Daniel Ellsberg had both the appropriate degrees and relevant job experiences to properly educate him about the ethical dimensions of patriotic whistle blowing. History and the legal system have seemingly respected the dramatic moves of Daniel Ellsberg in providing the Pentagon Papers to key individuals (e.g. members of Congress) and later many American newspapers, starting with The New York Times and the The Washington Post. These documents brought overdue transparency to the American voting public regarding the lies and cover-ups of several administrations. The Vietnam War was a bloody quagmire that killed tens of thousands of drafted young men and the published Pentagon Papers exposed the hidden high-level discussions that concluded the Vietnam War was a disastrous military action we must terminate due to the futility of expecting a victory for South Vietnam in their civil war with North Vietnam which succeeded soon after we departed.
I argue that the revelations of the Pentagon Papers added substantial heft to the anti-war protest movement that eventually got the Congress, President and Pentagon to end the war. To many, Daniel Ellsberg was a serious and courageous patriot who had a specific mission of limited scope that resulted in a specific positive outcome: educating America about the fruitlessness of not ending the Vietnam War.
Now consider the current leaks of Edward Snowden. Do we really think the clandestine seizure of four laptops of top secret digital NSA documents and then release of unknown quantities to a British newspaper for several days of publication, combined with preemptively fleeing the country to avoid an anticipated arrest for stealing and planning to share extensively a large cache of top-level sensitive NSA secrets is a commendable patriotic act that we should now applaud?
As the Edward Snowden saga unfolds, my assessment of his civil disobedience,leaking extensive details about NSA sources, methods, and activities, not only domestically but also internationally,is becoming more and more negative.
The details of his academic background and short list of successfully completed endeavors cast real doubt about his appropriateness for top-level security clearances and for being employed in highly-sensitive intelligence IT system security functions. Early reports seem to indicate he misrepresented his education to fool his last employer Booz Allen Hamilton into hiring him when he was not fully qualified. Most busy employees who are successfully meeting the requirements of a $100,000 and more job don't have time to do independent snooping and collection of data regarding the scope of their employer's operations such as Mr Snowden appears to have done. Perhaps Mr Snowden was expecting to be fired for falsifying key disclosures on his application and was following his personal political agenda to gather evidence regarding a surveillance operation he deemed dangerous and oppressive and fully expected to be fired soon, if he didn't quit first.
As the public image of Mr Snowden becomes a multi-sourced text, he appears to be an audacious young man thrashing around in the quest for finding a skilled profession that provides a high salary and a sense of special purpose. By thirty, many middle-class Americans hope to have strong job skills and are starting to buy property and to find a mate, and unfortunately Mr Snowden seems to be stuck at zero for three.
At the moment Mr Snowden looks like a confused idealist, overly concerned about modern surveillance techniques necessitated by the monster role of a nexus of Internet connections that put individuals corporations nations and resources in intimate relationships for better or worse and he was unprepared to keep the secrets his job required.
My fondest hope is that some generous civil liberty attorneys will make contact with Ed Snowden in order to orchestrate a safe trip back home to Virginia where he gets a reasonable negotiated short sentence (perhaps ten years or so in a light white-collar prison) in exchange for full disclosure and complete return of the intelligence taken.
In addition, we must put new strategies into NSA and CIA hiring and security clearances and build new guidelines for mixing independent consultants with supervised government personnel in critical federal government agencies.
Additionally, we need to get clarification as a group of unsophisticated American voters, who trust that Congressional oversight committees actually dig into their jobs effectively, that previous changes to the Patriot Act and improved surveillance practices are not wasting time and money spying on random citizens for unauthorized purposes.