remedy for the violation” of any laws. Legislative “fixes” should be sought rather than “jury nullification” based on sympathy for the violator's goals.

vi     1774. Boston Gazette. Adams signed the letter “Novanglus” (New Englander) and this was his seventh letter using this pen-name.

vii    See note number 1 (i).

viii  Although they revere this 1848 concept of Thoreau's, most of them would not endorse another of his views: "That government is best which governs least." It is found in his essay, “On Civil Disobedience,” which appeared the following year.