an autodidact meets a dilettante…

Like many people, my imagination has been exercised by the Edward Snowden case, though I haven’t followed ii particularly closely. When I do think of it, it’s in terms of what the USA’s National Security Agency has been up to. As a humanist, I’m obviously not so concerned about the security of particular nations as I am about the human consequences of surveillance, spying, secretiveness and the like. So it was with some interest that I read in yesterday’s Adelaide Advertiser a letter to the editor which argued that Snowden had not committed a “real crime”. I thought the argument, prima facie, a good one. Snowden released secret data collected by the NSA about individuals – or released data to the effect that the NSA was spying on individuals, I’m not sure of the details – but not before making sure he was in a foreign country, out of the reach of the US government. Since then, there has been much shrieking about treason, not only from US officials, but from US allies. This is as you would expect. Imagine, though, a North Korean citizen releasing data to the effect that North Korea’s National Security Agency was collecting data, not only on North Korean citizens, but on citizens of many other nations. But this North Korean citizen waited until she was out of the country (let’s say in the USA) before releasing the data. North Korea’s government shrieks treason and demands that the individual is returned to North Korea to face the consequences of her actions. I would be very surprised if the US government acceded to such a request. I imagine that the western newspapers would place much more emphasis on the information leaked by this ‘traitor’ than on her behaviour, and that she would be treated more as a hero than a villain. And we can look at many other scenarios of this kind, with many different responses, depending on national allegiances. It follows that this kind of behaviour is not a ‘real crime’ in the way that murder, rape, theft, assault and many other crimes obviously are.

I can imagine counter-arguments. For example, that this just takes a libertarian line, saying that ‘real crimes’ are only those against individual liberty, while ignoring what we owe to our nation, the abuse of which is like an abuse to ourselves, and has the potential to make each of us more insecure. My response to that would be that, while I do find nationalism a rather shallow allegiance, that doesn’t make me a libertarian, as I believe very strongly in the ‘social glue’ that enriches our humanity and is in fact essential to it. So the behaviour would have to be measured in a more complex way, against the background of how it affects the non-national, human social glue as opposed to how it affects nationalistic concerns, which themselves have their shifting impacts, pro and con, on the human social glue.

Taking that argument, and considering what seems to have been leaked – but I admit I haven’t looked at the detail of that – the criminality of Snowden’s actions seems at the very least questionable. And besides, I would take the USA’s complaints more seriously if they made a more serious attempt to subscribe to international law and international criminal jurisdiction, which of course successive US governments treat with scarcely veiled contempt.