Edward Snowden a 'Profile in Courage' Says Church Committee Whistleblower

Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian has revealed the identity of Edward Snowden, the source for a string of pieces on the NSA, and posted a video interview with him. Recent revelations include: "NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily," "NSA Prism program taps in to user data of Apple, Google and others" and "Boundless Informant: the NSA's secret tool to track global surveillance data."

Greenwald has noted in recent interviews that "these lessons should have been learned from the Church Committee."

CHRISTOPHER H. PYLE, cpyle at mtholyoke.edu

Pyle teaches constitutional law and civil liberties at Mount Holyoke College. He is the author of Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics and Getting Away with Torture.

In 1970, he disclosed the U.S. military's surveillance of the civil rights and anti-war movements and worked as a consultant to three Congressional committees, including the Church Committee.

Pyle just wrote the piece "Edward Snowden: Profile in Courage," which states: "Edward Snowden may go down in history as one of this nation's most important whistleblowers. He is certainly one of the bravest. ...

"Like Daniel Ellsberg, who disclosed the Pentagon Papers [and who is supporting Snowden], Snowden is a man of principle. 'The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to,' he told interviewers. 'There is no public oversight. The result is that [NSA employees] have the latitude to go further than they are allowed to.' For example, he said, he could have accessed anyone's e-mail, including the president's.

"This is not the first time that the American people have learned that their intelligence agencies are out of control. I revealed the military's surveillance of the civil rights and anti-war movements in 1970. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post disclosed the Watergate burglary by White House operatives, which led Congress to create two select committees to investigate the entire intelligence community.

"Among other things, the committees discovered that the National Security Agency had a huge watchlist of civil rights and anti-war protesters whose phone calls it was intercepting. The FBI had bugged the hotel rooms of Martin Luther King and tried to blackmail him into committing suicide rather than accept the Nobel Peace Prize. The CIA had tried to hire the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro. President Richard M. Nixon used the Internal Revenue Service to audit the taxes of his political enemies. His aides tried to destroy Daniel Ellsberg for leaking a history of the Vietnam War, both by prosecuting him and by burglarizing his psychiatrist's office for embarrassing information. The FBI opened enormous amounts of first-class mail of law-abiding citizens in direct violation of the criminal law.

"Since then the technology has changed. The old Hoover vacuum cleaner has been redesigned for the digital age. It is now attached to the Internet, where it secretly collects the contents of everyone's 'audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs' from Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. It also siphons billions of telephone communications and Internet messages off the fiber optic cables that enter and pass through the United States. None of us has a reasonable expectation of privacy any more.

"The Fourth Amendment used to require specific judicial authorization before the government could undertake a seizure. No longer, according to the secret FISA court. Secret seizures of 'metadata' now precede individualized searches. Starting this fall, this information will be stored in a huge warehouse at Camp William, Utah, where it can be searched by computers whenever the military decides to re-label one of us a 'person of interest,' like a reporter, a suspected leaker, or a Congressman it doesn't like.

"Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), claims not to be worried, but he should be. Before Watergate, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had 24 file cabinet drawers full of dirt on politicians just like Graham. Hoover let each politician know that the Bureau had found the compromising information while on some other search, but promised not to reveal it. Not surprising, Hoover's abuses of power were not challenged until he died. New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who used to prosecute Wall Street swindlers, was driven from office when data miners at the U.S. Treasury Department leaked news that he had been laundering money to pay call girls. ...

"Now that the story is out, President Barack Obama "welcomes" a 'conversation' about them. Baloney. The function of secrecy is to prevent conversation, not welcome it. The Obama administration is a great supporter of privacy, but only for itself. ...

"The president insists that no one is listening to our phone calls, but Snowden said he could. Of course, we now know that President George W. Bush lied us into the Iraq War, and falsely denied authorized a massive program of warrantless wiretapping, then a felony under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The NSA and FBI both denied their illegal wiretapping and mail opening programs in the 1950s and 1960s. In 2004, the Justice Department assured the Supreme Court that our government did not torture people, just a few hours before the torture photos from Abu Ghraib were broadcast on national television. Why should we believe such people now?

"Secret government was curbed in the 1970s. President Nixon was driven from office. The NSA's watchlist was shut down; the FBI was returned to law enforcement. Wiretapping was brought under the supervision of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Assassinations were forbidden by executive order, and the campaign to punish leakers ended when White House aides were caught trying to suborn Ellsberg's judge. Both Houses of Congress created intelligence committees to oversee our secret agencies.

"Unfortunately, these efforts at oversight have largely failed. Judge Vinson's order to Verizon proves beyond cavil that the secret FISA court is a rubber stamp for the indiscriminate seizure of all sorts of personal records. ...

"Seventy percent of the federal government's intelligence budget now goes to private contractors. Far from overseeing the agencies, members of Congress court them, hoping to obtain business for companies that contribute generously to their campaigns. ...

"Americans can no longer trust the President, Congress, or the courts to protect them, or the reporters, whistleblowers, and politicians on whom our democracy relies. Our government has been massively compromised by campaign contributions and executive secrecy."

The online activist group Rootsaction.org has begun a petition supporting Snowden's actions.