Stuck in Prism

When Edward Snowden leaked classified information on the nefarious activities of the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA), I bet the last thing that he thought would happen was that no one would care. Unfortunately for him it appears that the most controversial thing to come out of this whole sordid affair is just that.
But let’s recap for a moment, according to the documents released by Snowden US intelligence has been spying on the US public as well as ‘friendly’ countries such as Germany. In fact it turns out that the NSA and by extension the US government has been spying on just about everybody. Of course this came as a surprise to absolutely no one except apparently the man who leaked the news to the public and the journalist who broke the story.
I’m not quite sure what was going through Edward Snowden’s mind when he decided to trade a six figure salary and a comfortable life in Hawaii for the uncertainty of the life of a fugitive from the US government but I dare say he didn’t figure on what he got. Worse than widespread hatred and revulsion, Snowden has been either ignored or used as the butt of jokes. This is despite the best efforts of the international media who have been giving widespread attention to a story that has spies, the US government and scandal all over it. I don’t blame them for being stumped that people haven’t really gotten involved.
This story is undoubtedly in the public interest but is the public really interested?
The newspaper who broke the story in the USA was The Guardian, I dare say that the newspaper has had an axe to grind since the CIA assassinated one of their journalists in 2007. His name was Simon Ross and he had just met with his source in Waterloo station in central London when he was killed by a CIA sniper’s bullet. Of course this happened not in real life but in the Hollywood blockbuster; The Bourne Supremacy. So perhaps this is merely a case of art imitating life?
That movie was released when stories about the torture and kidnapping of terrorist suspects by the British and American intelligence services in ‘Extraordinary Rendition’ operation were doing the rounds in the media. This ensured that the scene described above provoked a surprising amount of controversy in its own right. And yet no one seems to care when a genuine whistle blower, a real live honest to God intelligence operative comes into the limelight telling the US public that their own government has been listening to their phone conversations, reading their emails and generally invading their privacy.
Is it possible that it’s because Snowden wasn’t telling us anything we didn’t know already? Another movie called Wag the Dog has a scene featuring a bemused Secret Service agent played by William H Macy facing off against the cynical PR guru Robert DeNiro. After informing DeNiro that spy satellites have detected no real movement of nuclear weapons he is hard pressed when the tables are turned against him. “If spy satellites haven’t found anything then what good are they?” The truth is that there is no such thing as a spy satellite that isn’t picking up something and we all know it. When our countries create huge intelligence gathering apparatus we all know that they exist to detect enemies of the state and we all assume that they can look at any of us that they choose to and if they can’t then what’s the point in having them?
For decades we’ve all been watching movies where shadowy government agencies abuse their power against their own populace, using closed circuit television cameras, hacking and phone tapping to follow innocent people wherever they go. But we have also become all too used to extremist terrorism which we expect our governments to do everything in their power to protect us from. In the wake of every high profile terror attack questions are asked of our intelligence services, namely why they failed to protect us. This is made even more beguiling by the fact that it always seems to emerge that the perpetrators of the attacks were already under surveillance by the security services at some point.
So on the one hand security services are coming under fire for not protecting the populace well enough and on the other being attacked by the likes of the Guardian for carrying out too much espionage. The truth is that Hollywood long ago got us used to the fact that the intimate details of our electronic lives are fair game for spies and quite frankly if the NSA want to break into my account they’re welcome to take on the debt that they’ll find there!
It’s hardly surprising that people have little patience for anymore “whistle blowers” in the Wikileaks age. At first it was interesting to everyone as the covers were brutally torn off a world that we so rarely see, but now I am starting to feel that I am seeing way too much of it and I don’t think I’m the only one.
Interestingly the Guardian wasn’t Snowden’s first choice to publish his secret documents, he first went to the newspaper that brought down President Nixon, The Washington Post. According to their reporter Barton Gellman the paper refused to meet Snowden’s conditions and he therefore went to the Guardian to share his information. The Post didn’t exactly snub Snowden so much as attempt to negotiate with him regarding how and when they published his leaked intelligence. At which point he moved on to the Guardian.
In the meantime the man who leaked all of the information is currently languishing in a Moscow airport. Not only has Snowden been overshadowed by the information he has dispensed but he has started to become the butt of numerous jokes with the websites such as The Daily Mash and comedians on late night television use his escapades as A grade material. The truth is that there is more than a little irony in the fact that a man complaining about state sponsored espionage by the USA ran straight to China and on to Russia in the wake of making his revelations.
If the United States is a bad violator of the privacy of its citizens then it seems clear that Snowden couldn’t find a country that’s better to protect him. Where could Snowden have run to and not seemed like a hypocrite?
So presumably Snowden will be free to hang around in Moscow airport right up until the moment that Putin feels that having him is no longer useful and then Snowden will find himself on his way back to US soil to stand trial. At the time of writing another US whistle blower, Bradley Manning who released a huge number of documents to Wikileaks, is just about to find out whether he is considered guilty of the crime of aiding the enemy in a military court martial. No doubt the verdict of that trial will have some influence on what happens to Snowden when he is eventually brought into a courtroom despite the fact that Manning is being tried in a military court martial and Snowden was a civilian employee of a firm contracted by the NSA.
Here in Israel there is no real room for doubt that our own security services are practising exactly the same form of general espionage upon the populace and there’s even less room for doubt that very few of us care. In an age of security threats from an unseen enemy intelligence has assumed a supreme role in preventing attacks against us, something that Israelis are all too well aware of. With raids against targets in Syria to the North increasing and with the instability in Egypt at the moment it is unlikely that anyone will be complaining against the intrusive nature of Israeli intelligence gathering. In fact we are more likely to praise the effective nature through which they collect it.
And so we come back to the reason why Snowden’s revelations made him a lonely man trapped in Moscow, the butt of jokes on late night television rather than a national hero. It’s not that no one cares so much as people are sick and tired of seeing their country’s dirty laundry aired in public, not to mention the attempts at portraying a simple renegade spy as a superstar whistle blower. With the internet making it so incredibly easy for people in sensitive positions to abuse the trust which they have been handed it is unlikely that we have seen that last of people like Snowden but it seems that so far as the general public is concerned they aren’t anything to be particularly interested in and certainly no hero whistle blower to celebrate.
UPDATE:

I'd like to think that the decision by Jpost mag not to go with this article proves my point.

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