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9 December 2013 No Contest: Edward Snowden Is Person of the Year
December 9, 2013 No Contest: Edward Snowden is Person of the Year Posted by John Cassidy In an effort to gin up a bit of publicity for its annual choice for “Person of the Year,” Time has released its list of ten finalists. They include Pope Francis, President Obama, Jeff Bezos, Miley Cyrus, Ted Cruz, and two Middle Eastern leaders: Bashar al-Assad, the embattled President of Syria, and Hassan Rouhani, the new President of Iran. Of these, Pope Francis is by far the strongest candidate, but even the radical new Pontiff can’t compete with another troublemaker on the list: Edward Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor who is currently residing somewhere in Russia as the guest of Vladimir Putin, Time’s 2007 honoree. According to Time, its award, which will be bestowed on Wednesday, goes to the person who, in the opinion of the magazine’s editors, had the most influence on the news. By this metric, it’s no contest. In downloading thousands of files from the computers of the electronic spying agency and handing them over to journalists like Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Barton Gellman, Snowden unleashed a torrent of news stories that began in May, when the Guardian and the Washington Post published a series of articles about the N.S.A.’s surveillance activities. Seven months later, the gusher is still open. Just last week, we learned that the agency is tracking the whereabouts of hundreds of millions of cell phones, gathering nearly five billion records a day. It’s not just here in the United States. Snowden’s revelations are still causing ruptures and generating headlines all around the world, including in Brazil, which has just said that it wants to question Snowden about revelations that the U.S. agency intercepted the communications of President Dilma Rousseff and her aides; in Germany, where the N.S.A. reportedly tapped Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone; and in Australia, where the government was embarrassed by the revelation that it had been spying on the President of neighboring Indonesia. And there are almost certainly more stories to come. Last week, Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, said that his paper has so far published only one per cent of the files that it received from Snowden. (The Guardian has already anointed Snowden its “Person of the Year.”) But Snowden’s claim isn’t merely based on the quantity of news he has generated; his contribution is much larger than that. In opening the eyes of people around the world to how easy it is for governments to monitor digital communications, and to how complicit major technology companies have been in these surveillance programs, he sparked a long-overdue debate about how to preserve privacy in the information age—and whether such a thing is even possible. If Snowden hadn’t come forward, the steady encroachment of the surveillance state would have continued, and most people would have been none the wiser. Now Big Brother and his enablers have been rattled, and have been forced to be a bit more open. On Monday, for example, the chief executives of seven big Internet companies—AOL, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo—published an open letter in which they said that, while they “understand that governments need to take action to protect their citizens’ safety and security, we strongly believe that current laws and practices need to be reformed.” Among the companies’ demands: governments should limit their spying to specific targets rather than sweeping up bulk data; the courts that oversee the snooping programs should be more independent; and companies should be allowed to publish the number and the nature of the information requests they receive from the government. This all sounds reasonable, although whether it goes far enough is a fair question. But the point is that, without Snowden’s intervention, the likes of Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg wouldn’t have signed the letter, because it wouldn’t have existed. Perhaps, as some of them claim, they were indeed chafing under the terms of the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act, which prevented them from saying very much about the demands they received from the N.S.A. But it was only after Snowden blew open the whole thing, and presented a threat to the future of their businesses, especially outside the United States, that they did anything about it. (Even now, some of the companies’ demands are self serving. For instance, they are resisting calls from overseas for them to store user-generated data on local servers, which might be more difficult for the N.S.A. to access.) It’s pretty much the same story with the Obama Administration, which until Snowden came along had been issuing blatantly false statements about what the N.S.A. was and wasn’t doing. Who can forget James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, saying it wasn’t true that the agency collected any data at all on hundreds of millions of Americans, or General Keith Alexander, the head of the N.S.A., denying fourteen times that the agency intercepted any American’s e-mails, texts, and other electronic communications? Even after Snowden revealed these statements to be bogus, the President continued to obfuscate. In August, he claimed that even before Snowden came forward he had launched a review of the government’s spying programs, and he suggested that the leaker, rather than going to the press, could have utilized the federal protections for whistleblowers. As CNN’s Z. Byron Wolf showed, neither of these claims were accurate. (In an extensively reported story in this week’s issue of the magazine, Ryan Lizza asks why the Administration is so reluctant to rein in the electronic spooks.) It’s safe to assume that few people in the White House or the defense agencies would be happy to see Time pick Snowden as Person of the Year. But that’s just another reason why he deserves the honor. Often with the best of intentions — protecting us from terrorists and potential terrorists — governments of both parties have overseen an unprecedented expansion of the surveillance state that bent America’s laws and violated some of its most cherished values. (Lizza’s piece recounts some of the relevant history.) Even now, after all of this year’s revelations, there is no assurance that anything very meaningful will be done to roll back the incursions and to protect the zone of privacy in which all (or most) of us would like to interact, and live. Snowden, now languishing somewhere in Russia, seems to have anticipated this. In an interview with Glenn Greenwald back in May, he said: The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. People will see in the media all of these disclosures. They’ll know the lengths that the government is going to grant themselves powers unilaterally to create greater control over American society and global society. But they won’t be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests. Naming Snowden as Person of the Year won’t, by itself, change what happens in Washington and other capitals. But the honor, coming from the editors of the world’s most famous newsweekly, would, at least, send a message that journalists recognize the contribution he has made, and the importance of the issues he has raised.
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