generalspeaking

Appealingly Ingenuous

"Hello. My name is Ed Snowden. A little over one month ago, I had family, a home in paradise and I lived in great comfort.
"Individual citizens have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring. Accordingly, I did what I believed right and began a campaign not seeking to enrich myself. I did not seek to sell U.S. secrets. I did not partner with any foreign government to guarantee my safety.
"Instead, I took what I knew to the public, so what affects all of us can be discussed by all of us in the light of day, and I asked the world for justice."
Edward Snowden, former analyst at the National Security Agency

The 30-year-old's anguished nobility may represent as heart-wrenching testimony to some, but certainly not everyone feels a compassionate urge to cheer on his selfless sacrifice of comfort and "a home in paradise" for the greater good of inviting the world to wallow in the disgust he evinces of his government's institutionalized surveillance of foreign governments and American citizens alike.

Well, perhaps not alike, perhaps in their all-consuming zeal to know all and prepare themselves for any and all disasters that might come their way courtesy of another government's particular plans, or members of their own citizenry disaffected in the extreme, making common cause with terror, overtaxing themselves in their anxiety to forestall misery and in the process treating all as potential enemies. Suspects, at the very least.

Not that the United States is alone among countries in its surveillance of opponents real and imagined. It would take a naive mind indeed to believe that this kind of activity is restricted to one country alone. There is, in fact, a union among countries sharing their information gleaned from surveillance techniques. And even though the U.S. has been revealed to have spied on some of its closest collegial nations' business, their activity is well reciprocated.

These are secretive surveillance activities, espionage that has always been part of any country's covert, self-interested pursuits. They have intensified because techniques have changed, and where human-generated activities were once prevalent, their importance has now been superseded by cyberspying, with the use of technically-advanced, more complex equipment that has lulled governments into the belief that humint is no longer the necessity it once was.

Edward Snowden, for all his righteous, self-serving servitude to truth and justice has, in his vulnerability to arrest and court action taken by a country, any country -- that wouldn't take kindly to being betrayed by a citizen working as an intelligence professional, and given access to highly classified documents -- sought refuge in one after another of the very countries whose use of cyber-intelligence techniques has become a threat to his own country.

Both China and Russia have aroused the ire of the United States, itself rather administratively naive to think for one minute that either country would be loathe to add to its embarrassment of betrayal by its own. In choosing to thumb his immature nose of entitled defiance as an 'honest interlocutor' on behalf of all liberal-minded, leftist-oriented conspirators who thrive on proving how underhanded governments are to the greater good of humanity Edward Snowden has done no one any favours.

He has chosen in his degree of unsophisticated reasoning, to demonstrate his trust of the Kremlin above his distrust of Washington. Moscow, under the undisguised rule of a Soviet-era autocrat who has chosen to refurbish the history of Joseph Stalin as a great man as opposed to the Washington of Barack Obama, whose humanely inspired agenda should have satisfied a 30-year-old leftie, but hasn't because he has a hate-on for his own.

So, under Vladimir Putin's careful terms of public non-disclosure which certainly does not mitigate against studious de-briefing of this delightfully opportunistic new source of information about America's secret files, Edward Snowden, to save his skin from paying the piper of his self-indulgent succumbing to an imagined saviour-status among hero-worshippers of civil rights activists has tossed in his lot with the devil.

The devil may indeed take him. Cleansing him of his sins of acquisition of classified documents and any other paraphernalia of additional irritating embarrassment to his country. And Edward Snowden will mete out his version of civic responsibility. For his troubles he will have justice indeed; fairly rough justice for having abandoned paradise for its opposite shore.

Labels: Crisis Politics, Cyberwarfare, Espionage, Human Relations, Russia, United States

posted by Pieface @ Monday, July 15, 2013