Snowden spills his guts

I like Nick Anderson's cartoon, but I don't take it literally.

While I applaud the artistry of tying together a couple of threads in our deteriorating democracy, to take it literally would be a bit overwrought.

Then again, I don't think you should wait for an immediate, personal threat before you question what the hell is going on here. That's like one of those cartoons where the coyote smacks into the canyon floor and only then does his parachute deploy.

If you do accept the worst-case scenario, Edward Snowden has done a pretty good job of positioning himself as hiding in plain sight. If they were going to disappear him, they'd have more trouble doing it now than 36 hours ago when they could simply pretend they never found the source of the leak.

What I really admire about this cartoon, though, is that, while Anderson holds out the spectre of quick-strike justice, he doesn't specifically ascribe it to a particular administration, though he sure pins it to this moment in time.

Whatever is going on is not the fault of one man or of one administration. We've built this over a couple of decades, and we've built it together, as a people.

In fact, I commented elsewhere that, when Daniel Ellsburg leaked the Pentagon Papers, he was prepared to accept the consequences, but that, by the time his trial came up, the burglaries and incidents of illegal spying arrayed against him by the Nixon White House had so tainted the case that the judge declared a mistrial over prosecutorial misconduct and dismissed the charges.

I speculated over whether you could even find a judge like that anymore, and the response came that, before a judge can rule on your case, you have to come before a judge. We don't bother with that anymore.

That's a chilling bit of truth, even if it doesn't actually come into play in this case.

What gave us the ability to put down the Watergate scandal was the sense of outrage it provoked, not just in the presiding judges but in congress and in the people. LBJ may have been a mean and manipulative SOB, but the suddenness of the leap from his nasty, pragmatic ways of getting things done to the outright, self-serving rat-f***ing of the Nixon White House was enough to shock the sensibilities.

Since those days, however, the gradual slide into Big Brotherism has made what is going on much more acceptable.

Dan Wasserman points out the futility of even trying to track this stuff down, in a world that believes the Bill of Rights only applies in good times, and then only to good people, and also that "good" and "bad" can be determined without a vote or a hearing.

I wrote two days ago that I'm not particularly concerned with the collection of data, because, for one thing, the more is collected, the harder it becomes to pick anything out of the pile, and, for another, if there is a good reason to look into something, this only makes it faster. It will happen anyway.

For instance, if the CIA warned you that al Qaeda had some big thing coming up soon, and if their leading source for that information had just been assassinated, you might want to look into things.

Then again, you might not connect those dots, and you might not have sufficient translators on hand, but, in any case, you cannot expect to randomly yank it all out of the pile without a pretty good clue as to where you should look and what you're looking for. Meanwhile, the pile of raw data is relatively benign.

Anyway, quit looking so shocked.

As Derf says, we saw this coming. Or some of us did. All of us should have.

It's a funny element of our cultural illiteracy that the term "Cassandra" has become morphed with "The Boy Who Cried Wolf."

People on Sunday panel shows and other repositories of brilliant analysis will dismiss "the Cassandras" who are always warning about these things, but, for all their Ivy League degrees and their smug, button-down arrogance, they're missing the entire point of Cassandra's legend.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf was deliberately lying to cause an uproar.

Cassandra was not only sincere and passionately loyal in her statements, but was also completely on target.

Cassandra was given the gift of prophecy but, along with it, the curse that nobody would believe her.

So to call someone a Cassandra is to say, "She's absolutely correct, but we're all too blind to pay attention."

That's not an analysis I've heard around the Tables of Infinite Wisdom on Sunday morning, nor is it to be found in the words of the all-knowing David Brooks, whose git-a-rope take on Edward Snowden is more than simply dismissive and, well, seems like a good reason to take a walk around the block and read your column again before moving it from the "draft" to the "publish" queue.

Based on initial reports, Snowden sounds to me like an aspie, given his reported lack of diplomas and social skills and his presumed IT expertise. In fact, I recently read that one IT company is going out of its way to recruit autistic employees because of their intense, monomaniacal focus and utter dedication to problem-solving.

Problem being that, if you recruit someone for his dogged insistence that programming follow all the proper rules, you can't expect him to dial it down on the topic of ethical principles.

Edward Snowden reportedly hadn't been there very long, which, depending on how you see it, either means he lept to a hasty judgment or that he hadn't yet been sucked into the machine.

What the hell. The other Snowden was on his first mission, too, when he spilled his guts to Yossarian.

Yossarian ripped open the snaps of Snowden's flak suit and heard himself scream wildly as Snowden's insides slithered down to the floor in a soggy pile and just kept dripping out ... He turned back weakly to Snowden, whose breath had grown softer and more rapid, and whose face had grown paler. He wondered how in the world to begin to save him.

"I'm cold," Snowden whimpered. "I'm cold."

"There, there," Yossarian mumbled mechanically in a voice too low to be heard. "There, there."

Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably. He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden’s secret.

 

Comments

[Buzz Fugazi]

The Catch 22 movie takes a lot of flak cuz it's not the book etc. etc. but I love it as much as the book. One of my favorite books. One of my favorite movies.

[Mike Peterson]

To me, "Catch-22" and "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" are examples of times when the movie and the book are not all that much the same, but the movie is an ideologically and artistically valid interpretation rather than a slavish following.

By contrast, for example, the much-praised Russian long-form cinema version of "War and Peace" is such a literal recreation of the novel that it's like having someone read it to you -- wooden, lifeless and without purpose.

[Lost in A**2]

Since I first head the leaker's name, I've been reciting, "Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?" Thank you, Mr. Peterson.

I thought I had heard that Bose/Allen was his second or third job, taken AFTER he had left Government service, to continue doing what he had been doing. I probably misheard.

[Mike Peterson]

I'm sure we'll get a more coherent timeline as things develop, but being there less than three months isn't even clearing probation at most organizations. People I know who worked in Cheyenne Mountain came back stunned the first few weeks and then either became jaded, put it in perspective or learned the entire mission, depending on how you look at it. Ditto, I'm sure, with this stuff.

One thing I heard on NPR which makes a lot of sense was that, when he said he was "authorized" to tap your phone or the president's phone, it's not that he had permission to do it -- it's geekspeak and what he was saying was that he had that level of technical access. What sounds horrifying in terms of how many people might be listening in makes much more sense if you keep it in the context of an IT guy's turf, where "authority" means something different than in the rest of the universe.