Did Edward Snowden's leak make Americans less safe?
According to Glenn Greenwald: Nope
Politicians are turning up the heat on former CIA employee Edward Snowden, who has gone into hiding since outing himself this week as the person who leaked documents on the National Security Agency's broad surveillance programs.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), among others, called Snowden, 29, a traitor. "The disclosure of this information puts Americans at risk," Boehner said. "It shows our adversaries what our capabilities are. And it's a giant violation of the law." Similarly, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper claims the leaks did "huge, grave damage" to U.S. intelligence gathering efforts.
Glenn Greenwald, who unveiled secret documents leaked by Snowden in Britain's Guardian, claims that none of the revelations "even remotely jeopardizes" U.S. security.
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"Somewhere in between those two takes," says Josh Gerstein at Politico, "lies the truth."
The most dangerous terrorists, of course, are already doing everything they can to avoid using telephone lines or internet communication that might be spotted in the kind of dragnets the NSA has been using. Here's Rick Moran at American Thinker:
Snowden's defenders, however, say that any damage the leak did — and they doubt there was much, if any — is far outweighed by the damage he prevented by exposing the extent of the government's vast surveillance apparatus. John Cassidy at The New Yorker argues that any honest accounting of the consequences of Snowden's actions will conclude he did the right thing.
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Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.