Summer of the Spy: Edward Snowden vs. The NSA

Mass-Leaking of Government Agency's Documents Leads to Controversy

Story by Sumaia Masoom

   On May 1, Edward Snowden and his girlfriend silently moved out of their home in Hawaii after which Snowden alone fled to Hong Kong. The next few steps of his master plan didn't take place until a few weeks later on June 5, when the first of a series of revelations about the NSA's surveillance program PRISM occurred. Over the next few weeks, outcry over the federal government "spying" on its citizens grew exponentially as it was revealed that the program went deeper than just telephone calls, for it consisted of email surveillance as well. However, although many Americans were (and continue to be) outraged, there remains a visible split over how the country as a whole feels about this. A significant number of people hail Snowden as a hero, an unfairly persecuted whistle-blower. On the other hand, Snowden is also being portrayed as, in the words of Speaker of the House John Boehner (R), a "traitor" and a spy himself. Snowden, it seemed, didn't really care how he's branded--he just doesn't want to be found, and he's made that clear by starting a worldwide goose-chase, from the U.S. to Hong Kong to Moscow to potentially Cuba or even Ecuador, where Wikileaks founder and perpetrator Julian Assange looked to for help. He finally settled down in August when Russia offered him asylum for one year after he had lived in the Moscow airport for a month. Since then, Snowden has disappeared once more to an undisclosed location in Russia.

   There's enough blame to go around on both sides--not of the aisle this time, but between both the government and the whistleblower. While the government is clearly violating the 4th Amendment with its often unwarranted investigations of its citizens, it could make the "probable cause" argument and say that it was only doing all of this for our safety. And Edward Snowden made a serious breach of trust when he began leaking the information he was privy too.

    But, the other side also has a fair point as well: our citizens should be allowed to know if we're being spied on--and it could be argued that we shouldn’t be spied on at all in the first place . By making this such a clandestine operation, the government pretty much ravaged the little trust that it had regained from the public since Watergate in the '70s. Now, the main question is this: is our safety worth the infringement of our rights, and should there even be a question about how much it's really safe for the common citizen to know?