(Or He's Got a Ticket to Ride)
I’ve followed the Edward Snowden case without having much personally to say. It’s hardly revelatory to learn that the NSA is combing through the world’s communications. All you have to do is look at the $10-odd billion in shadow budgets and the hundreds of thousands of people who scrupulously maintain high security clearances to stay on that particular gravy train. If they’re not spying on us they’re wasting our money. Whatever the case, right or wrong, this cat-bites-mouse story is about as enlightening as an episode of Tom and Jerry.
What is interesting to me is the elemental weakness it reveals. In 2011 we spent over $1 billion on criminal and civil background checks, drug tests, polygraphs, interviews with thousands of people’s neighbors, colleagues, exes, and old roommates, along with mountains of paperwork. But no screening can uncover a quietly held opinion, a change of heart, or a random act of rebellion or revenge. In the end, no system can prevent Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning, Daniel Ellsberg, or Mark Felt from deciding to submit the damning things they know to the judgment of the public.
None of this is to say that I particularly like knowing that there’s a massively powerful organization with unknown authorities and abilities checking through everyone’s Facebook accounts for references to fertilizer and diesel fuel (think of the farmers). Something about Snowden really rubs me the wrong way too. We can argue on the merits or we can argue about the optics, but we're not covering any new territory. The potential for a crazy bastard or bastards to cause arbitrary harm on innocent bystanders probably merits some system of finding and arresting them. Even if Snowden is an arrogant self-interested jerk, he may have done some good. Even if there are serious breaches of the public’s trust, some of what the NSA does is probably a good thing. Some of what the KGB did was probably good in some sense too. The world's complicated and all sorts of people do all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons.
But power is limited by other factors aside from the odd disillusioned contractor. Snowden showed up in Hong Kong with information showing that Chinese systems had been compromised by American intelligence. Conveniently, the extradition paperwork was held up on technicalities, and Snowden flew off to Moscow before the Americans could get near him. When he arrived in Moscow he remained in the pre-customs holding area, complete with its own hotels and restaurants. Russia, still sore from both the cold war and our ongoing wars on their allies, told US officials that there was nothing they could do since he was never checked by their customs officials. Now Snowden is off to a small Latin American country with a left-wing government, a chip on its shoulder for past American transgressions involving intelligence personnel, and favorable extradition treaties for political dissidents. When you do things people don't like, they don't forget.
In the end, American power is constrained by forces far above or below what can be bought from a defense contractor or launched from an aircraft carrier. American power can’t buy omnipotence. Even with our colossal military, legal, and diplomatic force in play, what real choices remain for American authorities to place Snowden in their custody? What stops some anonymous intelligence analyst with information and an agenda from sharing what he knows?
To be certain, it would be a logistical flick of the wrist for Obama to order a special forces team and a couple of drones to track down, capture, and forcibly relocate Snowden from his Wikileaks-funded beachfront villa to a Supermax facility in Kansas. But political considerations like the sovereignty of our allies, or the ugly precedent set by such tactical escalation take that option away. To paraphrase someone with wisdom on the subject, the more we squeeze, the more things slip through our fingers.
No number of lawyers, diplomats, soldiers, spies, or assassins can bring Snowden to justice. No amount of computer programming, viruses, or hard drive erasures can take back the information that is out there for the public to see. If we have any level of moral standards or even practical considerations beyond the immediate, we can’t do anything. And the heroic dissident is sitting on the beach. Consider that precedent.
