After nearly a year of “public debate” about how the United States government and its allies gather information from across the globe, what has changed? We know that certain intelligence operations have been compromised to the point that they are now less effective in tracking terrorists. We also know that millions of people are more confused about why these programs exist and what they are designed to accomplish than ever before. But is the public safer in any way?
The real question we must ask ourselves is how Edward Snowden has helped the public interest with his lies, his treason, and his cowardly flight to Russia. We must also ask how an anarchist like Glenn Greenwald can or should be rewarded for irresponsibly exposing government activity that continues despite his disclosures.
Finally, we must ask how the public interest is served by uncovering methods of surveillance that have been used to identify and track enemy operations in the longest-running war that the United States has ever fought. Critics of these programs insist that no lives have been put at risk but they have no evidence to back up such specious claims. After all, of the more than 1,000,000 American citizens who currently work with or support the intelligence operations that have been compromised by Snowden’s treason, fewer than 100 have stood up to support him. That is a telling stroke against the arguments put forth in favor of continued coverage over these issues.
The fact that Edward Snowden has been caught in lie after lie has been ignored by the Pulitzer committee, which is rewarding the journalists who published those lies with recognition that impoverishes and debases the meaningful accomplishments of past journalists who have truly served the public interest.
If Edward Snowden and his allies had truly exposed government wrong-doing — such as NSA or FBI programs designed to take innocent American citizens off the street, curtail citizens’ voracious appetites for mouthing off against their own government (especially around tax time), or impose crushing political restrictions upon the citizenry to sustain leaders who don’t wish to relinquish power — then we could all agree that these stories were justified.
However, what has been shown so far is that Glenn Greenwald treats anyone who defends national security with disdain and derision — all while he lives in self-imposed exile in Brazil. What has been uncovered so far is that millions Americans under the age of 30 are so naive that they will believe any lie without doing actual research to understand the issues being discussed.
Take, for example, the oft-voiced concerns about the US government’s electronic surveillance programs. If these programs infringe upon freedom of speech, why did past generations not voice outrage against them? The fact is that American military and civilian intelligence groups have been monitoring electronic communications since the Civil War (which happened in the 1860s). If in 150 years no generation has risen up in outrage against government surveillance, and conspiracy theorists have not been shy about telling people about the surveillance for decades, then why should we care now? We grew up in a surveillance state and the surveillance becomes more intense every month as more government agencies install more cameras on city streets and buildings.
When your children are kidnapped, or someone drives a vehicle through a crowd, will you harangue the government for being able to quickly identify all the victims and persons of interest? What would be the public reaction if our government agencies could not dip into these huge databases filled with names, pictures, and addresses and find out who is connected to important events?
The sham journalism coming from the Washington Post and the Guardian should never have won any recognition. It should have been greeted with derision and scorn. They roused the rabble over imaginary constitutional issues and they incited fear and anxiety in the general population but when President Obama’s closely scrutinized committee of intelligence experts made their recommendations for securing public safety, the most significant change they proposed was that massive volumes of private data be taken out of government hands — where it has not been successfully breached — and placed under the control of commercial interests, whose track records for securing consumers’ private information leaves much to be desired.
And if this is all that we can point to as a result of the disastrous gouging of government security programs that have not been shown to be illegal (they are still operating per court-ordered constraints and revisions), then why should the Pulitzer committee reward these scandalous yellow journalists with anything other than a cold shoulder? The Pulitzer Website claims it has been “honoring excellence in journalism in 1917” but what is excellent about frightening the public with stories about government bogeymen who have not harmed the citizenry?
This shameful year will go down in history as the year that the Pulitzer committee rendered itself irrelevant to the public interest.