Snowden to face charges

The computer specialist who leaked classified information about the National Security Agency’s mining of online and phone data went into hiding this week after giving interviews in Hong Kong. Edward Snowden, 29, a former analyst for defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, said he had acted because he opposed the government’s broad power to monitor U.S. citizens. “I don’t want to live in a society that does these sorts of things,” he said. As lawmakers of both parties called for his prosecution, ABC News reported that federal prosecutors plan to charge him under the Espionage Act.

A high school dropout, Snowden studied computing at community college and worked at Dell and at the CIA until early this year, when he joined Booz Allen Hamilton and was assigned to an NSA facility in Hawaii. Snowden fled to Hong Kong in the hope that the semi-autonomous Chinese territory would shield him from extradition. But Hong Kong has a bilateral extradition treaty with the U.S., and authorities there were expected to cooperate with any U.S. request to hand Snowden over.

Snowden is a classic “libertarian geek,” said Andrew Leonard in Salon.com, a Ron Paul donor who believes information wants to be free. He was compelled to speak out when he saw the Internet’s power misused as a “tool for totalitarian surveillance.” We should thank this “man of conscience” for blowing the whistle, said John Cassidy in NewYorker.com. “He is a hero.”

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He is a traitor, said Ralph Peters in the New York Post. What right does a “spoiled-brat, dropout Benedict Arnold” have to decide that vital intelligence programs authorized by law and overseen by Congress should be made public? Such decisions fall to elected officials, not some disgruntled computer jockey. “Snowden, not the NSA, subverted democracy.”

It’s easy to dislike Snowden, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. In interviews he seems “grandiose to the point of self-parody,” boasting of his ability to wiretap the president’s telephone and warning that the CIA might order Asian gangs to kill him. Yet his leaks have opened our eyes to the excessive power we’ve granted our intelligence agencies. “He is an imperfect messenger, to say the least. But his message should not be ignored.”